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Alexandra (Alix) Fyodorovna 1872-1918
German princess, and Empress of Russia as the wife of Nicholas II

Born in Darmstadt, the daughter of Grand Duke Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt and Alice Maud Mary (the daughter of Queen Victoria), she married Nicholas in 1894 and tended to dominate him. Deeply pious and superstitious, she came under the evil influence of the fanatical Rasputin in her concern for her haemophiliac son, Alexis. During World War I, while Nicholas was away at the front, she meddled disastrously in politics and was (erroneously) thought to be a German agent. When the revolution broke out, she was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks with the rest of the royal family (1917), and later shot in a cellar at Yekaterinberg.