Family album of last tsar surfaces in Russian museum

Held a virtual prisoner by the Bolsheviks months before his execution, Russia's last tsar Nicholas II pasted informal snapshots of his family into an album which has now come to light in a Russian provincial museum.
The photographs, most of which have never been seen before, show the last of the Romanov rulers of Russia without pomp and in unguarded moments. Many were taken by Nicholas II himself.
Since the 1920s, the album has been held in the Urals in the local history museum of Zlatoust, a small city in western Russia dominated by foundries.
It is now on show at a museum in Yekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, where the family was brutishly murdered along with their servants in 1918 in a crime that still raises raw emotions in Russia.

The exhibition marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty.
Without any gold crests or monograms, the album has simple pages with the photographs posted thematically rather than in chronological order. On the back of the pictures are pencilled names.

The exhibition has caused excitement in Russia with national daily Komsomlskaya Pravda serialising the photographs. The album has never previously been shown outside the museum where it is held.
"We don't know for sure how the album turned up in our museum, but it has been in our holdings since the end of the 1920s. Where it came from though is not recorded," the deputy head of the history department of the Zlatoust museum, Yury Okuntsov, told AFP by telephone.

"Most likely before that it was in the possession of someone who had something to do with guarding or executing the tsar's family."
Zlatoust is around 300 kilometres from Yekaterinburg, where the tsar and his family were shot in a cellar.
The album contains just one photograph taken after the tsar's abdication in 1917.
The others date from 1914, 1915 and 1916 and it seems likely that the tsar compiled the album to pass the time while in exile with his family in Tobolsk in western Siberia between 1917 and 1918.
Nicholas II and his family initially lived in a degree of comfort in a mansion in Tobolsk. But following the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, conditions worsened and they were held as virtual prisoners.

They were then transferred to Yekaterinburg in late April 1918 ahead of their execution.