"[5] General Count Alexander Grabbe, Major-General of His Imperial Majesty's Own Convoy, wrote that "the prettiest of the Grand Duchesses was Tatiana, the Tsar's second daughter.

[18] According to one story, Tatiana kicked her lady-in-waiting Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden for addressing her as "Your Imperial Highness" during a committee meeting, and she hissed, "Are you crazy to speak to me like that?

Vyrubova and Lili Dehn claimed that Tatiana longed for friends of her own age but that her high rank and her mother's distaste for society restricted her social life.

She read her Bible frequently, studied theology, and struggled with the meaning of "good and evil, sorrow and forgiveness, and man's destiny on earth".

[4] "It was not that her sisters loved their mother any less," recalled her French tutor Pierre Gilliard, "but Tatiana knew how to surround her with unwearying attentions and never gave way to her own capricious impulses.

On 29 May 1897, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia recorded in his diary that Nicholas II had named Tatiana as an homage to the heroine in Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin.

She and her sisters slept on camp beds without pillows, took cold baths in the morning,[35] and embroidered and knitted projects to be given as gifts or sold at charity bazaars.

[38] Symptomatic carriers of the gene are not hemophiliacs, but they can have symptoms of hemophilia, including an abnormally low blood clotting factor that can lead to heavy bleeding.

[39] The Tsarina relied on the counsel of Grigori Rasputin, a Russian peasant and wandering starets or "holy man", and she credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich.

[42] Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, one of the sisters' governesses, was horrified that Rasputin was permitted access to the nursery when they were in their nightgowns and requested that he be banned from the household.

[44] The Tsarina insisted to Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna that she had investigated Vishnyakova's claim but that "they caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack of the Imperial Guard."

De Malama claimed that Dmitri was appointed an equerry to the court of the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo, where he developed a romantic relationship with Tatiana.

In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić delivered a letter to Tsar Nicholas in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the Grand Duchesses.

[70][71] Nicholas replied that he would allow his daughters to decide whom to marry, but he noticed that the Serbian prince Alexander often gazed upon Tatiana during family dinners on his recent trips to St.

[70] There were also reports that the Windsors wanted to marry her to the Prince of Wales, with the future Edward VIII insisting he was impressed by her beauty and the way she tended to her younger brother.

[74] Tatiana, apparently trying to advocate for her mother, asked her friend Margarita Khitrovo in a letter on 8 May 1917 why their fellow nurses did not write to Tsarina Alexandra directly.

Chebotareva's son, Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, noted the grand duchess's "firm, energetic handwriting" and how the letter "reflected the nature which endeared her so much to my mother.

[78] During the month of separation from their parents and sister, Tatiana, Olga, Anastasia, and ladies in waiting busied themselves sewing precious stones and jewelry into their clothing, hoping to hide them from their captors, since Alexandra had written she, Nicholas and Maria had been heavily searched upon arrival in Yekaterinburg, and items confiscated.

"The sailor Nagorny, who attended to Alexei Nikolaevitch, passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms, behind him came the Grand Duchesses loaded with valises and small personal belongings.

Nagorny tried to come to her assistance; he was roughly pushed back by one of the commisars ..."[81] At Yekaterinburg, Tatiana occasionally joined her younger sisters in chatting with some of the guards over tea, asking them questions about their families and talking about her hopes for a new life in England when they were released.

"[86] The following day, on 15 July, Tatiana and her sisters appeared in good spirits as they joked with one another and moved the beds in their room so visiting cleaning women could scrub the floor.

[87] On the afternoon of 16 July 1918, the last full day of her life, Tatiana sat with her mother and read from the Biblical Books of Amos and Obadiah, Alexandra noted in her diary.

Tatiana went that evening to Yurovsky's office, for what was to be the last time, to ask for the return of the kitchen boy who kept Alexei amused during the long hours of captivity.

Tatiana and her family had time only to utter a few incoherent sounds of shock or protest before the death squad under Yurovsky's command began shooting.

Dr Botkin was killed, and a gunman named Ermakov repeatedly tried to shoot Tsarevich Alexei, but failed because jewels sewn into the boy's clothes shielded him.

The theories were reduced in scale, but still persisted, when the bodies of most of the family were found and identified from a mass grave discovered in the forest outside Yekaterinburg and exhumed in 1991.

Occleshaw based this claim on studying the diaries of the British agent Richard Meinertzhagen, who hinted at the successful liberation of a Grand Duchess, allegedly Tatiana.

Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber."

Preliminary testing indicated a "high degree of probability" that the remains belonged to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, Russian forensic scientists announced on 22 January 2008.

The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally interred at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on 17 July 1998, eighty years to the day after they were murdered.