Elizabeth, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, was the wife of the Tsar’s uncle Sergei, the Governor of Moscow. After Sergei was assassinated, Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to get his murderer to renounce violence in the hope of a pardon. She dedicated the rest of her life to Moscow’s sick and poor, as a nun in a convent of her own foundation.

Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Elizabeth was arrested. Lenin ordered his secret police to execute Elizabeth and other Russian nobility by dropping them into an abandoned mineshaft, to die of their wounds and of starvation. Two weeks later, Elizabeth’s sister Alix and her husband, the Tsar, were also assassinated.

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