The Romanovs 1818 1959

Illustrated with contemporary photographs, this account of the Russian royal family form 1818 until the end of its reign and beyond will appeal to anyone interested in the dramatic and tragic story of the Romanov family, and in Russian history.

This work examines Alexander II's life and reign, and the lives of his children, including his successor Tsar Alexander III, whose determination to purge the empire of all terrorism and protect the autocracy brought more violence in its wake. It also recounts the lives of the Tsar's children.

Preparing for President Putins State Visit in 2003, the Bank of England is ordered to return any remaining Czarist money to Russia. The Banks trustee of the former Empress Alexandras secret trust account resists. To support his case, the trustee investigates the revealing career of a Grenadier Guards officer. The evidence trail follows the Grenadier though the trenches of World War I, including active service events involving The Prince of Wales, Winston Churchill and the Royal Flying Corps. The backdrop is Imperial Russia and the extraordinary lives of Emperor Nicholas and his family. While history recorded three women surviving the initial shootings of the Imperial family, only to be killed later when they cried out, rumours erupted of a female Romanov escapee. Stalin determined to liquidate her. In 1918, the Grenadier offi cer is posted to Russia to locate and aid the escape of Romanovs. Attached to a Cossack regiment, a peasant girl rescues him from Red soldiers. Against a background of international intrigue and Imperial elegance the story winds through two of histories greatest mysteries, the murders of the Imperial family and Rasputin. King George Vs hitherto misunderstood delay in rescuing his cousin Emperor Nicholas is explained. Questions challenging conventional history run through the story, including amazing evidence, suggesting the British MI6 organization of Rasputins assassination and Trotskys raising of Bolshevik seed capital in New York.

Alexander III called Victoria ‘a pampered, sentimental, selfish old woman,’ while to her he was a sovereign whom she could not regard as a gentleman. But the Queen's son and two of her granddaughters married Romanovs.

In the space of a single decade, three leaders liberated tens of millions of souls, remade their own vast countries, and altered forever the forms of national power: Abraham Lincoln freed a subjugated race and transformed the American Republic. Tsar Alexander II broke the chains of the serfs and brought the rule of law to Russia. Otto von Bismarck threw over the petty Teutonic princes, defeated the House of Austria and the last of the imperial Napoleons, and united the German nation. The three statesmen forged the empires that would dominate the twentieth century through two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Each of the three was a revolutionary, yet each consolidated a nation that differed profoundly from the others in its conceptions of liberty, power, and human destiny. Michael Knox Beran's Forge of Empires brilliantly entwines the stories of the three epochal transformations and their fateful legacies. Telling the stories from the point of view of those who participated in the momentous events -- among them Walt Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Chesnut and Leo Tolstoy, Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie -- Beran weaves a rich tapestry of high drama and human pathos. Great events often turned on the decisions of a few lone souls, and each of the three statesmen faced moments of painful doubt or denial as well as significant decisions that would redefine their nations. With its vivid narrative and memorable portraiture, Forge of Empires sheds new light on a question of perennial importance: How are free states made, and how are they unmade? In the same decade that saw freedom's victories, one of the trinity of liberators revealed himself as an enemy to the free state, and another lost heart. What Lincoln called the "germ" of freedom, which was "to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind," came close to being annihilated in a world crisis that pitted the free state against new philosophies of terror and coercion. Forge of Empires is a masterly story of one of history's most significant decades.

Russian Leaders A Bibliography With Indexes