The Tsarevich and his family were imprisoned in their own palace in Tsarskoe Selo soon after his father had to give up the Russian throne. Their beloved home was no longer a private place and not nearly as clean. Add all this to whatever deprivations and hardships Alexei Nikolaevich had borne due to his illness, and whatever isolation from the world rendered him somewhat of a lonely boy....
Very few friends remained in Alexei's circle after March 1917. Two boys, his best friend Kolya Derevenko and a palace servant, Leonid Sednev, were the young prince's last peers. Both of them accompanied the Imperial Family to Tobolsk on the last day of July 1917. Kolya Derevenko got a second to last letter from Alexei probably just before his final illness and the journey he took with his sisters to rejoin his parents and Maria Nikolaevna in Yekaterinburg. Leonid Sednev was sent away from the Ipatiev House the day before the Tsarevich and his family were murdered.
The only girl that even remotely figures in any prince and princess story involving Alexei was Princess Ileana of Romania. The two little royal children met before the First World War, when the royal families of Russia and Romania got together in Costanza and Prince Carol of Romania meant to propose to Olga Nikolaevna. Little Ileana was four years younger than the Tsarevich - still a boyish prankster at his age, but coming up with his own innocent proposal to her, no doubt in order to make things right.
