Quotes from Helen Rappaport

Life is also meaningful without being married', she had once told her mother, and marrying merely for the sake of it was, in her view, 'one of the greatest mistakes a woman can make

History may have condemned him many times over for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt, the most exemplary of royal fathers.

Father asks me to tell all who have remained loyal to him and those over who they might have influence, that they should not advenge him, for he has forgiven everyone and prays for them all; that they should not themselves seek revenge; that they should remember that the evil there is now is in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil that will conquer evil – only love.

Show kindness to all, be gentle and loving, then all will love you

Happy voices, smiling faces, golden memories of a summer afternoon, of a world that could still laugh and talk of war as something far away.

Many years later he insisted, 'They knew it was the end when I was with them'; that evening, though the words remained resolutely unspoken, everyone had a clear sense of what might lie ahead.

I cannot bear to think what will become of me without you – you who are my one and all, who make up all my life',

After all, in this life we do not know what lies before us.

Having benefited from happy days, should I not share with them the bad days?

It's hard thinking about where they are taking us. While you're on the way there you think less of what lies ahead, but your heart is heavy when you start to think about how far you are from your family and if and when you might see them again. I haven't seen my sister once in five months.

St Petersburg society looked upon Grand Duchess Vladimir as the real Empress of Russia, for Alexandra now hardly ever emerged from her retirement at Tsarskoe Selo.

I now have to choose between son and husband. But I have made my decision and I have to be strong. I must leave my boy and share my life – or my death – with my husband.17

It was clear to anyone who encountered the tsar and his daughters in the Alexander Park how much pride he had in his girls. 'He was happy that people admired them. It was as though his kind blue eyes were saying to them: "Look what wonderful daughters I have.

In Ekaterinburg, as in many other Russian cities, the sharp and unavoidable disparity between Bolshevik rhetoric and Bolshevik practice was now becoming only too painfully clear.

You need only to add balalaikas, sonorous songs of the Volga, a disorderly dance and there you have it--the Russian emigration.

His wife, "who only demanded of life that it should amuse her".

Paul and Olga enjoyed a gilded exile with their two daughters, in a home created together that was "worthy of a Pompadour or a Du Barry.

Now that you are a big girl, you must always be more careful and not show those feelings', Alexandra reiterated. 'One must not let others see what one feels inside.'15

The first thing he noticed with fascination was the shape of Lenin's "amazing skull"; filled to bursting with erudition and ideas, it "made one think not of anatomy but of architecture.

Maria Pavlovna)'s "Russian life was over." She and her kind had, she sadly admitted, "outlived our epoch and were doomed." "Everything disappears into the past, everything which is good everything which is bright and the only thing that's left is the terrible reality.

T)hey talked as only Russians can. Not listening to each otehr, repeating the self-same argument over and over again, excelling in pantomime and reaching the uppermost heights of drama.

Their boat was covered in snow and looked unreal, like a "construction of crystal and sugar, with stalactites of ice hanging from every protrusion.

The Bolsheviks are coming, like Atilla, like clouds of locusts. They are destroying everything in their path. (Vera Muromtseva)

H)is action was merely "galvanizing the corpse" of an army that was already in retreat and heading for defeat.