Russian father starts his daughter smoking at age 15

[Larry1]

It was almost a century ago.  The father was Nicholas II and the girl was his daughter Anastasia.  There is a photo of Anastasia next to her father with a cigarette in her mouth.  There are additional photos in this collection that were apparently mostly forgotten in a small museum in Siberia.

Romanov's Final Days Seen in Recovered Photos

Anastasia Romanov, the youngest daughter of the last Russian Tsar, was already smoking at the age of 15, encouraged by her proud father Nicholas II.

The anecdote about the Grand Duchess, a key figure in the conspiracy theories that followed the gunshot and bayonet murders of the Romanovs, has been revealed by a series of photographs found in a remote museum in the Urals.

Taken in 1916 near Mogilyov*, where the Russian military was headquartered during World War I, the photo shows the young girl puffing at the cigarette with every encouragement from her father.

“At the time there was not the same stigma attached to smoking,” wrote the Siberian Times, which described the pictures found in the local history museum of Zlatoust, a small city about 186 miles from Yekaterinburg. It was there that the tsar and his family were slaughtered in 1918 by the Bolsheviks on the orders of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin.

It wasn’t the first time Anastasia enjoyed a cigarette. According to the report, a year earlier she had written to her father: “I am sitting here with your old cigarette that you once gave me, and it is very tasty.”

Taken by the Tsar himself or his children, the 210 photographs have names and dates penciled on their backs. Historians believe they were put together in a modest album by Nicholas himself while in exile with his family in Tobolsk in western Siberia between 1917 and 1918.

The pictures date from 1914-1916 and show all members of the Imperial family in their last unguarded and happy moments.

Several photos taken in 1916 portray Crown Prince Alexei, heir to a throne that would be abolished the following year. Clad in a stripy bathing suit, he’s shown playing with his father on the banks of the Dnieper River close to Mogilyov. He’s also seen posing on a tree with his beloved spaniel Joy. The crown prince was known to have a genetic disorder, hemophilia, that impair the body’s ability to control blood clotting.

“The images of Alexei show a surprisingly strong boy given that his hemophilia saw him portrayed as sickly,” the Siberian Times wrote.

Alexei was in fact the last to die in what has been regarded as one of history’s most infamous murders.

http://news.discovery.com/history/the-romanovs-as-never-seen-before-130513.htm

*Mogilev, in what is now Belarus.  I think this is at least the fourth way I've seen the city's name spelled. 

[Voyager36]

Alexei was in fact the last to die in what has been regarded as one of history’s
most infamous murders.

Did he get a blindfold and a..... cigarette?