Were the daughters of Nicholas II of Russia and Alexandra raped?

I found this:

[quote]"The abuse reached a crescendo as the night wore on. Gibbes, locked away in his cabin, listened helplessly, as he later told his son George, as the drunken guards harassed the Grand Duchesses. 'It was dreadful, what they did,' the former tutor recalled. The 'terrified screams' of the girls, Gibbes said, haunted him 'to the end of his life.'"

These people are in denial...

I was OBSESSED with Nicholas and Alexandra as a young 12-year-old gayling. I did a two-part book report in 7th grade about the Robert K. Massie book. The whole thing was a bit tragic - and those poor girls. I didn't think about them being raped (what 12-year-old would think about that...) and their brother was a hemophiliac.

They were ASKING for it, the little whorinas--especially that trollop Anastasia!

And Alex was a VERY sloppy pass around bottom--such a bleeder!

There are no evidence of such crimes. So based on lack of evidence no such things happened. It is sure those girls would have told their parents who would have talked to officials and guards. Romanovs were very close and tight, especially when they were sent away from Petrograd. R2 I was, too, and still am. Alix has to be one of the most interesting person in the history of royals because she made so poor choices.

Paging Mrs. Ramsey. Mrs. Patsy Ramsey to the courtesy phone, please.

Geez what a dainty bunch of prisspots on that board.

I often wondered how they kept those girls away from the guards for so long. On the last night I bet those guards wanted to rape the girls as a final insult to the Romanov dynasty.

Actually from what I recall the guards were not terribly enthusiastic about executing the family when the order came. I don’t think they were the barbarians some of you are painting them as.

No, they were not. That is your mind, OP.

#YaTozhe

[quote]I was OBSESSED with Nicholas and Alexandra as a young 12-year-old gayling. I did a two-part book report in 7th grade about the Robert K. Massie book.

Yes, the Massie book was made into the 1971 film, "Nicholas and Alexandra".

Janet Suzman was Oscar-nominated for playing Alexandra, and Michael Jayston is pretty good as Nicholas.

Tom Baker (Doctor Who) makes a good, creepy Rasputin.

If you’re doing actual research, you would know that facts drive your conclusion - not the other way around. What you describe is the frau misuse of “reserach” which is little more than flipping randomly through websites.

That isn’t research. Please learn the difference and stop misusing academic terms.

weirdly, for something that may or may not have happened 100 years ago, OP, hope not. just gross, but yeah, maybe, but yeah, gross.

Even though are no primary historical sources to support that they were, as an eldergay and reader of history, I would be much more surprised if they weren't.

Of course the girls were raped.

The guards were men, weren’t they?

R15 Once guards got to know the family they began to feel sorry for them. Only Alix who stayed cold and distant and hardly ever left her room was seen differently. There were guards who refused to shoot the children. The guards were also changed because they got too close with the family. There was a hint of romance between Maria and one of the guards but Alix ended it.

Which one was Alix?

Alix was largely raised by her maternal grandmother, Queen Victoria of England, after her mother died. I am dumbfounded as to why she was such a terrible consort.

I was molested.

R17 Empress, much hated by Russians because of her friendship to Rasputin, German origins and her shyness which made her nervous and silent with society and when meeting with people. She hardly ever smiled in public which made people think she hated them.

R12, The ignorant conclusion drawn by r15, presumably a male, would seem to refute your assumptions about "frau misuse of research," no?

[quote]Empress, much hated by Russians because of her friendship to Rasputin

And Massie goes into detail about Rasputin's effect on the Empress in his book.

And it's portrayed in the 1971 film between Tom Baker and Janet Suzman.

I wouldn’t take those films too seriously because they take artistic freedoms here and there

OMG R23 -- you mean movies aren't always the actual truth????

Tsar Alexander III and Tsarina Marie had well-founded doubts regarding Alix's cold and off-putting temperament and unsuitability for the role of empress consort. They were more enthusiastic about Princess Helene of Bourbon, daughter of the pretender to the French throne.

R24 My reply was to R23 who mentioned 1971 film. That’s all. R25 Alix’s grand mother Queen Victoria had her doubts, too. She thought Alix was unsuitable to Russian court and gossips. Then Alexander III got ill and it changed everything. He and Maria had to accept Alix, but they and Victoria were right, Alix was totally wrong person to the position of Empress of All Russians.

R21. I’m sure I haven’t seen it. However, it does again raise the question about using big academic words you don’t understand. In this case “refute”. The academic sense drawn from OP’s would have suggested this from research indicating actual study and analysis not just slinging nonsense.

Try harder, using evidence not ad hominem and fallacy.

[quote]I wouldn’t take those films too seriously because they take artistic freedoms here and there

Yes of course historical films aren't 100% accurate, but in this case the events are pretty well-documented and closely follow the historical accounts.

R15, that’s what it means to be a woman, isn’t it? Always in fear of being perved on/raped/assaulted/killed.

Has nothing to with the color pink, make-up, dresses, heels, etc.

Didn't they butt rape the little son?

Their deaths were brutal .. finishing a few of them off with stabbing and bayonets . Overkill . Grisly and callous . I’d say that there was a likelihood that they were raped . One of the murderers supposedly touched the privates of one of them.

In addition, there is the story about how the bullets bounced off their brassieres because of all the diamonds sewn into their undergarments.

I would love to believe that but not sure if it's true...

R4 is the most Russian thing I’ve ever seen.

I've read many accounts of their deaths and of the scientific examinations of their bones when they were exhumed some years ago, and I've never read anything from a historian that suggests they were raped.

According to Massie, the guards used to scrawl obscene images in the bathrooms, mostly at Ekaterinberg, usually with Rasputin and the Empress in sexual positions. The gossip/fake news of the day assumed Rasputin (and it was not fake news that he was a horse-cocked fucker of anything with a vagina) was screwing the Empress and the dumpy confidante of the Empress, Anna Vyrubova.

"I am dumbfounded as to why she was such a terrible consort. "

I read up on N&A back in the day, and I remember being dumbfounded at their genius for doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Every time they fucked up and the public turned against them, their motives were usually decent or selfless, but the public never twigged to their motives (or excuses) and thought they were assholes.

But once it was established that Alexis was a hemophiliac with zero chance of a normal life, well, they were fucked. Alexandra was fucked, because she'd failed in her duty to produce a healthy heir and carry on the dynasty, and by they time the realized what the situation was, nothing could be done. Not even the most advanced medical science of the day could save the kid or get her pregnant at her age, there was just no saving the situation. Of course bringing in Rasputin was about the worst possible attempt at a solution to an insoluble problem, but it's not like she had any better options than faith healers.

Although Rasputin was a fake in most ways, what's interesting is that he did actually help Alexis. He ended up being a comfort to the boy and helping his hemophilia at certain times.

Massie and other authors have speculated that Rasputin's ability to transfix Alexis and calm him down, may have allowed the mind to allow his body to relax and the blood loss to lessen.

Alexandra was well-meaning and her intentions were always, to her, moral, but her sheltered Victorian upbringing did not prepare her for the sophisticated politics of the Russian court. Her mother in law, the Empress Marie, sister of Queen Alexandra, lived in Russia for a while before she became Empress, and thus had time to learn the language and the social mores. To the Russian aristocracy and to some of the growing middle class or nouveau riche, Alexandra was a bore and a prude, and later, ironically, a sexual monster given the rumors about Rasputin.

"Massie and other authors have speculated that Rasputin's ability to transfix Alexis and calm him down, may have allowed the mind to allow his body to relax and the blood loss to lessen. "

Like I said, she didn't really have any better options than faith healers, and by all accounts Rasputin was a very good faith healer. He was said to have had incredible personal magnetism and an extremely persuasive personality, so when he used his powers for good (a rare event), he could actually ease the boy's pain when the doctors could not.

So yeah, this was part of Nicholas and Alexandra's genius for doing the wrong thing for the right reason. They brought this horrible untrustworthy corrupt man into the inner royal circles and made him a public figure, out of love for their son. If they couldn't bring themselves to give him the boot as was advisable, they ought to have treated him as a dirty secret instead of a friend, and brought him in to see the boy and have him escorted out with underlings carefully going over how he'd be killed if he ever talked about meeting the royal family.

Knowing human beings and how we have not evolved as much as we liked to think, I would guess there was some sexual abuse. Any confined group is subject to this sort of thing slaves etc...servants...anyone who was somewhat powerless could fall victim to this sort of debasement human beings have historically enforced on the captured...be they former royals or black slaves....

R40 has much more eloquently explained what I meant.

Yes, r19, I am a woman and it’s always in the back of my mind. We can be optimistic and hope that military-trained men with guns and power over women and girls would behave differently in this particular situation. Maybe they had mercy on them, but I think they didn’t have to fear discovery or retribution and didn’t resist their urges.

I really doubt it. Unlike the French, the Russians retained a strong reverence for their royal family. If anything, the guards were too attached and ended up prolonging the inevitable to the point of torment.

[quote]Didn't they butt rape the little son?

No doubt he would have bled to death.

It's a fascinating story, but I find it hard to feel too sorry for the Imperial Russians...

Well, I feel sorry for the children, R43.

They were all innocent and brutally murdered.

Agree, R44. Those kids were some of the last victims of Game-of-Thrones style dynastic anhilation in the civilized world. if post-revolutionary Russia could be called "civilized". The Western world generally gave up slaughtering the children of political enemies around the time of the War of the Roses.

I’ve seen speculation on DL that Nicholas was raped.

[quote]I’ve seen speculation on DL that Nicholas was raped.

I've read that too, r46. Who could blame them? See below.

Otherwise, I've read that Alix's physicians prescribed the new wonder drug aspirin for for his hemophilia. Aspirin induces blood thinning and bleeding, the last thing you'd prescribe for a hemophiliac. Rasputin forbid the royal physicians treatments, improving his condition and Alexandra's trust in him.

Nicky swimming in Finland from a private family album. The family weren't nudists but had no problem with nude sea bathing and practiced it.

It's fairly common to use rape as a way to torture and humiliate prisoners. There are reports during (civil) war times where victims were raped in front of their spouses and other family members which, to some religious people, is a fate even worse than death.

R33 I’m not Russian nor support its politics in any way. I just loved to read books of Russian French and Scottish royals from early age. It all began when I read Three Musketeers. Later I went to study history. I just find Alix very interesting, because we know why she made certain choices but why she didn’t see the storm coming is a mystery. She burnt her diaries when she was in house arrest in Tsarskoje Selo. It means the only source to understand what she was thinking was gone.

Rape is still used by many groups as a weapon in wars. Raping the civilians is seen as a demoralization and humiliation attack.

I'm surprised more people don't realize how common it is. It's naive to think these women weren't raped. If they weren't, it was probably because the soldiers were still deferring to them as royalty and leaders, not because of any sudden burst of ethics and morality on their part.

The Empress was an absolute tin-plated cow from go to whoa. Read Queen of Romania's many-volumed autobiography: she writes very frankly about what a howling cunt she was. Of course, Romanov fan gurls, who are some of the creepiest people on the planet, weep for her. She certainly didn't deserve Nicholas, who was wet dream material as a young man. The Empress aged faster than a steam train, and -- fun fact -- ended up wearing merkins, which were discovered amongst her belongings after the massacre.

FYI: The Alexander Alexander Palace site, linked upthread, is chock full of crazed fan gurls and characters. The guy who runs it, and his male partner, got into an endless flame war with one Oma Hamou, who hoped to star in a Romanov film playing the Empress (she even paid to have herself on the cover of Variety!) Hamou, who has an impressive record in the courts, is a character worthy of DL recognition: she and Alexander Palace boys created many websites where they would slag off each other. Their internet war went on for the best part of a decade. It now seems to died off as both sides are in their dotage.

Nicholas was cute

Correction, I just looked, at it seems like the war is still going on. At least on one side.

Here's the much-famed Variety cover with Hamou as the Empress, in an off-the-rack wedding dress and some brilliantly Photoshopped jewels. Spitting image! The South Korean flag is in the background because -- I forget the exact reason -- but I think some Korean put up a few hundred bucks. But hey: as logical as anything else in Russia!

R51 You’re right, Alix aged fast, she is only 42 in the picture. She also had this suffering image when in public. She had great deal of health problems both physical and mental but she wasn’t a happy person. But Nicholas fell in love with her and didn’t want anyone else. They were very close and very much in love with each other. Love is strange thing.

Nicholas was indeed handsome and beautiful. He was shy sensitive young man, had no strengh to make decisions. He would have needed a strong and stable wife, and stable Alix was not. His eyes are stunning.

Nicholas has a taut body. Though, of course, he doesn't have a California tan.

He knows how to wear clothes but he's nicer nude.

R56, I never realized there were naked pictures of the Tsar until this thread.

One of the accounts of the assassins states that they admired Nicholas's body after they had stripped it as it was in such great shape. He had a gym bar in his bathroom, and went on daily long walks. Short legs, fantastic arse, nice cock (the outline of which you can clearly see in some of the photos in the Romanov Albums in Library of Congress holdings.) Unfortunately shit teeth, and his chain-smoking due to his nerves aged him almost as fast as Alexandra. Both of them spent much of their lives heavily doped: she on an early barbiturate, Veronal, and he on various opiate mixtures he got from a dodgy supplier for his nerves. It most likely accounts for his placidity at the time of the abdication and prior.

Some royal VPL.

rasputin may have been dodgy in many ways but the royal family absolutely should have listened to him and they DIDN'T. he told the czar that if he were to drag his country into WWi it would end tragically. it would be the imperial russia's doom. you know what made the regular folk support the revolution? you think it was their poverty? no. they had been poor for centuries yet never really revolted they way they did in 1917 - not even in 1905. it was russias WWi escapade and, in particular, the czar's refusal to go the treaty way and just wash his hands of it all, that made the regular folk support and rally behind the nasty, power-hungry bolsheviks.

the 1917 revolutions - noth the february and the october one - would have never happened if nikki had actually listened to old man rasputin and refused to have anything to do with the war. unfortunately, the nasty little creep felix made sure rasputin died before he could talk some sense into the pliable, weak nikolai.

ok the godawful spelling doesn't help my case but still

R61 I agree

[quote]I've read that too, [R46]. Who could blame them? See below.

So, no one's going to say anything about the disgusting creep @ R47, who is tempted to rape anyone who is good looking and fit?

The revolutions might not have happened if the attempt at a constitutional monarchy that occurred after the 1905 violence had not been hindered by Nicholas' reactionary uncles and also his wife. Nicholas would have been a fine constitutional monarch like his cousin George; he just wanted to stay home and hang with his family and occasionally preside at ceremonies . The difference was that in Britain monarchical powers had declined precipitiously since the Glorious Revolution. The last king to rule without Parliament was Charles II. Yet around the time of Charles II, Russia was moving towad the brutal autocracy of Peter the Great and was actually beginning, yes beginning, a policy of serfdom. Also not that one of Nicholas' uncles, Serge, was asssasinated in 1905. His wife was the sister of Alexandra. After the death of her husband, she became a nun. She was killed along with others in the family around the same time the royal family was murdered. Serge was a closeted gay with notoriously reactionary views. He ruled Moscow, and he thought the lower classes were drunkard deplorables whose poverty was their own fault. He was also a religious fanatic. He would do well in the administration today, but he would stick out, because he was most attractive. And fastidious about it.

I am going to guess that those guards were more protective of those girls rather than lusting after them. There was a time when men did have some common decency and respect.

I sometimes find it amazing that everything on this board is turned into something sexual. I know some of you won't believe it but there ARE other things in life besides sex.

[quote] R28: Yes, of course historical films aren't 100% accurate, but in this case the events are pretty well-documented and closely follow the historical accounts.

I think the series mashed-up various historic events and put a single man and his family at center. Events that may have taken over hundreds of years to occur.

Daddy WANTS dat hole...

There has never been such a time, r66. There has always been a significant portion of the population who are evil, crooks, murderers, rapists, you name it. That is how humanity works.

History has been cleaned up for school and mass consumption, but if you dig even a little bit below the surface of any historical topic, you will discover men in general -- actually people in general regardless of gender, though mostly men -- are thoroughly debauched. At least enough of them that there is no way you can make a sweeping statement about all men in such-and-such a time period being decent.

[quote]I am going to guess that those guards were more protective of those girls rather than lusting after them.

Have you ever met a russian, R66?? They are nasty, evil fuckers. Especially the lower class ones, like the guards.

The guards at Ekaterinberg were lower class, but a few, including the leader, were also fanatic Bolsheviks. They considered themselves above the "cruder" classes from which they hailed. Thus, the would not have approved of sexual contact with the lascivious decadent upper classes.

I won't say that it's impossible that the girls weren't sexually abused, but I would say it's unusual. I suppose there might be differences between our culture and that of Russia in 1918; no hyper-sexualized media, peasant guards that had grown up to revere the Tsar as being one step down from God, fear of hellfire, and a respect for "good girls" that no longer exists. And those girls were good by all accounts, nice, pretty, well-behaved girls who had worked as nurses during the war instead of coming out into society, and who were part of a close-knit, loving family.

However, bone-deep cynic that I am, I can imagine that the high-level Bosheviks who were in charge of executing the tsar didn't want to let the guards get away with being kind to such important prisoners. Revolutionary governments are full of the kind of assholes who'd order their underlings to rape against their original inclination, do the rapes themselves, or ship in soldiers from elsewhere to act as a rape gang if they wouldn't do it.

R47 That is an extraordinary photograph.

It looks like a double-exposure. But I guess I can understand it if the photographer is lying prone on a wharf while the tsar swims below just beneath the water's surface. His back is well-muscled and his legs are spread.

Of course they were raped.

The account of the night comes from an interview with George Gibbes, who was the adopted son of the bachelor tutor to the Romanov family, Sidney Gibbes. Sidney was on the boat, the Rus, that night, but locked in his cabin, so he saw nothing, only heard the screams of intimidation by the drunken guards. George was adopted by Sidney Gibbes (who has been presumed to be gay, and who later become a priest and lapsed into eccentricity), when he was 16. As one does. The frau upthread who wittered about the gentlemanliness of Russian Bolshevik guards, at least provided a good laugh. When the Russians marched into Berlin in '45 they gang raped every woman they could get their hands on, whatever their age. Complete peasant animals, who can turn on a dime and hug a kitten.

[quote] Complete peasant animals

who remembered Petrograd

They gangraped babies, R76.

I am NOT a frau, nor am I claiming the guards were gentleman. Yurovsky in Ekaterinberg replaced sloppy, slovenly guards who may have harassed the girls, but not raping them in the strict sense. Yurovsky was a cold-blooded killer, and his cohorts were, but they were sent because they were strict and no-nonsense, not sloppy. In Tobolsk, the place of their previous incarceration, town was filled with royalists, and don't forget that their use as hostages and even being sent to England to stay with their relations was still being negotiated, and the impending takeover of the areas where the family was incarcerated by the Whites was looming. Marie, the third of the daughters, and the least intelligent but probably the most attractive, even flirted with guards there. Yet the scholarly evidence, primarily Massie, does not show any physical rape. The situation of mass rape after WWII was a different situation, other than that the perpetrators were lower class Russians (ground down by both Stalin's and Hitler's tyranny, far worse than that of the last Czar). And do NOT laugh at me, ever. I will not stand for laughter of the queens of Canaan, Babylon, Troy!

I read that the drunken peasants who were drafted in to help dispose of the bodies became very angry when the soldiers arrived with a cart full of corpses. They believed they would get to rape all of the women before they slaughtered them.

They apparently took their anger out of the naked bodies when they were being brutally disfigured. There was one report that 2 men put their fingers inside the dead Alix's vagina and were reprimanded for it.

In their final weeks the mother and sisters shunned Maria as there was evidence she had improper relations with one of the guards.

Yes, that could be true about Maria. Of course, improper relations could mean several actions ...

But I reiterate that Yurovsky was hired to keep the guards in line until the orders came down to slaughter them.

One other relevant point: those girls were incredibly naive and sheltered, even by late Victorian standards. I doubt any of them even knew about the basics of sex, even though, paradoxically, evidence exists that Nicholas and Alexandra, until her premature aging, enjoyed a healthy sex life.

The description of the massacre in horrific, I cannot imagine the terror they went through.

Yes, and what is really horrible, is that many did not die quickly. It was overall a "slop" job. The Empress died instantly, but the girls were wearing corsets into which jewels had been sewn as a mean of hiding them in case they were moved again, and jewels caused the bullets to ricochet round the room. Lenin claimed the Revolution needed no historians ... well, now that phrase slaps him in the face, as the Putin fascist theocracy has canonized the family, not as martyrs, but as "Passion-bearers," kind of like Confessors, who adhered to their Christian faith before they died.

Now that we have almost reached 85 comments in this salivating thread I have to tell you I regard 70 of them with the utmost scepticism.

There is a paucity of documentary evidence and a shipload of fevered invention.

Colonel Pavel Rodzianko gave accounts at the time that he believed the women were sexually abused in their final days. A little known story is that he was able to escort one of their dogs to the safety in England that was denied to them by their interfering cousin, King George. Joy the dog's story is at link.

Man's inhumanity to man. But we do love our doggos.

Upthread mention is made of the futility of N and A's predicament as parents of a sickly heir. Why wasn't seeking to make Grand Duchess Olga heir apparent an option by attempting to overturn what Emperor Paul had put in place forbidfing women to serve as rulers of Russia?

R75, Gee, the least the Russians could've done was let the German females shower first.

Alexandra shaved her daughters’ heads at one point, saying they suffered from a fever. I wondered if she was trying to make them less attractive to the guards, as well as conveying that they had a contagious disease, in order to protect them from rape. It’s the kind of story they might have all agreed to in order to protect them.

In the old days, people didn’t talk directly about such things, but only hinted at best, even in their diaries. I’ve read pioneer diaries from the 1800’s, and the women never mentioned that they were walking and riding 3,000 miles in the heat and cold while pregnant, or that they were raped, had a period, or went to the bathroom somehow on the open plains with nothing to hide behind, or any other delicate matter, no matter how urgent. A lot of the stories we do know about these things are accounts told verbally to trusted friends or family years later.

The main source for this information is Robert Massie, an expert in the field. Perhaps, according to one poster, we should cite everything. Would you like APA or MLA style? Are you requiring a Works Cited or Reference List? And I am assuming you are not allowing Wikepedia as a source.

Lol, thank you r89. I’m all for “cite your sources” but st the same time, let threads happen organically.

I contributed heavily to this thread, and I got much of my information from Massie.

R89 I will only accept Turabian (as in Kate L.)!

R88 the daughters had measles and that was why their heads were shaved. Iirc that is from a primary source. Their heads were probably shaved so their lesions could be treated. I had measles in kindergarten and my head wasn’t shaved but I wasn’t a young woman with long hair and my understanding is measles is worse for adults/teens than very young children. They also didn’t have the benefit/or access to hot showers or bathing hygiene whenever they wanted once they were prisoners.

My aunt had her head shaved when she got measles. Her Dad, my grandfather, shaved his head in solidarity.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

R95 I was just reading the article and thinking the same!

It's questions like this that make professional historians despise history buffs.

1) It was Russia. Those girls had already been raped multiple times by that point.

2) My God OP, those split ends!!! The guards did those girls a favor.

Bump for The Last Czars

[quote]r20 She hardly ever smiled in public which made people think she hated them.

Most likely, she did.

That whole crowd (much like the BRF that spawned her) wanted nothing to do with the general public unless it absolutely had to.

[quote]r36 Every time they fucked up, their motives were usually decent or selfless ...

-- as so many virulent antisemites are --

I never read they were raped, but I did read the Grand Duchesses weren’t given any privacy when they used the toilet and the guards would taunt them and make lewd comments while watching

Yes, they were raped by the Bolsheviks ... and you can find the black and white, silent footage on pornhub.