This is an historical "what-if". The events did not happen.
The Journal of
Olga Nicolaievna Romanov
July 16, 1918
History, I’ve been told, is fickle. It favors the strong-bodied, the strong-willed, and paints them as heroes. France’s Napoleon could be seen as such. In my own country, my great-grandfather, Alexander II, was considered as a hero among my people, for freeing the serfs. His physical stamina was amazing and it took an assassin’s bomb to stop him from carrying out reforms that my country desperately needed.
As I sit here now, on the steps of the Ipatiev House, before the supper hour, I listened to the sounds of the artillery guns ratting in the distance. I wonder what fickle history will write about my father, Nicholas II. I have always adored him since I was a toddler, but while my father was strong in body, he was not in spirit. He took our country down a path no one expected it to go – least of all himself.
He is inside playing bezique with our mother, who has always had a delicate constitution. Alexi is resting in their room, his knee painfully swollen. Our father wonders what our fate will be, but Tatiana and I doubt we will leave here alive. Sadly, for one brief opportunity, my father had a chance in 1913 to exercise his strength and set our country, and my destiny, on a path that might have seen happier days. If only he had the strength of will to follow this bold way! However, I have a feeling fickle history did not want to see him follow this opportunity through.
This may be one of my last journal entries, so I write freely, with little shame, not caring if my other mother sees it, for if she did, she would punish me even now. I know history will cast my father as a weak man. It will not favor him and I fear the scandal it will bring the Romanov name. But for another weak man, Czar Paul I, I would have been Czarina of all the Russias. Only he, like my father, was a man history did not favor.
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