Kathleen McKenna Hewtson
ASIN: B017Z85VCQ
Publisher: Taylor Street Books (November 13, 2015)
Pages: 278
The love story of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia has long been considered a fairytale romance with a startlingly tragic ending, when the entire Imperial Romanov Family was shot and bayoneted to death by a Bolshevik firing squad in a cellar in Ekaterinburg on July 17, 1918.Nicholas and Alexandra were famously devoted to each other, writing each other cooing notes daily, but successive tides of political, military, and then revolutionary, history swept them away.At least that is the received wisdom, but the truth is somewhat more complicated. Tsar Nicholas never wanted to be Tsar, was never trained to be Tsar, and indeed proved to be catastrophically inept in the role. Empress Alexandra was stunningly beautiful but socially and physically clumsy to the point of being repellent to her mother-in-law, Dowager-Empress Marie, most of the Russian court, and therefore by ...