The Abandoned Royal Family. Tsarskoye Selo — Tobolsk — Yekaterinburg. 1917—1918

Sergei Vladimirovich Markov – a representative of the White emigration, a monarchist, a former officer. He volunteered for World War I at the age of 16 and met the fateful year of 1917 as a very young eighteen-year-old cornet, already with serious front-line wounds and St. George crosses for bravery. Sergei Markov served in the Crimean Cavalry Regiment, whose chief was Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, who cared for her officers in a motherly way, including the "little" Markov, as she called him. The former cornet remained loyal to his "state chief" for life.

He was one of the few officers who tried to do something to save the royal family, which had been arrested after the February Revolution, and even went to Tobolsk following the exiled empress and her close ones. Unfortunately, it was unbearably difficult to observe from afar the arrested ones, not being able to help in any way. And to provide effective assistance in their release without endangering the lives of the royal family members was something the young cornet could not achieve even with the help of a few friends.

In 1928, a book of memoirs by Sergei Markov titled "The Abandoned Royal Family" was published in Vienna, in which he recounts everything he experienced during the Russian Revolution, the people from the immediate circle of the royal family, and how they revealed themselves during the terrible days of the people's revolt, the beginning of the Civil War in Russia, and the deposed sovereigns who had no one to help them in their last days of life…