The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Tsar Nikolai II

A valuable account of the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family, which contradicts the official Soviet version in which Siberian Bolsheviks ordered the executions without Moscow’s permission.

What makes this book special is not so much Radzinsky’s account of Nicholas’ last days, but his access to Communist archives that allowed him to reconstruct how and why the Bolshevik leadership decided to murder Nicholas II.

Also fascinating is Radzinsky’s account of the subsequent careers of Nicholas’ murderers, how they became minor league Communist celebrities who recounted at komsomol (youth assemblies) how they had shot the Tsar. This continued until Stalin decided that they had become drunken embarrassments, and decided to keep them out of the public eye…

560 pages