r/romanovs

Partial translation:

"The wealth of Tsar Nicholas II was so great that, on the day of the execution of his family by the Red Army, the young princesses Anastasia, Maria, and Tatiana had to be killed with bayonets because the communists' shots did not penetrate their dresses, which were sewn with more than a kilogram of diamonds. The death of the royal family on that night of July 17, 1918, would bring an end to more than 300 years of the Romanov dynasty.

It is from this turbulent Russia that "Seu" Alexis would flee, an immigrant who lived in Cuiabá for almost his entire life, working as a lathe operator and repeatedly telling anyone who would listen that he was Alexis Nikolaevich Romanov, the Tsar's only son, a child whose remains were never found. His confidence in his own nobility earned him fame, and Alexis was the subject of numerous reports and interviews.

At 92 years old, after three traffic accidents, he died in a bed at the Cuiabá Emergency Room, more than 14,000 kilometers from the small room where the Romanovs were murdered. He left behind faithful listeners in his family, such as his great-grandson Manoelito Pires da Cunha Júnior, who never stopped believing in his grandfather. He recounts that Alexis ventured out as a sailor while fleeing Russia and arrived in Brazil in 1925, disembarking from the ship "Oriente". He settled in the capital of Mato Grosso and began to work.

The supposed heir to the Russian throne died in 1996. The story of his nobility has been repeated since the 1930s, when Alexis arrived in the city from Uruguay. From then until now, the Russian immigrant married, started his own business, and lived dreaming of returning to Russia. Children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were absolutely credulous confidants of Alexis. Manoelito Júnior, now an employee at a dealership in Várzea Grande, has never forgotten his great-grandfather's stories. "I wanted to write a book about it; I even spent a month just researching the story," he says enthusiastically. Júnior says his great-grandfather's story was never questioned by his relatives. "My grandmother, my father, everyone believed him; it couldn't be a lie. He spoke in detail about the history, details about the palace where he lived," he assures.

DNA and Disappointment

But this credulity wasn't repeated with the journalists who sought out Alexis. The first of them, reporter João Martins from O Cruzeiro magazine, classified the Russian's account as "convoluted." "Let whoever wants to believe it. I, however, don't believe it," he wrote. On other occasions, the distrust was repeated. On Jô Soares's program, a joking tone accompanied the accounts of the self-proclaimed heir to the Romanovs.

“If I had been there, I would have ripped him off right then and there, live on air, because Jô is a joker,” Manoelito recalls angrily. Alexis's great-grandson had a similar reaction when he heard my offer for a phone interview. “If you want to talk, I'll even talk, but I don't have much faith in it,” he summarized. According to Júnior, journalists end up giving up on telling the story after they discover the results of the DNA test, done in 1996, the same year Alexis died.

The old mechanic reacted with indignation to the result – which was negative. “If I'm not mistaken, he himself threw away the result.” In a report published in the Diário de Cuiabá, Alexis's children said that their father believed there had been a “conspiracy” to prevent him from receiving the inheritance. Manuelito, however, says that there was a second test, according to which Alexis was only the son of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of Nicholas II.

“After they found the family's remains, they found a trunk belonging to the queen, and at that time people exchanged many letters, and in one of these letters they discovered that she had a lover who was a general. The husband found out about the affair, ordered the general killed, and remained quiet, waiting for her to have a son, who was my great-grandfather,” she says."

Is there any evidence of any of Tsar Nicholas’s children not feeling Russian because their ancestry was entirely German and Danish?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently doing research into daily life in Tsarist-era estates (pre-1917 Russia), with a particular focus on servants and — their duties, hierarchy, and living conditions.

Would anyone happen to know historians, researchers, or specific fields of study I should look into? Or maybe someone who specializes in this kind of social or nobility history?

I’d really appreciate any recommendations, names, or directions on where to look.

Thanks in advance!

For this to even be a possibility, the Ōtsu Incident—an attempted assassination of Nicholas, then the Tsarevich of Russia, in 1891. My questions are: would this seriously damage Russian–Japanese relations? Would Alexander III of Russia have sought aggression against Japan? And the main question: what kind of tsar would Grand Duke George Alexandrovich have been? Assuming the historical timeline remains the same, he would have only about five years on the throne before dying of tuberculosis, after which Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich would become tsar. At that point, from 1881 to 1899, four tsars would have ruled in a relatively short span of time. Would this lead to instability or even attempts at revolution? What do you think.