Anna Vyrubova and her American Patrons

Anna Vyrubova and her American Patrons ‘Nobody, I am very much afraid, is interested in the Czar or his fate. Later it will be different. Many years later, I think.’ American journalist Rheta Childe Dorr Anna Vyrubova’s devotion to Tsaritsa Alexandra captured in 1909...

OTMA – The Romanov Sisters

Going out into the Koptyaki Forest where the family’s bodies were dumped after they were murdered in July 1918, left an indelible impression on my mind and my creative imagination. I wanted, with a passion, to tell the story of those four lovely, much photographed but historically neglected sisters…

Sophie Karlovna Buxhoeveden, Pt 2

In May 1919, after having been received by Alexandra, the Queen Mother at Marlborough House, Isa travelled on to Copenhagen where she was finally reunited with her widowed father and she lived with him there for the next year or so.

Sophie Karlovna Buxhoeveden – Pt 1

Sophie Karlovna von Buxhoeveden [styled Буксгевден/Buksgevden in Russian] – or Isa as she was known to the Imperial Family – always thought of herself as a Russian. But although she was born in St Petersburg in 1883, her father Karl Matthias had come from Dorpat [today’s Tartu] in what was then the Governorate of Livonia of which Estonia was part.