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.
The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg is a sad, touching book with an emotional end. There was only one member of the family left-Alexei dog Joy -waiting for them to return, but it didn't happen.
Everyone know how the story will end.In a claustrophobic basement room, choked with smoke and the metallic scent of blood, with bodies – including children – riddled with bullets.
What is the most heartbreaking that the children was the ones who suffered the most during the end.They literally butcherd them.And what was the most heart wrenching that it was little Alexei whose own blood was the reason he was sentenced to the death from birth,he had to watch how everyone he loved died in front of him,and even as he was shot he still held on.
Nicholas and Alexander had their chances, made their mistakes, and paid the ultimate price. The children, though, were simply caught up in it.