One of those little footnotes to history that has always intrigued me is that the Bolsheviks planned and carried out the October Revolution in the palace of the Tsar’s mistress. The idea of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the rest of them strutting about the marble-clad halls and damask-swathed boudoirs of the great courtesan’s mansion in their cloth caps, smoking and plotting bloody mayhem, is grotesque but also somehow fitting when one considers the moral squalor and the shoddy grandeur of their political enterprise. I longed to know more about this Bolshevik Bethlehem.
This book has done more than satisfy my curiosity. The story it tells is an extraordinary one in every way. Born in 1872 into a family of Polish dancers who had moved to St Petersburg, the heroine quickly came to prominence as a ballerina of genius. At the age of 17, after performing before the imperial family for the first time, she set her cap at the young Tsarevich, the future Nicholas II.
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