{"product_id":"the-fall-of-the-romanovs-political-dreams-and-personal-struggles-in-a-time-of-revolution-annals-of-communism-series-9780300070675","title":"The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (Annals of Communism Series)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"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 Pankratovs 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 recountedand romanticizedfor decades. Now a new book explores the full range of events and reveals the thoughts  perceptions  and judgments of the individuals involvedNicholas 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. Khrustalv 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647267037237,"sku":"ByrdShop_0300070675","price":34.64,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-fall-of-the-romanovs-political-dreams-and-personal-struggles-in-a-time-of-revolution-annals-of-communism-series-9780300070675","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}