The History of the Romanovs on American Screens: Glamour, Nostalgia, and Transnational Flows of White Imperialism

The six-part Netflix docudrama The Last Czars is a historical docuseries, aiming to give an intimate account of the history of the last years of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their children. Leaving to others the debate about the accuracy of the account, I am interested in the emotional focus of the TV series—its nostalgic sentimentality as well as its dramaturgy. The first episode opens with the tragic and sad event of Alexander III's funeral. Seeming to allude to the deterioration of the Russian empire, the corpse is shown quite literally decaying, prompting the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, played by Gavin Mitchell, to say, “He stinks!” While this episode is rather unlikely given the strict protocol for imperial state events at the time, and was indeed criticized by Russian media,⁷ it also sets the tone of the show. The evaluation of history it offers is visualized through the bodies and actions of the actors and actresses playing the last Tsars and their subjects. Thus, the show moves from depictions, in pastel colors, of very intimate, racy sex scenes between Alexandra and Nicholas II; to scenes of sexualized violence, including the “mad monk Rasputin”; to the later desecration of his corpse; to the bloodshed of the Romanovs’ execution. The reenactment of historical events by people in lavish costumes takes place in a gloriously rich ambience—richly decorated rooms, beds with red velvet curtains, golden furniture, and the lavish adjacent gardens that the Tsar's family hardly ever leaves. These surroundings accompany, and contrast with, a focus on the individual suffering of all the family members, particularly the parental anxiety of Alexandra and Nicholas over Alexei Nikolaevich's hemophilia. These scenes are interspersed with historical photographs, film footage, and commentaries by the academics Simon Sebag Montefiore, Pablo de Orellano, and Philippa Hetherington, as well as the story of Anna Anderson or Franziska Schanzkowska, an impostor who appeared in Berlin in 1920, claiming (in 1922) to be the surviving Grand Duchess Anastasia. The back-and-forth between historical periods, the focus on the great hope awakened by the idea that Anderson could indeed be the lone survivor of the imperial family, and the jumps to our own time through the academic speakers, who also speak in excited and often emotionally charged tones, enhances feelings of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a longing for something, a place and time “that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy.”⁸ I argue that The Last Czars is a romance with the American fantasy about the Romanovs. Like any cinematic image of nostalgia, it “is a double exposure, a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present.”⁹

The romance with the fantasy of the last Tsars was widespread in American popular culture. Influenced by Russian émigrés, adventurous Anglophone travelers to Russia, and, not least, by Russian literature—Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky (translations of which were enormously popular during the last decades of the nineteenth century¹⁰)—Americans had developed a “taste for aristocratic Russia.”¹¹ Anna Karenina was a big hit among American audiences, as were Isabel Hapgood's¹² accounts of the life of the Russian nobility, and “the marriage of Julia Dent, granddaughter of American President Ulysses Grant, to the Russian Prince Cantacuzéne-Speranksy in 1899 sparked a media extravaganza.”¹³ With all the focus on Russian splendor and nobility, “there was little American interest in the peasants, the Russian Orthodox Church, or the merchants, and Russian imperial advances in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia held only limited popular appeal.”¹⁴

The strong emphasis on the romantic love between the Tsar and the Tsarina, their personal struggles, and the glamour of their material wealth (conveyed through elaborate costumes and sets), confined in their palaces at the very western edge of the European part of Russia, rather than the context and struggle of the very diverse population of the huge empire stretching out through the entire length of Asia, repeats one of the dominant sentiments of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American popular culture. During that period, the American public was familiar with many contradictory discourses about Russia. While radical feminists, social reformers, and Marxists criticized the oppressive autocracy of the Tsarist regime, and supported Russian revolutionaries,¹⁵ diplomats and some intellectuals lamented Russia's fustiness and “prescribed rapid modernization.”¹⁶ At the same time, “in the American popular imagination, Russia was more than a case of arrested development and terminal backwardness; Russia meant imperial romance, the glamorous lifestyle of exotic and privileged nobility, and the possibilities of political adventure in a diverse geographical locale.”¹⁷ Moreover, in the eyes of the American public, Russia might have been seen as old-fashioned, but it was never considered to be primitive.¹⁸ Americans admired Russia as a slightly oriental but ancient civilization and a “major European power with vast imperial interests, [and] an established court society that very few Americans had penetrated with any degree of success.”¹⁹ Petrograd was viewed as the hotbed of innovative “art, music, and literature, and scholarship equaled only in Paris and to a lesser degree, in London.”²⁰

The Last Czars’ narrative threads all hark back to longstanding American popular culture myths. The first silent movie about The Fall of the Romanoffs by American director Herbert Brenon entered American cinemas in 1917, only seven months after the abdication of Czar Nicholas II.²¹ Unfortunately, the film was lost, and all that remains are promotional materials, reviews in newspapers, and records in the North Bergen film studio archives.²² Those records indicate that director Brenon edited the film during production so it could premiere in New York City on September 6, 1917, just days after filming ended.²³ “As late as October 1918, filmmakers added scenes to remain current with the rapidly changing Russian events, [including] the Czar's condemnation, execution, and the death of the Czarina.”²⁴ If the remaining records of the film are accurate, the first image of the murder of the Tsar and Tsarina entered American cinemas only moments after their actual execution.

It is also noteworthy that the film was promoted with “the largest exploitation campaign ever attempted at the time,”²⁵ a wide distribution of images of film scenes, and exclusive stories in film trade journals and newspapers. The film company even produced a trailer for cinemas, “to build intense audience anticipation of the picture.”²⁶ It was one of the first blockbusters at the onset of what would soon become the gigantic American film industry. Perhaps being part of the first major public relations campaign for an American movie helped anchor the nostalgia for the Romanovs within American popular culture. Up till today, in the wake of the first, at least eleven more American full-length feature films have followed.

The longstanding myth of Rasputin²⁷ as the cause of the downfall of the empire can be traced back to the year 1917 as well, and the publication of an anonymously authored, alleged eye-witness account titled The Fall of The Romanoffs: How the Ex-Empress & Rasputin Caused the Russian Revolution.²⁸ This book, with a fairly clear misogynist and sensationalistic bent, demonizes the German Tsarina Alexandra and glorifies the Romanovs, mourning their lost empire. While The Last Czars is not as harsh toward her, it still repeats the notion that Alexandra, who was herself manipulated by the power-hungry savage Rasputin, influenced Nicholas II with her misguided religiosity and short-sighted stubbornness. The series paints her as someone who knows nothing about politics or the Russian empire and aspires only to domestic bliss. With a great deal of agency, and most probably in violation of the royal etiquette that the real Alexandra is said to have been so protective of,²⁹ she directs her husband's attention away from matters of state, his obligations to the country, and toward their immediate family.

Nevertheless, the portrayal of Alexandra is inconsistent. At one point, she assumes the position of Nicholas II, when he is at the front lines during World War I; but in the following moment, she is shown to be entirely disinterested in the monarchy, and only concerned with her family. It is also she who forces the Tsar to flee Petrograd for one of his countryside palaces when social unrest breaks out. This unrest leads to the events of January 1905, known today as Bloody Sunday, which initiates the first stage of the end of the empire. The series marries her hysteria and selfishness with the weakness and indecisiveness of the Tsar, citing them as reasons for the failure of the imperial system on the day of the massacre. On this day, soldiers of the Imperial Guard began firing bullets into masses of peasants and workers, who were marching toward the Winter Palace to protest. The demands of the workers and peasants are only vaguely delineated by some of the academic commentators, who throw out phrases such as: “There are strikes, in all the big factories”; “there is discontent, there is terrorism”; and “Russia is seething, on the edge of revolution.”³⁰ Through original footage showing factory workers and demonstrating peasants, viewers are offered a glimpse of what was going on in the capital of Russia at that time. But the focus moves swiftly back to the Tsar's family, and their personal and emotional struggles, leaving the context somewhat opaque.

In this series, the individualization of the Tsar as a struggling father, a weakish man torn between his mother and his wife, rather than an emperor and statesman, is amplified by a reduction of the historical context to a mere mention of the war with Japan, and World War I, and the aforementioned vague allusion to social inequality and poverty among the general population. The efforts of the colonial empire to russify Siberia by moving almost five million white peasants from the western parts of the country to the Asian regions between 1891 and 1914, is never mentioned at all. Yet, it is arguably the aura of imperial superiority, with its inalienable project of colonial expansion, that makes the Russian Tsars so appealing to Anglophone viewers. According to the last Tsar's plans, Siberia was meant to “become the outpost of Russian civilization at the Asian borders,”³¹ and through economic and industrial reforms such as the building of a railroad, “Christian (i.e. Orthodox) love and enlightenment [would be brought] into dark Asia.”³²

Through forced migration, millions of peasants from Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Russia were resettled in Siberia, and much of the Indigenous population was forcibly removed or violently russified. While the violence toward the Western metropolitan population, poor working conditions of factory workers, and the harsh treatment of the protesting crowds is at least briefly alluded to in The Last Czars, colonial expansion in Siberia, the violent suppression of the more than 190 ethnic minorities, and the privileging of white settler-colonialists, is completely ignored. Moreover, and in connection to this lacuna, the imperialist ideology that sustained and legitimized the Romanovs’ rule, and the settler colonialism involving the subjugation and removal of Indigenous peoples and cultures, based on ideas of white Western superiority and civilization, remain not only unchallenged, but implicitly affirmed through the nostalgic view of royal glamour and splendor, supported by scenes of romance and family bliss.

What makes the Anglophone nostalgia for the last Tsars and their lost empire so unsettling is how seamlessly its core ideas of white imperial superiority and glorious wealth align with contemporary Russian discourses. Against the backdrop of Russia's recent reemergence as a colonial-military aggressor that builds its legitimacy on an eclectic assemblage of imperial and Soviet nostalgia for, and about, itself, the American nostalgia for the late imperial family seems far from innocent. Moreover, a comparison between the long-established nostalgia for imperial Russia in popular culture with the current efforts by Russian institutions to rehabilitate the Romanovs in the eyes of the Russian public necessitates a revision of longheld views on the politics of Anglophone popular culture. Williams³³ and Tatiana Osipovich³⁴ have read the American interest of the 1990s in the last Tsars, and particularly the figure of Anastasia, as nostalgia for the gender and class politics of a historical period that ultimately relegated Russia to the position of a female victim in need of Western progress, and a symbol of Western superiority.³⁵ While this insight was significant in that context, in the way it upheld 1990s and 2000s American “cold war triumphalism”³⁶ and the transnational mourning of an empire that seemed lost forever, it falls flat at the current moment. From today's perspective, the nostalgic commemoration of the glorious Tsars, and the collective mourning of their death, must be seen as perpetual romanticization and legitimization of imperialism, and mitigation of colonial violence. To put it more drastically, although today many Russians may laugh at the mistakes³⁷ and embarrassing inaccuracies of the cinematographic recreation of history in The Last Czars,³⁸ ultimately, and together with a long line of similarly nostalgic documentary and fictional depictions, they have paved the way for the “rehabilitated view of the Romanov past”³⁹ of the Russian Orthodox Church and the State, which is also the basis for the latter's irredentism, the annexation of Ukraine, Donbas, parts of Georgia, and the war in Ukraine.

Sociologist Joe Colleyshaw analyzes the Romanov exhibit at the “Russia: My History” parks in Moscow in 2018 and 2019, and “demonstrate[s] how the exhibit presents narratives that [. . .] foster senses of irredentism and loss that coincide with contemporary domestic and foreign policy of the Russian government.”⁴⁰ His description of how the parks rewrite history through the creation of a narrative, by selectively presenting episodes and historical figures, mirrors the composition of the docudrama The Last Czars. A further comparison demonstrates the transnational circulation of myths around the Romanovs. The “Russia: My History” exhibition was initially put together by the Russian Orthodox Church to celebrate the 400-year jubilee of the founding of the House of Romanov in 2013. Due to its success, it became part of a larger project “as part of the 2030 Strategy of National Cultural Policy, receiving endorsement from the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education as a tool for teaching.”⁴¹ Colleyshaw concludes that the park offers its audience “sentiments of nostalgia associated with irredentism's desire to reclaim lost territory.”⁴² and associate contemporary Russia with its military expansionist legacy. By focusing selectively on certain Romanovs in a favorable way, “it fosters a sense of loss for Russia's heritage that coincided with the end of the dynasty.”⁴³ Not coincidentally, it includes an exhibition dedicated to Nicholas II. Very much like The Last Czar, the exhibition individualizes him “as a family man, unfortunately unable to keep up with events that unfurled during his reign.”⁴⁴

In contrast to the presentation of all other Russian rulers, the portrait of Nicholas in the exhibition shows him together with his son Alexei, emphasizing his family orientation, and “creat[ing] the tangible sentiment of a lost past—and lost future. It humanizes Nicholas as a family man [. . .], a man lost in history, and with him—a lost Russia. This is further entrenched by [. . .] a quote from the tsarevitch [Alexei]: ‘when I become tsar, there will not be any poor people nor unhappy people. I want everyone to be happy.’”⁴⁵ While the 1905 Revolution, World War I, and the Russian Revolution are mentioned, all these events are presented as having “happened to” Nicholas II, who had no active part in eliciting them. This presentation is very similar to that of The Last Czars, which presents Nicholas II as equally passive and guiltless of any ill will, “a country-esque squire who was simply not the right man for the job of leading the empire.”⁴⁶ This view of Nicholas and the late empire is inherently nostalgic, as it “desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”⁴⁷ It creates feelings of empathy with the individual Nicholas, not the autocrat, and thereby not only legitimates his imperial power but also glorifies it and mourns its loss. Alluding to the Tsarevich Alexei, the “nostalgia explored here is not [strictly] for the ancient regime or fallen empire but also for the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete.”⁴⁸

This kind of revisionist and nostalgic view of the last Romanov Tsar aligns nicely with the efforts of the Russian Orthodox Church to elevate the memory of Nicholas II from an ignorant autocrat and abject failure to a pious man devoted to his family and god.⁴⁹ Moreover, as transnationally circulated myth, the idea that the end of the empire was a result of fate or bad luck, rather than the Romanovs’ brutal imperialist and colonial rule, promotes and legitimizes the idea that the loss of Ukraine during that period too was a tragic event that needs revision. “The exhibition mentions explicitly the forced split of Ukraine and Russia”⁵⁰ as a tragic circumstance. Examining the underlying ideological threads of the “Russia: My History” exhibition along with the reconstruction and museification of the symbols of the Romanov wealth, such as the restoration of the last home of Nicholas II outside of St. Petersburg, which opened to the public in fall 2021,⁵¹ further points to the nostalgia of transnational Romanov discourses. The Romanovs’ wealth becomes the symbol of a glorious Russia, not a territory where peasants and workers suffered from poverty and inequality under a violently autocratic system. Rather, it was a fabulously rich empire where beautiful white men and women could enjoy themselves and the company of their loved ones. This nostalgia is dangerous, and bears the potential of war, as Boym warned. It “is the promise to rebuild the ideal home [. . .], tempting [anyone] to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters.”⁵²

The Pleasure of the Massacre—The Russian Trauma

Before moving on to a discussion of the Amazon Prime show The Romanoffs, I want to reflect briefly on the obligatory execution of the Romanov family in episode six of The Last Czars, titled “the House of Special Purpose.” While the scene is not strictly true to the historical facts, it captures the myth-making potential carried by the execution of Nicholas II and his immediate family on the night of July 17, 1918, by the Bolsheviks. The scene misses some of the servants,⁵³ and the depiction of Lenin, issuing the direct order to execute the family is highly unlikely;⁵⁴ Yet, the Netflix show follows the legend that spread almost immediately after the execution had taken place. It builds suspense in the manner of a horror movie, showing empty basement hallways and the view of a closed door that is about to be opened. Moreover, it takes up the rumor “that the guards charged with carrying out the orders were drunk at the time and had difficulty bringing themselves to murder the children.”⁵⁵ Furthermore, the shooting drags on for a long time, which is motivated by the alleged fact that the bullets were stopped by jewels the women had sewn into their underwear. “They were essentially wearing the world's most expensive bulletproof vests,”⁵⁶ says Pablo de Orellana, scholar of international relations, annotating the scene. Finally, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore comments on the bloodshed the audience has just witnessed with the words: “In all of history, it's hard to imagine an act that was so utterly barbarous as the messy slaughter of the imperial family.”⁵⁷

While the scene affirms all the aforementioned myths around the Romanovs’ execution, it puts an end to another myth that it had entertained in great detail throughout the previous five episodes: the legend around the survival of Anastasia. This myth became internationally known in 1922, and already in 1928, the American director Tom Terriss created the first movie about the escape of the Grand Duchess Anastasia.⁵⁸ In 1956, the famous actress Ingrid Bergmann played Anastasia in the 20^th Century Fox film of the same name,⁵⁹ and won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her role. As late as 1997, and after the DNA evidence proved that Anastasia was killed and buried outside of Yekaterinburg together with her siblings, her father, and their servants,⁶⁰ 20^th Century Fox added the most famous interpretation of the Anastasia myth to date, in the form of the animated film Anastasia.

There are several reasons why the American audience loved Anastasia. One of the most important in today's context, however, seems to be that the execution of the Romanovs, and the escape of precious Anastasia, allows contemporary audiences to witness a gruesome massacre, and at the same time enjoy a happy ending. This idea of extreme trauma survived by a beautiful female victim intersects conveniently with general ideas about Russia as a country, as Williams,⁶¹ Osipovich⁶² and others have shown. Although it doesn't allow Anastasia to survive the execution, The Last Czars repeats the visualization of feminine Russian trauma. Moreover, the sequence adds sound to the scene—the prolonged screaming of the female members of the Romanovs. Susan Sontag warned against the visualization of others’ trauma in her seminal essay Regarding the Pain of Others.⁶³ Representations of pain and suffering are objectifying, and witnessing the pain of others exercises power as much as it reflects power structures. Moreover, there is always a friction between the representation of history and the representation of trauma.⁶⁴ The dominant discourses of American visual culture during the 1990s and early 2000s commemorated historic traumas that are specific to Russian culture, and problematically signify trauma as Russianness, pathologizing the nation or people. This mechanism was identified as a strategy of othering very similar to the exercise of power in other colonial contexts.⁶⁵

Since at least the early 2000s, however, the Anglophone focus on Russian trauma has intersected with a Russian cultural politics that accused the “Western gaze” on Russia of being imperial and colonial and proclaimed the need for an emancipatory agenda for Russia. This emancipatory transformation involved shedding its victim status to create national unity. Seemingly paradoxically, Russian visual culture utilized images of Russian trauma similar to those that American visual media had circulated.⁶⁶ Yet, this visualized trauma, paired with nostalgia, did not spark the desire to emulate, or integrate into, Western liberalism (which was increasingly seen as patronizing). Rather, it created a strong desire to return to the glorious, if fictional, Russian imperialism associated with the Romanovs.

The Romanoffs: A Critical Discussion of an American Obsession

Matthew Weiner's The Romanoffs is, at least at first glance, a critical and ironic discussion of the Romanov myths within American popular culture, and the continuous nostalgic visualization of these myths through media. As such, it is unsurprising that the opening theme of the show is the execution of the Romanov family by a Bolshevik firing squad—“the only thing anyone knows about them,” as Olivia, the fictional famous actress hired to perform the role of the last Czarina, Alexandra (played by Christina Hendricks) says in the third episode of The Romanoffs. The anthology drama series for Amazon Prime TV, which premiered on October 12, 2018, presents eight stand-alone, movie-length, entirely fictional stories, featuring various, equally fictional, contemporary Romanov (spelled Romanoff here) descendants. All the Romanoff characters are privileged white members of the American upper and upper-middle class. They are all somewhat neurotic figures, some on the verge of mental collapse, many of them living in New York City and recalling protagonists of Woody Allen films. Some of them display mildly sadistic personalities; but all in all, their problems are problems of white liberal elites. Essentially, they embody the neurosis of contemporary Western civilization.

The history of the imperial family is not much discussed in the individual episodes. Rather, it functions as the thread holding the films together. In each episode, a Romanoff heir provides the occasion for critical reflection on one of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. In episode one, a lonely old aunt's pride prevents her from showing kindness, instead pushing her into xenophobia and racism. In episode two, the midlife crises of a sexist male chauvinist ends in an attempt to murder his wife (wrath). In episode three, the envy of a narcissistic middle-aged, actress-turned-director, played by Isabelle Huppert, leads to the abuse and death of a vulnerable young woman. Episode four is about adultery (lust). Episode five is arguably about sloth, pride, and envy, as it deals with hysteric homophobia and bigotry. In episode seven, a transnational adoption of a Siberian orphan by an American heir of the Romanoffs ultimately reveals the woman's ableism, culturalism, cruelty, and selfishness. Finally, episode eight brings forward a critique on greed and wrath, as a transgender woman and Romanoff heir seeks revenge for her mother's murder through another murder. Only episode six digresses slightly from the discussion of these deadly sins, depicting how a mother copes with her son's hemophilia—the same hereditary condition that the Czarevich Alexei suffered from.

The Romanoff heritage and history is shown to be a kind of obsession of either the heirs themselves, or, in some cases, their spouses or friends. Sometimes, older family members cling frantically to the idea of the continuation of the royal bloodline, the continuation of white royal superiority. In episode two, “The Royal We,” Shelly Romanoff, who is married to Michael Romanoff, goes on a cruise for a reunion of descendants of the royal Romanovs. Michael is a frustrated narcissist who feels emasculated by his wife's competence and success and his own mediocrity, realizing that nothing but a myth distinguishes him from sad averageness. In search of meaning and adventure, he stays back from the cruise to pursue an affair. Returning from this bizarre event, in which everyone dressed up in period costumes and cheered on actors and actresses with dwarfism playing the late Tsar's family on stage, Shelly shares her new insights about Michael in a therapy session. “There are so many people out there with your background and I guess they are proud, but they are really fucked up. I think I finally understand why you are the way you are and that it's not your fault,”⁶⁷ she observes. Of course, her realization is not so much about the Romanoffs per se as it is about the entitlement, narcissism, and selfishness of white, American, upper middle-class privilege, and the value that people in search of their own superiority attach to the Romanov legacy, or any other origin myth. In their boredom, people like Michael, individuals without a purpose, cling nostalgically to their Romanoff heritage. The emptiness of their materialistic lives, without meaningful human interaction or connections, is transmuted into nostalgia for lost imperial power, a longing for a home and power that never existed.

Read against the long history of the Romanov myths in American culture, each episode of The Romanoffs has the potential to be viewed as a powerful critique of these long-celebrated myths. Episode one, “The Violet Hour,” and episode four, “Expectation,” prompt a critical discussion of the obsession with the continuation of the Romanov bloodline and hint at what Maureen Montgomery has called “Gilded Prostitution”: the practice of some Gilded Era families to strengthen their social ascendance through marrying into European nobility.⁶⁸ The pride that white Americans take in their royal roots, and, hence, their implicit (white) class superiority, takes on a new, very equivocal, meaning when read against Matthew Frye Jacobson's⁶⁹ claims. He points out that during the 1990s, as a reaction to People of Color and Black Power movements fighting systemic oppression and celebrating Indigenous and African heritages, white America started rediscovering and embracing its ethnic European heritage based on the newly mass-accessible DNA testing. This “pride” in royal roots can be read as an expression of white class privilege and a conviction of inherent superiority in otherwise liberal, seemingly “woke” North American elites.

However, this critical potential seems to fade against the background of the most dramatic and potent scene of the show: the opening theme, visualizing the Romanovs’ execution.⁷⁰ Over the sound of classical music, the camera moves past portraits of well-known Romanovs (Catherine and Peter the Great) in gilded frames on red walls, and over a red rug, until the entire majestic sitting room that hosts Nicholas II, Alexandra, and their five children, comes into view. The women are wearing white dresses, and the Tsarevich Alexei wears a white sailor suit. Suddenly, revolutionary guards enter the room and march the family to a basement room with two chairs in the center, where they are shot dead in an almost comically gruesome scene. The execution is accompanied by the Tom Petty's song “Refugee,” which continues to play as the girls’ white dresses turn red from their blood. The camera follows their blood running over the floorboards, where pictures in black and white of the royals, and then increasingly diverse and modern people, are scattered.

The Tom Petty song accompanying the opening scenes of The Romanoffs alludes to the Romanov relatives and aristocratic émigrés who were forced to flee Russia after the revolution, but it also hints at the myth of Anastasia. In the last seconds of the theme song, a gush of air whirls up some photos off the floor, and the scene shifts to a young woman wearing an old- fashioned long dress and blue cape and running through a forest. With the line, “You believe what you want to believe,” the young woman morphs into a modern New Yorker, wearing a blue raincoat and exiting a subway station. The scene draws our attention to the nostalgia of the Romanov myth, but it also captivates us through the gory images of the execution of the last Tsars, thereby confirming our fascination, rather than calling it into question. In this way, the cynical criticism of The Romanoffs falls into the same trap as The Last Czars, and the Romanov episode of The Crown. Any possible critique of colonial imperialism is silenced in the face of their tragic death. The glittering images of everything linked to the Romanov's past, even if artificial, also keep us hooked on nostalgia for the past glories of the lost Russian empire and its tragic protagonists. As we watch them die over and over again, we do not need to know what their politics were or why their empire ended. In light of the prevailing myth, for us to mourn them, it is enough that they were gorgeous and their death was tragic.