The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg » (Reprint)

Helen Rappaport studied Russian at Leeds University and is a specialist in Russian and nineteenth-century women’s history. Her previous book No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War (Aurum Press) was published to acclaim in the UK in 2007. She lives in Oxford. Please visit her Web site at www.helenrappaport.com.

On the sweltering summer night of July 16, 1918, in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg, a group of assassins led an unsuspecting Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, the desperately ill Tsarevich, and their four beautiful daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, into a basement room where they were shot and then bayoneted to death.

This is the story of those murders, which ended three hundred years of Romanov rule and set their stamp on an era of state-orchestrated terror and brutal repression.

The Last Days of the Romanovs counts down to the last, tense hours of the family’s lives, stripping away the over-romanticized versions of previous accounts. The story focuses on the family inside the Ipatiev House, capturing the oppressive atmosphere and the dynamics of a group—the Romanovs, their servants, and guards—thrown together by extraordinary events.

Marshaling overlooked evidence from key witnesses such as the British consul to Ekaterinburg, Sir Thomas Preston, American and British travelers in Siberia, and the now-forgotten American journalist Herman Bernstein, Helen Rappaport gives a brilliant account of the political forces swirling through the remote Urals town. She conveys the tension of the watching world: the Kaiser of Germany and George V, King of England—both, like Alexandra, grandchildren of Queen Victoria—their nations locked in combat as the First World War drew to its bitter end. And she draws on recent releases from the Russian archives to challenge the view that the deaths were a unilateral act by a maverick group of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, identifying a chain of command that stretches directly, she believes, to Moscow—and to Lenin himself.

Telling the story in a compellingly new and dramatic way, The Last Days of the Romanovs brings those final tragic days vividly alive against the backdrop of Russia in turmoil, on the brink of a devastating civil war.

Publishers Weekly

Synthesizing a variety of sources, British historian Rappaport (Joseph Stalin) details the Romanovs' last two weeks, imprisoned in a cramped private house in Ekaterinburg, a violently anti-czarist industrial city in the Ural Mountains where Nicholas II; his wife, Alexandra; and their five children were executed on July 17, 1918. The czar's rescue was a low priority for the Allies, and several escape plots by Russian monarchists came to naught. A lax guard was replaced by a rigorous new regime on July 4, headed by Yakov Yurovsky, whose family's impoverished Siberian exile had fueled his burning hatred for the imperial family, and his ruthless assistant and surrogate son, Grigory Nikulin. How the last czar and his family died was one of Russia's best-kept secrets for decades, and Rappaport spares none of the gory details of the panicked bloodbath (it took an entire clip of bullets to finish off the czarevitch because an undergarment sewn with jewels protected the boy's torso) and botched burial of the corpses. Although parts of the Romanov saga are familiar and Rappaport's sympathy for the czar often seems naïve, this is an absorbing, lucid and authoritative work. 16 pages of photos. (Feb. 3)

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List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Red Urals 1

1 Behind the Palisade 11

2 'The Dark Gentleman' 28

3 The Man with a Cigarette 44

4 The Woman in a Wheelchair 58

5 Girls in White Dresses 73

6 The Boy in the Sailor Suit 86

7 The Good Doctor 98

8 'Our Poor Russia' 106

9 'Everything Is the Same' 118

10 'What Is To Be Done with Nicholas?' 128

11 'Absolutely No News from Outside' 144

12 'Something Has Happened to Them in There' 159

13 'Ordinary People Like Us' 170

14 The House of Special Purpose 175

15 'The Will of the Revolution' 184

16 'The World Will Never Know What We Did to Them' 203

Epilogue: The Scent of Lilies 208

Note on Sources 224

Bibliography 228

Index 243