The third entry in Yale's Annals of Communism series consists of
documents on the fate of the Romanov dynasty, including official
orders, personal letters, diaries, and recollections, interspersed
with a commentary by Steinberg (History/Yale Univ.). The documents,
found in the Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow (where
coauthor Krustalev is historian-archivist), run from late February
1917, just before the Russian Revolution, up to the execution of
the former Tsar Nicholas II with his family and servants in July
1918. It reveals the tsar and his family alternately oblivious to
the mood of the times (Alexandra writes to her husband that the
riots in St. Petersburg are "a hooligan movement"); pathetic (in a
letter from Nicholas to his sister, "For me, night is the best part
of the day - at least you forget yourself for a while"); and noble
(one of the tsar's daughters writes to an officer supposedly
organizing their escape that it would be "ignoble" to leave without
the servants "after they have followed us voluntarily into exile").
On the vexed question of the responsibility for the murder of the
tsar and his family, the documents are inconclusive. Steinberg
thinks it likely that Lenin approved the murder but that "no direct
proof has ever surfaced." He concludes that the version closest to
the evidence is that the Urals Soviet was authorized to execute the
tsar and his family without trial if the military situation
deteriorated. Most chilling is the recollection of the commissar
who murdered them. Writing of the tsar's young hemophiliac son, he
noted that "Aleksei remained seated, petrified, and I finished him
off." A mixed bag of documents, alternately the mundane record of a
largely uneventful captivity and the cruel record of an execution,
with first-class analysis from Steinberg. (Kirkus Reviews)
"All around me is treachery, cowardice, and deceit!"-diary of
Nicholas II, on the day he abdicated "Behave with dignity; do not
allow the former tsar and his family to be insulted or treated
rudely."-Commissar Vasily Pankratov's instructions to the guard,
September 1917 "The bullets...ricocheted off [the jewels in the
daughters' corsets] and jumped around the room like hail."-Yakov
Yurovsky, commissar in charge of the execution of the tsar and his
family The compelling and poignant story of the arrest, captivity,
and execution of the last tsar of Russia and his family during the
revolution of 1917-1918 has been recounted-and romanticized-for
decades. Now a new book explores the full range of events and
reveals the thoughts, perceptions, and judgments of the individuals
involved-Nicholas and Alexandra, their children, and the men who
guarded and eventually killed them. This deeply moving book is
based on documents and photographs from recently opened Russian
archives and from Western collections. The documents, which appear
for the first time in English (the language in which some of them
were originally written), include correspondence between Nicholas
and Alexandra during the February 1917 revolution; portions of
their diaries; minutes of government meetings, telegrams, and other
official papers concerning the arrest, confinement, and execution
of the Romanovs; letters written by the captive tsar and his family
to friends and relatives; appeals from Russian citizens concerning
the fate of the Romanovs; and testimonies by the revolutionaries
who guarded and executed them. Mark D. Steinberg sets the stage for
this dramatic saga of revolution in a text that provides engrossing
narrative and sensitive exploration of ideas and values and that
draws on the whole range of archival and published documents. He
and Vladimir M. Khrustalev also provide notes identifying people
and explaining terms. Together, the text and documents challenge
the conventional image of Nicholas as weak and witless and of
Alexandra as either the preoccupied mother of a hemophiliac heir or
as the treasonous "German empress." Instead they tell an ironic
tale of individuals whose fatalistic spirituality and unbending
faith in an archaic political culture allowed them to fall victim
to revolutionaries whose political dreams had yet to be proven
false.
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