Marxism In All Its Loveliness.

 Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna in 1887, nearly 20 years before her assassination.

source: reddit

Of all the royals of the Victorian and Edwardian era, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna may have led the most tragic life of them all. Born on November 1, 1864 to Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and Alice of the United Kingdom, she married Grand Duke Sergei, a son of Alexander II in 1884 and moved to St. Petersburg before converting to Russian Orthodoxy in 1891.

After Sergei was assassinated in 1905, Elizabeth stopped eating meat, sold her belongings and opened the Convent of Saints Martha and Mary where she helped the sick and elderly of Moscow. However, this didn’t endear her to the new political regime. In 1918 she was arrested on the orders of Lenin and exiled to Perm before she was moved to Yekaterinburg, and later Alapayevsk. 

On July 18, 1918, Elizabeth and her fellow inmates were driven to an abandoned iron mine where they were blindfolded and marched to the bottom before being beaten and thrown in the pit. Once their captors were out of the mine they tossed in a couple of grenades for good measure before the mine was set on fire.