Pierre Gilliard

author

Pierre Gilliard

1879–1962

Best known as the Swiss tutor who spent thirteen years with the last Russian imperial family, he left one of the most intimate firsthand accounts of the Romanovs’ final years. His memoir brings court life, exile, and the family’s private world into sharp human focus.

1 Audiobook

Thirteen years at the Russian court (a personal record of the last years and death of the Czar Nicholas II. and his family)

Thirteen years at the Russian court (a personal record of the last years and death of the Czar Nicholas II. and his family)

by Pierre Gilliard

About the author

Born in Fiez, in the Swiss canton of Vaud, Pierre Gilliard became a teacher and later an author whose life was shaped by extraordinary history. He went to Russia in the early 1900s and, from 1905 to 1918, served as French-language tutor to the children of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.

Because he lived so closely with Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the heir Alexei, Gilliard became more than a classroom figure: he was a trusted witness to the family’s daily life during the last years of the Russian Empire. After the Revolution, he returned to Switzerland and wrote Thirteen Years at the Russian Court (1921), a memoir that remains one of the best-known personal accounts of the Romanovs in their final era.

Gilliard is remembered not only for what he saw, but for the tone of his writing: observant, personal, and deeply shaped by loyalty to the family he had served. For readers interested in the Romanovs, his work offers a rare view from someone who stood near the center of events without ever being a ruler himself.