Anastasia was only fifteen when the family was placed under house arrest. She was a tomboy, a boisterous child, so there is no documented love affair, but she was fond of her friend Katya’s brother, Viktor Zborovsky, who was nursed at Tsarskoe Selo after being wounded in the war. In one letter to Katya in June 1917 Anastasia reminisced about a time when they had water fights with Viktor in their garden. Could her feelings for him have developed into something deeper had she lived?

All the girls’ romances were innocent, giddy crushes that never had the chance to blossom, but they are poignant for the insights they give into these very normal girls with their keenly felt passions.

There’s one more poignant thought: had Olga or Tatiana been engaged or married to a European royal before 1917, surely the country concerned would have been honor-bound to rescue the Romanovs from their Bolshevik captors? I imagined a proposal from Prince Louis of Battenberg in the “deleted scene” in this PS section but, while there is evidence he liked Maria, no such letter existed. Perhaps if the Romanovs had not held out for love matches but had opted for traditional arranged marriages with members of other royal dynasties, they could all have survived.

Reading Group Questions