It's OK | The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II

Magnificent biography! | The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II | Edvard Radzinsky

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	• The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II Edvard Radzinsky Anchor, 1993 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Too fine for words

I began my review with the phrase too fine for words, but I suppose thats an oxy moron in reading. Indeed though it is a spectacular accomplishment, from the beginning, "We called it Atlantis" that lost Russia. Mr. Radzinsky Chekovs succesor pulls the reader immediatley from his own world into a lost long white night of sledges on runners and pastel palaces and a beautiful haughty girl married to a small sweet man who lived only to please her. The story darkens these two unfortunatley hold the lives of millions in their hands an empire falls and a magic fairytale Russia dissapears into legend. I'm not a good enough writer to be able to adequatley describe this book, I can say that it will haunt the reader forever.

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It's OK

The history is all there in detail. Very interesting, particuarly if you are into tzar history like I am. However, the book is really hard to read. It usually takes me no longer than a week to read a book, but this one actually took me almost 2 months.

Magnificent biography!

I absolutely loved this book. Once I started reading, I couldn't put the book down. This was the first biography about Tsar Nicholas II that I had ever read. It gives excellent background information about the country, its history and the politics, so even if you're not at all familiar with Russian history/politics, you can still follow. Excellent purchase!!

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Mystery and more mystery

It was the end of the age of kings, and, as usual, the kings were the last to know. Radzinsky is a talented playwrite. I have enjoyed his plays in Moscow when I lived there. Indeed, Nicholas II was a character you could respect and feel sorry for at the same time. He was not a ruler at all. I have copies of many of his diary entrees and he was so far removed from the plight of his country, it is sad and terrible. The people suffered from it. Radzinsky presents all of this in his theatrical style. He doesn't answer all the questions, but then no one really can. The "facts" seems to change and imagination often takes over. But, still, it is a necessary book on that very sad affair. Surely I recommend this book.

Frederick R. Andresen, author of "Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia."

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Our Bitter, Bitter Revolution

A man is sitting at a book-covered table in the Central State Archive of the October (1917) Revolution in Moscow. The surviving diaries of the last imperial family of Russia are there, unclassified at last. Reading them, his thoughts carrying him back and forth in time, the man is moved when he finds pressed flowers in the journals of the tsar's daughters: "Souvenirs of a destroyed life".

Edvard Radzinsky is that haunted man, sitting at a table strewn with memories of a broken dynasty. "The Last Tsar" is the product of his research and his sadness. A playwright, Raszinsky is well-qualified to explore the human depths of the lives of Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and the others who were part of their doomed world.

The book gained a great deal of publicity when it was first released here for its sensational assertion that two of the family may have escaped execution on that terrible night in 1918. And this work of popular history merits the attention. This book is likely to become the definitive work on the last years of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

Rarely is a work of history so beautifully written, so thoroughly researched, and so permeated with emotion and insight. A great debt is owed to the translator for her lyrical and poetic voice while retaining a sense of historical authority.

Radzinsky's attitudes and feelings are juxtaposed with those of the two main characters of the story-- Tsar Nicholas and his queen, Alexandra. The inclusion of the author's feelings is unorthodox in a historical work however, in this case, it's a success and it offers a perspective that is both personal and realistic.

The tone of the book is conversational rather than scholarly. It is not difficult to imagine Radzinsky weeping as he sits at the table covered with diaries, though he does not say he did. Certainly, the depth and honesty of his feelings are so evident that we find it difficult to hold back tears ourselves as the tragedy of the Romanov family unfolds.

Radzinsky has a deep respect for the dead Tsar and his wife, but he clearly loves those children. They are the classic innocence, doomed by the destruction of their grand and insulated world.

In the early 90s, exhumation of what is assumed to be the family's grave revealed only nine skeletons. Although the accepted number of victims has always been put at eleven. Even more recently, two bodies were found nearby to the execution site and burial site that some experts believe to be the missing bodies.

The book and the forensic examination raise again the persistant belief that not only the Princess Anastasia, but also the Tsar Evitch Alexi, heir to the Russian throne may have survived the execution. However, these most recent exhumations near the main burial pit appear to show that neither Alexi nor Anastasia survived.

One of the participants in the execution later wrote that Alexi and his four sisters remained alive after the shooting had stopped.

"This had amazed the Commandant", he wrote, "since we had aimed straight for the heart. It was also surprising that the bullets from the revolvers bounced off for some reason and ricocheted, jumping around the room like hail."

That night, the children were wearing clothing into which the family diamonds had been sewn. Seeing that the bullets had not done its jobs, the killers decided to finish off the children with bayonets. A strong, although essentially circumstantial case, is presented that Alexi and Anastasia may, in fact, have survived.

This conclusion appears to have been recently overturned by the finding of the two bodies near the main burial site.

"The Last Tsar" was written as the Soviet Union, the author's homeland itself, was collapsing. The two Russian Revolutions, those of 1917 and 1989, are often intertwined in the book. In the lonely archives and libraries of a dying country, Radzinsky fell into a no-man's land of historical whirlwinds where huge and incomprehensible became understandable. He offers insights into the character of Russian history where, ". . . great and terrible events. . . are usually due to someone's stupidity or laziness," and to the apparently cyclical nature of history.

"Oh, our bitter, bitter revolution," he writes.

This is a book about processes. The tragedy of a family, the drama of a world turned upside down and the mechanics of research and writing are among the subjects.

Radzinsky's superb use of diaries and letters, his simple straightforward arguments and his penetrating thought-provoking style combined to make a very entertaining and convincing book.

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An in-depth account of the life, reign, and final days of the last Russian tsar draws on Nicholas II's personal diaries, firsthand accounts of the murder of the royal family, and other sources. Reprint. 90,000 first printing. $90,000 ad/promo. NYT. K.

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