Thursday, January 15, 2015

The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion & The Fall Of Imperial Russia



Although not one of my favorite historical periods, I’ve always had a small fascination with the whole “missing princess” story.  I hadn’t read many non-fictional accounts of the Romanov family so I didn’t know a lot of what was happening in Russia during this time.  This book was well written and kept everything pretty simple so I got a much clearer picture of how Nicholas was ignoring and sometimes exacerbating the problems that the poor were facing in Russia, which certainly went a long way towards explaining why the Russian Revolution happened.  Actually both the October and May Revolutions were pretty well explained.  I also felt like I had a better grasp on why World War I actually started and how the various powers became involved.  Before reading this book, if someone had asked me, I would have said “an archduke got shot” but this book actually pretty simply explained the land situation and who was allied with who and why.  I’m not sure that I learned a lot of new information about the family themselves, because I knew more about them going into the book, but there were some interesting tidbits about them, especially the children, as well.  Overall, I’d have to say that I really enjoyed the book and would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in this time period or Russian history.

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