The last of the tsars : Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution
Title:
The last of the tsars : Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution
Author:
ISBN:
9781681775012
Edition:
First Pegasus books hardcover edition.
Physical Description:
xviii, 382 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 24 cm
Contents:
Tsar of all Russia -- At GHQ -- The February revolution -- Abdication -- Tsarskoe Selo -- Family life -- The provisional government -- The British offer -- Rules and routines -- On the lives of rulers -- Kerensky's dilemma -- Distant transfer -- Destination Tobolsk -- Plenipotentiary Pankratov -- The October revolution -- The Romanov dispersal -- Freedom House -- Learning from others -- Time on their hands -- "October" in January -- The Moscow discussions -- Rescue plans -- The Russian future -- Comrades on the march -- Tobolsk and Moscow -- Commissar Yaklovlev -- The order to move -- South to Tyumen -- Destination to be confirmed -- To the Ipatev house -- The Urals and its Bolsheviks -- Meanwhile, in Tobolsk -- Enduring Ekaterinburg -- A sense of the world -- Civil War -- German manoeuvres -- Last days in the house -- The Ekaterinburg trap -- The Moscow fulcrum -- The man who would not be tsar -- Narrowed options -- Death in the cellar -- Red evacuation -- Murders, cover-ups, pretenders -- The Czechoslovak occupation -- Romanov survivors -- The anti-Bolshevik inquiry -- Dispute without bones -- Afterword.
Summary:
A detailed account of Tsar Nicholas II's last eighteenth months draws on the Tsar's diaries, recorded conversations, and official inquiry testimonies to create a portrait of a man entirely out of his depth.
"In March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All Russia, abdicated the throne and the dynasty that had ruled an empire for three hundred years was forced from power by revolution. Now, on the hundredth anniversary of that revolution, eminent historian Robert Service examines Nicholas's life--in fresh and unprecedented detail--from the weeks before his momentous abdication to his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The story has been told many times, but Service's deep understanding of the period and his forensic examination of the Tsar's diaries and other newly discovered recorded conversations, as well as manifold testimonies of the official inquiry, shed remarkable new light on his troubled reign, and also reveals the kind of Russia that Nicholas wanted to emerge from the Great War. The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic, and political ferment in Russia that followed the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet socialist republic."--Jacket.
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