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 Tsar's family come alive August 7, 2008
M (London, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a masterly work of history. Although, of course, we all know how the Romanov story ends, Rappaport takes us inside The House of Special Purpose where the Tsar and his family were imprisoned, and locks us into that oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere. Nicholas, Alexandra and the duchesses come alive for us, not as saints or villains, but as a real family, loving each other, finding solace in their religion, trying to support each other as, closed off from the outside world, they await their fate ... The Tsar, whose dearest wish was to run a farm; Alexandra, racked with pain from sciatica; the girls who found pleasure in helping maids to sweep floors because it broke up the tedium of their days.
The tension is unbearable as Rappaport recounts the last 14 days of their lives as the politics of revolution and world war close around them.
This is a short book, which makes it all the more compelling because you can read it in a couple of sittings and maintain that tension and mood. I have been defeated in the past by the (literal) weight of volumes of Russian history - Orlando Figes's People's Revolution springs to mind, too heavy to hold, too heavy to carry, too many characters/organisations to keep track of, and consequently still-unfinished several years after it toppled off my bedside table and nudged its way under my bed (whence abandoned books never emerge again).
A feeble excuse, I know! But well done Helen Rappaport for writing a serious book of history that the ordinary, interested reader has a hope of finishing.
New perspectives on a hidden history August 5, 2008
C. Zaba (Bristol, England)
It isn't easy to take on the Tsars. You're entering a minefield - the politics and bloodletting of the Russian Revolution and everything that followed: Stalin, the hunger, the Second World War, purges and worse. To reach back through all that, and get at the true nature of the last days of the last Tsar of Russia and his ill-starred family, is an achievement indeed.
For me this book has a terrifying relentlessness about it. I read it sitting on a beach in Sicily, the blue Med lapping at my toes, a weird experience when, in the book, I was there in that stifling Ypatiev House in the hot Russian summer, no air conditioning, nothing at all to do, nowhere to go, staring my fate in the face. It's not surprising they turned to prayer. A lesser family would have disintegrated.
As the days passed you felt it with them, that terrible and growing sense of absolute doom. Helen Rappaport has no mercy - she tells it like it is. My nerves were strung out to breaking point as the final steps of the man who had masterminded the murders ascended the stair, on the evening of their deaths, and the unbearably innocent girls responded eagerly to the order and ran down happily to the basement where the gunmen would be.
And the murders! They went on and on, twenty minutes of carnage, so incompetent, so bloody. The author makes us see, feel, smell it. There's no escape. It is gruesome and it is real. I'm in that cellar with them and so is every reader.
Afterwards, the sheer uselessly hopeless incompetence of their murderers meant burial in an unmarked scratch grave next to the road for no better reason than the car finally gave up and they couldn't travel further with the bodies through the mud.
And this was the cousin of the King of England.
It's not surprising there's a collective grief in Russia now that bleeds hopelessly on. On the 90th anniversary of the deaths of the family, they've at last found a worthy chronicler in Rappaport, whose level, even and unflinchingly steady voice takes us through and past these events, places them in time, and leaves us with the scent of lilies in a wood, and the murmur of the all-night vigil of a thousand voices who haven't forgotten, and will not, ever forget. And neither will I.
Ekaterinburg July 19, 2008
Lady Het (Devon England)
Using her extensive research of diaries, letters and eyewitness accounts, Helen Rappaport draws together the strands of this story to write an utterly compelling account of the last days of the Imperial Family.
Set against the backdrop of war, revolution, and factional fighting amongst the Bolsheviks she explains how, after the Tsar's abdication, the Imperial family finally come to be imprisoned in the Impatiev House in Ekaterinburg, chillingly referred to as The House of Special Purpose. The house which has been turned into a prison, shut off from the outside world by a wooden palisade.
Helen really conveys the feeling of doom as the Tsar, the Tsaritsa and their daughter Maria enter the house on April 30th 1918, the other children following later when Alexy, the Tsarevich, has recovered from an attack of haemophilia. She describes how, for the next few weeks, the family and their servants endure the stifling heat, the oppressive atmosphere and lack of privacy of their apartment, cut off from the outside world, the windows sealed shut and whitewashed over.
She draws such intimate and detailed portraits of Nicholas, Alexandra and the children, that the family come vividly to life as they cope with their confinement. The Tsar resigned, Alexandra in constant pain, comforted by her daughters and her strong orthodox faith. The four Grand Duchesses, as they learn to wash their clothes, scrub floors and bake bread. Serious Olga, practical Tatiana, caring Maria and mischievous Anastasia, and Alexy, their brother, frail and sickly, playing soldiers with the kitchen boy Leonid Sednev.
The arrival of a new commandant Yakov Yurovsky on July 4th heralds a much harsher regime for the prisoners. The sense of foreboding intensifies in the house. Yurovsky's purpose is to arrange and carry out the efficient and secret liquidation of the Romanov family. The tension builds as the night chosen for the murders arrives and Yurovsky's meticulous plans begin to unravel. The subsequent horrific and botched killings in the cellar are gut wrenching and deeply shocking. The bungled efforts of the killers to dispose of the bodies, if not so tragic could be considered almost farcical.
Leaving aside the politics of the Tsar's disastrous reign, Helen has concentrated on this story of the Imperial family who were brutally murdered with the consent of Moscow, an act which was to be repeated all over Russia in the following years resulting in the death of millions of people. A terror outstripping any of the atrocities perpetrated during the Romanov reign.
Helen Rappaport has written a very powerful and moving book, which I recommend unreservedly.
Ms. Rappaport possesses a remarkable ability to breathe life into people and places long gone July 2, 2008
Steven Lavallee (Providence, RI USA)
I am in absolute awe of Ms. Rappaport's research and writing abilities, particularly her keen descriptiveness and her uncanny ability to "see" and report on circumstances, people, a house, a city -and a mood- as vividly as if this all happened in front of her eyes yesterday, instead of almost a century ago. Though describing gloom and fear and the sense of "suffocation," as well as other subjects that I'd rather not dwell on, the book has enthralled me.
Despite my decades of reading almost everything written in English or French on this subject, I found Ms. Rappaport's perspective on the times and the individual characters to be surprisingly enlightening. Ms. Rappaport has successfully synthesized an enormous amount of information from both well-known and rarer sources. With it, she conjures a sometimes agonizingly realistic picture complete with atmosphere, an overwhelming sense of tension, and visual descriptions that propel the reader backward in time to a city, a house and circumstances that long afterwards linger in the mind as vividly and hauntingly as an unshakable personal memory.
A fascinating book that could really be the last words on the final days of the Last Imperial Family June 30, 2008
Klaus Meyer (Berlin, Germany)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
I have just finished your book and I can not say how much I enjoyed it. One feels strangely saying so as it is a sad story by any means.
I have lots of books on the Romanovs and I was quite hesitant to buy another one. What can be possibly new about the whole subject?
But I have to admit that this excellent book gave me a new inside and you were able to separate the political side of things, from the human dimension. There is no romantic or religious vision of the final days. It is not written with a hidden agenda of glorifying the last Imperial Family. It clearly separates the politcial story that led to the downfall of the dynasty and the the human tragedy.
Helen Rappaport did not write the story - as it is ever so often - from the end. I appreciated very much how she showed the different personalities of the Imperial family and how they coped with the new situation. The personality of Alexandra, her illnesses, the illness of the Heir and how this effected all of the family long before the fall of the dynasty. The view that the isolation of the family during their reign found a sort of continuation during the confinement, but without the demands of the rule, and were partly at least from the Czar "welcome" is indeed very convincing. Her final comments hid a nerve with me. On top, I just like Helen Rappaport's style of writing.
All in all, I enjoyed this book immensely, it is fascianting, well written and gives the reader much stuff for further thought. I can only recommend this book!
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