‘It is impossible to imagine how horrifying that moment was when we all sensed the breath of death next to us. At the same moment we felt the greatness and the power of God. He stretched out His blessed hand over us… It was such a miraculous moment that I will never forget, just like I will never forget the feeling of bliss which I experienced when – finally – I saw my dear Sasha and all the children safe and sound, having reappeared one after the other from underneath the ruins.’ This is how Empress Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, described her feelings to her brother, George I of Greece in a letter written a week after the infamous train disaster at Borki.

In autumn 1888 the Russian Imperial family undertook an official trip around the Caucasus, which included stops at Tiflis, Batumi and Baku. On their way back they travelled by ship to Sevastopol, from where the family and their entourage boarded the train that was to take them to St Petersburg.

On the morning of 17 October, the family were having breakfast in the dining car. The youngest of the Emperor’s children, six-year-old Olga, was left with her nanny in the adjacent children’s car. The train was travelling at full speed when it derailed near Borki, a small town outside Kharkov. As the Empress recalled in the letter to her brother, ‘after a lot of rumbling and screeching a deadly silence ensued, as if there was no one left alive.’

After colliding with the front carriages, the roof of the dining car began to collapse, and it was the Emperor himself who according to the official version of the events held it up for several minutes, allowing others to escape. Little Olga had been thrown out of her carriage by the force of the collision and was found outside unscathed. Several standard carriages at the head end of the train carrying members of the Imperial family’s security team and other staff were impacted the most from the collision with the heavier Imperial carriages. Twenty-one people died at the scene and two later, with over thirty (according to other sources sixty) people injured. The Emperor’s beloved Siberian husky Kamchatka did not survive the crash either (fig.1).

Petr Sokolov’s painstakingly detailed artwork documents the direct aftermath of the derailment. The composition was most probably based on the official photographs released to the press shortly after the disaster (figs.2 and 3). The Emperor, calm and in control, is standing in the centre of the composition, with his daughter Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna to his left, clutching at his arm. The Empress is depicted to their immediate left, delivering first aid to a wounded member of staff, despite having herself sustained an injury to her arm. Two locomotives can be seen on the far left of the composition. The use of more than one locomotive was against the official rules and this was thought to be one of the main reasons behind the derailment, together with overspeeding and the overall unsatisfactory condition of the railway.

The Imperial family’s survival was nothing short of a miracle, leading to a considerable religious upturn among the Russian population. Numerous churches and chapels were built across the country and multiple icons and iconostases were designed to commemorate the event. A temple was erected in Borki in 1893, which is only known from photographs and postcards as it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1930 (fig.4).

The investigation into the Borki disaster, led by the notable Russian jurist and politician Anatoly Koni, resulted in the appointment of railway manager and future Prime Minister Sergei Witte as Director of State Railways. Alexander III became ill and died from kidney disease in 1894, with his death linked directly to the physical overexertion he experienced during the Borki crash.