More from #1917LIVE - Emperor Nicholas II with his son Alexei. This image is from 1916, before things turned sour for the Russian royal family. Tsar Nicholas II is playing with his son Alexei by the Dnieper River in Mogilev. 
Alexei was born with hemophilia, and his mother's reliance on the faith healer Grigori Rasputin to treat the disease helped bring about the end of the Romanov dynasty.
The Tsar had resisted the influence of Rasputin for a long time. At the beginning, he had tolerated him because he dares not weaken the Tsarina's faith in him. There are various explanations for Rasputin's ability, such as that Rasputin hypnotized Alexei..
... , administered herbs to him, or that his advice to the Tsarina not to let the doctors bother Alexei too much aided the boy's healing.
Others speculated that, with the information he got from his confidante at the court, lady-in-waiting Anna Vyrubova, Rasputin timed his interventions for when Alexei was on the road to recovery anyway, and claimed all the credit.
Court physician Botkin believed that Rasputin was a charlatan and his apparent healing powers arose from his use of hypnosis, but he was not interested in this practice before 1913 and his teacher Gerasim Papandato was expelled from St. Petersburg.
Felix Yusupov, one of Rasputin's enemies, suggested that he secretly drugged Alexei with Tibetan herbs which he got from quack doctor Peter Badmayev, but these drugs were politely rejected by the court. For Maria Rasputin, it was magnetism.
Alexei and his sisters were taught to view Rasputin as "Our Friend" and to exchange confidences with him. Alexei was well aware that he might not live to adulthood.
When he was 10, his older sister Olga found him lying on his back looking at the clouds and asked him what he was doing. "I like to think and wonder," Alexei replied. Olga asked him what he liked to think about.
"Oh, so many things," the boy responded. "I enjoy the sun and the beauty of summer as long as I can. Who knows whether one of these days I shall not be prevented from doing it?"
According to his French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, Alexei was a simple, affectionate child, but his environment was spoiling him by the "servile flattery" of the servants and "silly adulations" of the people around him.
Once, a deputation of peasants came to bring presents to Alexei. His personal attendant the sailor Derevenko, required they kneel before Alexei. Gilliard remarked that the Tsarevich was "embarrassed and blushed violently"
When asked if he liked seeing people on their knees before him, he said, "Oh no, but Derevenko says it must be so!" When Gilliard took the matter up with Derevenko, he said that Alexei was "delighted to be freed from this irksome formality".
As a small child, he occasionally played pranks on guests. One example occurred at a formal dinner party, where Alexei removed the shoe of a female guest from under the table, and showed it to his father.
Nicholas sternly told the boy to return the "trophy", which Alexei did after placing a large ripe strawberry into the toe of the shoe.
In December 1916, Major-General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, head of the British military at Stavka, received word of the death of his son in action with the British Expeditionary Force in France.
Tsar Nicholas sent twelve-year-old Alexei to sit with the grieving father. "Papa told me to come sit with you as he thought you might feel lonely tonight," Alexei told the general.
Alexei, like all the Romanov men, grew up wearing sailor uniforms and playing at war from the time he was a toddler. His father began to prepare him for his future role as Tsar by inviting Alexei to sit in on long meetings with government ministers.
The Tsar's Colonel Mordinov remembered Alexei: “He had what we Russians usually call "a golden heart." He easily felt an attachment to people, he liked them and tried to do his best to help them, especially when it seemed to him that someone was unjustly hurt."
"His love, like that of his parents, was based mainly on pity. Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich was an awfully lazy, but very capable boy (I think, he was lazy precisely because he was capable), he easily grasped everything, he was thoughtful and keen beyond his years"
"Despite his good nature and compassion, he undoubtedly promised to possess a firm and independent character in the future."
The imperial family was arrested following the February Revolution of 1917, which resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II. When he was in captivity at Tobolsk, Alexei complained in his diary that he was "bored" and begged God to have "mercy" on him.
He was permitted to play occasionally with Kolya, the son of one of his doctors, and with a kitchen boy named Leonid Sednev. As he became older, Alexei seemed to tempt fate and injure himself on purpose.
While in Siberia, he rode a sled down the stairs of the prison house and injured himself in the groin. The hemorrhage was very bad, and he was so ill that he could not be moved immediately when the Bolsheviks relocated his parents and older sister Maria to Yekaterinburg in April.
Alexei and his three other sisters joined the rest of the family weeks later. He was confined to a wheelchair for the remaining weeks of his life.
The Tsarevich was less than a month shy of his fourteenth birthday when he was murdered on 17 July 1918 in the cellar room of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. The assassination was carried out by forces of the Bolshevik secret police under Yakov Yurovsky.
According to one account of the murder, the family was told to get up and get dressed in the middle of the night because they were going to be moved. Nicholas II carried Alexei to the cellar room. His mother asked for chairs to be brought so that she and Alexei could sit down.
When the family and their servants were settled, Yurovsky announced that they were to be executed. The firing squad first killed Nicholas, the Tsarina, and the two male servants.
Alexei remained sitting in the chair, terrified, before the assassins turned on him and shot at him repeatedly. He remained alive and the killers tried to stab him multiple times with bayonets. "Nothing seemed to work," wrote Yurovsky. "Though injured, he continued to live."
Unbeknownst to the killing squad, the Tsarevich's torso was protected by a shirt wrapped in precious gems that he wore beneath his tunic. Finally Yurovsky fired two shots into the boy's head, and he fell silent.
It's creepy and sad to know that this really happened.
Rumors of Alexei's survival began to circulate when the bodies of his family and the royal servants were located. Alexei's was missing, along with that of one of his sisters (generally thought to be Maria or Anastasia).
As a result of this, there have been people who have pretended to be the Tsarevich. However, scientists considered it extremely unlikely that he escaped death, due to his lifelong hemophilia.
On 23 August 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of 2 burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs.
The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three years old.
Anastasia was 17 years old at the time of the assassination, while Maria was 19. Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Olga and Tatiana were 22 years old at the time of the assassination.
Along with the remains of the 2 bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber."
The bones were found using metal detectors and metal rods as probes. Also, striped material was found that appeared to have been from a blue-and-white striped cloth; Alexei commonly wore a blue-and-white striped undershirt.
On 30 April 2008 Russian forensic scientists announced that DNA testing proves that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters.
In 2000, Alexei and his family were canonized as passion bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. The family had previously been canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs.
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 after they were murdered.
