‘Now that I’m about to be freed of my responsibilities to the nation, perhaps I can fulfil my life’s desire — to have a farm, somewhere in England.” Such was Tsar Nicholas II’s counterintuitive reaction after being forced to abdicate.

Did the last Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias not try to cling to power? Well, no: Colonel Romanov, as he became in March 1917, took sustenance instead in the company of his wife, four daughters and son as they joined him in captivity.

A year and a half later, they were all brutally murdered by their revolutionary guards in a basement in Ekaterinburg, now famous for little else. Russia had moved on.

The Tsar, his wife Alexandra, their haemophiliac son Alexei, Rasputin, World War I, the 1917 revolutions, Kerensky, Lenin. . . these are the widely known talking points in a discussion of the Russian Empire’s collapse. Much less well known are the Tsar’s daughters — Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and Maria.

Aged between 22 and 17 when they died, these tragic princesses are rarely mentioned — victims whose voices are not needed to underscore their aggressors’ brutality.

Seeking to rectify what she sees as this final injustice, the Oxford-based historian Helen Rappaport has dug into the Grand Duchesses’ diaries, letters and other sources to bring them back to life.

In her book, subtitled The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses, we learn about the sisters’ childhoods, private tuition and sometimes rowdy behaviour, their familial love, youthful crushes and stoicism in captivity. The method and patient elaboration successfully illuminates a genuinely obscure aspect of the Romanov story.

The overriding impression generated is of the princesses’ humility.

Despite their immensely privileged situation, they seemed happiest in each other’s company and in bantering innocently with their tutors, ladies-in-waiting and military escorts.

Rappaport shows how their mother kept them young, shielding them from the court she herself despised and from the “horrid bore” of their father’s responsibilities.

It is astonishing how ill suited to power the family generally was. They were reticent, polite, apologetic, even somewhat mundane.

In captivity, parents and children alike stunned their guards by their equanimity and good humour, so out of place in 1918 Russia.

Although slightly overlong and curiously disengaged from Russia’s revolutionary forces, Four Sisters shows the warmth and spirit of a much pilloried family.

In the end, they appear as dignified in death as they were ill prepared for life.

Review by Andre Van Loon