The Tsar's Sister Who Got Out Alive, But Lost All Her Jewels

In 1919, a British battleship carried the sister of Tsar Nicholas II out of Russia for the last time. Her brother would be murdered in a cellar with his wife and children. She was the one who got out — and this is the story the history books skip: the forty years that came after the escape.

Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna was born in a palace, kept a hand-painted catalogue of more than nine hundred jewels, and married into the very heart of the Romanov court. Then the empire fell. This is the story of what exile actually did to her — the fraud that cost her a fortune in weeks, the grace-and-favour cottages at Windsor and Hampton Court where a King housed her rent-free, her mother's diamonds sold off to Queen Mary in a London saleroom, and the imperial jewels she carried out of Russia that left her, quietly, one piece at a time. Even a Fabergé imperial Easter egg would not stay.

She survived the revolution. She simply couldn't take the empire with her. This is what happened to the Tsar's sister after she escaped Russia.