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He's very charitable to the royal family - perhaps excessively so. I found myself lost in Massie's descriptions. Never has an historical account held my attention quite like this one. Still, everything is well-documented. He presents a more accurate representation of the tsars than popular accounts.
As you're reading, you can almost hear yourself say to the Romanovs, "Don't do that. Although this is not an historical novel, it almost reads like one. It will lead to your destruction." But of course you can't and the rest is history. It is an in-depth (character analysis). of the Romanovs, taking the reader step by step to the events that led to the downfall of the Romanovs. A well written book, logically flowing to tell you the who's, what's and why's of the Romanovs. Anyone who is a Russian hisotry fan will love this book.
This is an all-encompassing authoritative biography of the last ruling Romanovs, and Massie has compiled a thorough and well-researched insight into the lives of Nicholas and Alexandra. Alexandra seems frantic and ill at ease (and often just ill) in her constant concern over the life of her son. This made their demise all the more heartbreaking. Massie is very sympathetic in his presentation of the royal family and addresses pertinent questions about the fall of the monarchy. Overall, this is a captivating book and the saga is all the more intriguing because it's history. If Alexis, the heir to the throne, had not had hemophilia, would the influence of Rasputin not have been necessary. Even forty years after its original publication and long after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is a relevant part of Russian history. And I love that I felt I got to know each of the children, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia, and Alexis more individually and personally.
And if Rasputin were never in the picture, would the monarchy have suffered such a tarnished reputation.The book painted a very vivid picture of the Royal Family based on hundreds of sources and letters. Nicholas is an incapable Tsar but a warm-hearted, devoted husband and father. This book also gave me a greater understanding of the political climate of the time in Russia and a better comprehension of the revolution and the roles of Lenin, Trotsky, and other important players (although I occasionally found some difficulty keeping the various Russian names straight). I will definitely be interested to read some of the more recent material that Massie presents in The Romanovs: The Last Chapter.
Its an interesting thesis that still holds up well, though Massie's focus on the inner tragedy of the Tsar's family tends to make him discount the many other problems from which pre-revolutionary Russia suffered. I first read Nicholas and Alexandra many years ago as a 14 year old. Now that I'm in my early fifties, I recently reread Nicholas and Alexandra for the first time in about twenty years, and it continues to have the same magic. Had Tsarevich Alexis not had hemophilia, it is probable that Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra would not have come under the malign influence of Gregory Rasputin, the Siberian faith healer who had a catastrophic effect on the Russian government before and during World War I; leading to the Russian Revolution, the rise of Communism, and the deaths of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children. Most of all, Massie is able to make us weep for the Romanovs: a man who was a bad Tsar but a good husband and father, a woman who destroyed her family while trying to keep her son alive, and five innocent young people who never had a chance to lead happy, productive lives. Robert K.
Massie's descriptions of the Russian landscape and his finely drawn character sketches are wonderfully rich and detailed. It was a transformative experience for me, awakening what has been a lifelong passionate interest in royal biography and Russian history. Massie also has a natural tendency to whitewash Nicholas and Alexandra (parents of hemophiliacs have a special bond with those who share their trauma, after all), by barely mentioning such negative traits as the Tsar's anti-Semitism and the Empress' many neuroses.The book remains an extraordinary work of art. Massie became interested in the last Tsar of Russia because he, like Nicholas, was the father of a hemophiliac boy. Massie spent long hours reading about hemophilia and famous hemophiliacs, and he was fascinated by the way Russian and world twentieth century history turned on a chance genetic defect. He is able to explain the political and social complexities of the era colorfully and wittily, even when dealing with such abstractions as the differences between Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries, and Bolsheviks.
Every time I read Nicholas and Alexandra I tremble again at the thought of their last awful moments, but I am enriched still more by the chance to read such a magnificent work of art and scholarship.
The Tsarevich was protected by a full retinue, but this did not help him, and the boy was often in screaming agony and close to death from what might in another child, be a bad bruise. Yet Massie shows us a man and a family of uncommonly kind nature in Nicholas II and his family. Rasputin was not really political, but as his influence over the Romanovs grew, his power expanded commensurately, and he was able to have Ministers dismissed, Generals reassigned to sinecures, and policies changed according to his own whims (expressed as messages from God) or concerns. Although derided by most, and called a charlatan by many, Rasputin was perhaps one of the most charismatic men in history, had a devoted following (largely comprised of Society women he'd seduced), did have the power, somehow, to control Alexis' bleeding episodes, and therefore, had the Empress's full and unwavering support in all things.
This may have been the Imperial Family's worst error, as it robbed them of an outpouring of sympathy and support from a passionate populace. They acted to ameliorate suffering wherever they saw it, without reservation. Although the Ottoman Empire was always referred to as "the sick man of Europe," Robert K. Despite this, there is much truth in the observation that "Lenin inherited a nation playing beside a manure pile and Stalin bequeathed a nation playing with an atomic pile." This is not to defend Stalinism, but only to say how little the Romanovs did overall to modernize their State. Living in a bubble within a bubble, they were just not aware of conditions in most of Russia. When Nicholas II inherited the throne after his father's untimely death, he was woefully unprepared to rule.
The Tsaritsa, Alexandra, despite a reputation as an uncaring woman, herself nursed sick friends before the war and horribly wounded soldiers during the war. The Tsaritsa, Alexandra, was a solemn, shy, but deeply emotional and loving woman, nicknamed "Sunny" by her husband. Dominated for years by archconservative and anti-modernist members of his family, he did little to educate his people, provide health care, build infrastructure, or lift the heavy cloak of official repression that lay over all but ethnic Russians in his realm, or the cloak of cultural repression that lay over the ethnic Russians. Massie illustrates that Russia was not very well either, despite appearances. The Romanov Dynasty had ruled Russia then for 300 years, and brought the country, by fits and starts, slowly into the orbit of the modern world. As World War I dawned, Russia was upside-down, its best men in internal exile, and woefully unprepared for war. Of course, this was the problem. A genetic disorder inherited through the female line (Alexis' Great-Grandmother was Queen Victoria, whose progeny were ravaged by the disease), it prevents the clotting of the blood.
In 2000, there was much talk about the "most important person of the 20th Century." My choice was always Gavrilo Princip, the young Bosnian assassin who killed Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, igniting World War I, which caused the Russian Revolution, Communism, and the Treaty of Versailles, which led to Naziism, World War II, atomic bombs, and the Cold War. Massie's theory, that the hemophilia of Alexis, the young Tsarevich, had an inordinate influence of Russian and subsequent world history, is well thought-out, though perhaps an oversimplification. Nicholas II ruled over the largest domain on earth. When Alexis was born in 1904, the world was a full lifespan away from the development of a usable clotting factor; most hemophiliacs simply bled out and died. The Heir, therefore lived in a bubble within a bubble within a bubble.
The sensitive Nicholas, had he been really cognizant of the shape of things, could have, by a single order, vastly improved the lives of each and every Russian (of course, as he noted, being an autocrat and giving orders does not ensure that they are carried out properly). Their myopia was part and parcel of the lives of the citified upper classes, completely divorced from the mass of agrarian peasants in the countryside, magnified by the hermetically sealed nature of being an Imperial Family, aided and abetted by sycophants and the self-serving, who kept the real world at a very long arm's length, in order to maintain their own privileged positions. His daughter Olga paid personally for the care of a handicapped subject she spied from her carriage one day. An obsolescent autocracy, the Russian Empire was mired in time at the dawn of the twentieth century, the great mass of its people existing much as they had 100 years earlier. His greatest failings, as a ruler, all had to do with his decisions to outwardly maintain his Imperial hautre and his autocracy at all costs in the face of cataclysmic change.This bubble-within-a-bubble existence however, could not spare them from the fact of the Tsarevich's hemophilia. Almost for certain, the Romanov Monarchy would have fallen or been transformed out of recognition without the help of Gavrilo Princip's bullets.
To the world, she presented an aloof exterior, and was extremely unpopular with her subjects. The family built hospitals and schools in and around the various cities wherein lay the royal estates. Rasputin himself counseled against war, stating that Russia would collapse from within. Alexandra turned to religion, and ultimately, to Gregory Rasputin, a filthy, degenerate, sexually perverse and personally dissolute monk of peasant extraction.
Of course, there were other factors which formed the tragedy of the twentieth century, and perhaps some of these historical events would have happened anyway. Had they known the sorrows and agonies she suffered through with Alexis, her realm, and history, might have treated her far better. But the Imperial Family decided to keep Alexis' condition a closely guarded secret, fearing the destabilization of the Monarchy and Russia in the face of a physically frail Heir. His hundred million subjects included hundreds of peoples speaking hundreds of languages, linked together by a shockingly small road and rail system. The Tsar and his genteel family were consumed, ending their days against a wall before a Bolshevik firing squad, probably not understanding, until the end, that they had been in the eye of a hurricane that remade the world.
Sunset in Vladivostok was dawn in Brest-Litovsk. Yet, it cannot be discounted. Capable Russian leaders, who did not know the basis of Rasputin's power, suspected the worst of Alexandra, and in challenging Rasputin found themselves toppled from power. They acted only on what they saw with their own eyes, never recognizing that these sufferings were endemic throughout the realm. Russia today is still the world's largest nation, even shorn of Finland, Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, the Ukraine, the Central Asian provinces, and (in 1867) Alaska.
The feared and hated Rasputin may have indeed been a seer or had mystical powers of some sort, judging from circumstances. Nonetheless, the British, German and Russian grandsons of Queen Victoria went to war.In that war, millions died, empires fell, nations were born, ideological political systems triumphed, and the stage was set for a darker and yet bloodier future.
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