If you want to see some totally unnecessary clothing, then look no further. These portrait photographs of Russia’s ruling Romanovs were taken in 1903 at the Winter Palace in majestic St. Petersburg. Czar Nicholas II and his 390 guests partied for 2 days with dancing, music and food on the first day and a masked ball on the second, full of sexual excess and debauchery.
Ladies wore dresses embroidered with precious stones and kokoshniks (head-dresses) adorned with their finest family jewels, while the men donned richly decorated caftans and boyar-style fur hats. Nicholas himself was robed in the gold brocade of 17th-century Russian tsar Alexey Mikhailovich, and his wife, Alexandra, wore the robes of the first wife of Alexey Mikhailovich, Empress Maria Ilinichna.
The Czarina’s dress was brocade, decorated with silver satin and pearls topped by a diamond and emerald-studded crown. She also wore a huge emerald. All the jewelry was chosen by court jeweler Carl Faberge. It's estimated that today this dress would cost around 10 million euros.
Of course, it's not a great idea to parade your wealth in front of people who have nothing. Outside the palace the mood was dark. The Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch dubbed the event "the last spectacular ball in the history of the empire ... [but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace ... while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low."
Many factors influenced the events that led to the sudden end of a three-hundred-year-old Russian imperial dynasty, and it's impossible to try to pinpoint something specific that caused its downfall. Huge losses during World War I, coupled with rumors and a wide-spread belief that Rasputin was ruling Russia through his influence on the imperial couple, and some other factors, caused events to spiral out of control.
Fast forward to the night of 17th July 1918, following a revolution a year earlier, the Romanov family were shot and bayoneted to death, their bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped, buried, and mutilated with grenades to prevent identification.
These colourised images were created by Olga Shirnina
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