The road to Ekaterinburg

The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office and throughout the slowly unfolding catastrophe of his imprisonment, Nicholas II failed to conceive of how quickly the world around him could change, or just how desperate and ruthless the revolutionaries could be. A similar naivety was shown by his would-be rescuers.

Helen Rappaport’s frank and brilliant study of the various efforts to save the Romanovs begins, intelligently, with the race to save them from themselves. Their downfall began in 1916 as the course of the first world war began to run against Russia. Nicholas reacted by attempting to take personal control of the war effort, leaving his foolish, hysterical wife Alexandra and her spiritual mentor Grigori Rasputin in charge in Petrograd. Some of the most surprising material in the book concerns the mass efforts by European royal cousins as well as closer Romanov family members to avert the obvious disaster with personal letters, diplomatic entreaties and even threats of a palace coup.

Though the last days of the Romanovs are among the most thoroughly ploughed fields of historical research, Rappaport nonetheless manages to unearth new material. A suitcase of unsorted papers from the literary estate of a fellow Romanov-watcher yields extensive transcripts of royal correspondence hidden in the Romanian royal archives. From this we learn quite how deeply the Empress Alexandra’s royal relatives loathed her. ‘My innermost conviction is that [Alexandra] is suffering from a mild, but morally serious kind of insanity,’ wrote her aunt, the Duchess of Coburg, to her daughter, Crown Princess Marie of Romania, in February 1913. ‘Alix, to my mind, is absolutely mad, everything she does is dictated to her by this false prophet [Rasputin],’ she wrote later.