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ate with the Tatars resulted in his being given the
title grand prince of Vladimir, which had been
previously held by his brother Andrei, who had
rebelled against Tatar rule.
house arrest, first in the imperial palace at
Tsarskoe Selo and eventually in Ekaterinburg in
the Ural Mountains. There, she was executed
with Nicholas and her children by local Bolshe-
vik officials on orders from
LENIN
on the night of
July 17, 1918.
Alexandra Feodorovna
(1872-1918)
empress
The German-born wife of the last Russian czar,
NICHOLAS II
, Alexandra contributed to the politi-
cal isolation of the crown in the final years
before its collapse in February 1917. She was
christened Victoria Alix Helena Louise Beatrice,
the daughter of the grand duke of Hesse-Harm-
stadt and the granddaughter of England's Queen
Victoria, in whose household she was partly
brought up. In 1894, she married the future
Nicholas II and, following tradition for foreign
spouses, adopted the Russian name Alexandra
Feodorovna after being admitted to the Russian
Orthodox Church. She gave birth to four daugh-
ters Olga (1894), Tatiana (1897), Maria (1898),
and Anastasia (1901), before the birth of Alek-
sei, the heir to the throne, in 1904. Gravely wor-
ried about the health of Aleksei, who suffered
from hemophilia, she was receptive to the heal-
ing powers that the sinister monk Grigorii
RASPUTIN
claimed to have. From 1905 until his
assassination in 1916, Rasputin had a great
influence on Alexandra and, through her, on the
politics of the court, especially after 1915, when
Nicholas II stationed himself at the front to lead
the Russian armies during World War I, leaving
Alexandra in charge in
ST
.
PETERSBURG
. Although
wrongly suspected of pro-German sympathies
because of her birth, Alexandra did have a
highly negative impact on Russian politics dur-
ing the war through her access to the czar and
her support of incompetent or repressive prime
ministers such as Sturmer and Goremykin. A
staunch defender of the autocratic prerogatives
of the czar, she advised Nicholas II to resist any
type of accommodation with the
DUMA
, the par-
liament established in 1905. With the collapse of
the monarchy after the February Revolution,
she joined Nicholas and the rest of her family in
Allilueva, Svetlana Iosifovna
(1926-
)
writer, daughter of Joseph Stalin
The daughter of Joseph
STALIN
and his second
wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, Svetlana Allilueva
astonished the world when she defected to the
West in 1967. Allilueva's privileged life as the
daughter of a leading
COMMUNIST PARTY
member
received a first shock in 1932 when her mother
committed suicide. Although her father's favorite,
she was troubled by the courtlike atmosphere of
her surroundings. By the 1960s, with her
father's controversial legacy still at the center of
Soviet politics, she had become increasingly
uncomfortable in her native country. The death
of her second husband, the Indian Communist
Bradegh Singh, provided the opportunity for a
change when she was allowed to accompany his
ashes back home. Allilueva first settled in Prince-
ton, New Jersey, and in three successive works,
Twenty Letters to a Friend
(1967),
Svetlana, the Story
of Stalin's Daughter
(1967), and
Only One Year
(1969), she provided vivid accounts of the Stalin
household and the Kremlin court at a time
when these topics were still wrapped in secrecy.
Her life in the West as a “celebrity defector” was
turbulent and peripatetic. A third marriage, to
the American architect William Peters, was
short-lived but led to the birth of her daughter,
Olga, in 1971. With Olga, she moved to England
in 1982, where her daughter attended boarding
school in Cambridge. In 1984, she confounded
public opinion by returning to the Soviet Union
with her daughter. Soviet authorities, uncom-
fortable with her presence in Moscow, con-
vinced her to live in her father's hometown of
Gori in Georgia, where she had trouble getting
along with her Georgian relatives. Out of place
in her homeland, with a daughter who spoke lit-
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