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The story of the final four years in the lives of Tsar Nicholas II's four daughters - Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia - concluding with their brutal murders in the bloody climax to the Russian revolution. Interviews with leading historians, archive footage and dramatic reconstruction reveal the real women behind the familiar images of beautiful girls in white dresses.

In 1914 Olga and Tatiana were 18 and 16 and old enough to be married off to eligible princes, but any prospect of escaping their strange and very isolated life in the Alexander Palace was thwarted by the outbreak of the First World War. The war destroyed all trace of the life the sisters had known, but when Olga and Tatiana volunteered as Red Cross nurses they did enjoy a brief taste of the real world beyond the palace gates. The sisters became very close to some of the dashing young officers they nursed and Olga's touching diary entries reveal how she fell passionately in love with one particular Georgian officer, Dmitri Shakh-Bagov.

March 1917 brought a dramatic end to over three centuries of Romanov rule and following their father's abdication the girls were forced to adjust to a world turned upside down. After five months under house arrest at the Alexander Palace the girls, along with the rest of their family, were sent into exile in Siberia. The sisters' letters from Siberia bring the boredom, frustration and uncertainty of their captivity powerfully to life. For much of their tragically short lives the girls had been as much prisoners as princesses and in their final weeks in exile in Siberia that imprisonment was absolute - the whitewashed windows of the house where they were held denied them even a glimpse of the outside world.