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Rating: 
Summary: An incredible work
Review: It is difficult to express the debt of gratitude that it owed to the authors of this book. For all too long an America scholar should have cast a critical eye on the Soviet files regarding the story the Soviet regime wanted the world to believe. A healthy dose of realism and - if you read between the lines - skepticism was echoed in the writing and analysis. Steinberg scrutunized his findings with a view to the historical record he would leave behind. He has accomplished a much needed task for those of us who value scholarship not sensationalism. And the effort is a much needed addition to any Romanov library. My edition has so many dog-earred pages and has been so used that the spine is lovingly weakened from use. I shall buy another.
Rating:
Summary: An incredible work
Review: It is difficult to express the debt of gratitude that it owed to the authors of this book. For all too long an America scholar should have cast a critical eye on the Soviet files regarding the story the Soviet regime wanted the world to believe. A healthy dose of realism and - if you read between the lines - skepticism was echoed in the writing and analysis. Steinberg scrutunized his findings with a view to the historical record he would leave behind. He has accomplished a much needed task for those of us who value scholarship not sensationalism. And the effort is a much needed addition to any Romanov library. My edition has so many dog-earred pages and has been so used that the spine is lovingly weakened from use. I shall buy another.
Rating: 
Summary: A huge disappointment.
Review: This book is a good example of why the average American knows nothing or next to nothing about the forty to fifty million people who were murdered by the Soviet regime. A book about the last tsar and his family should be the perfect opportunity to familiarize the general reader with the basic facts about the Soviet terror. After all, the murder of Nicholas II, his wife, five children, their family doctor and three servants, was but an opening salvo in the mass terror perpetrated against the general population by the Communist regime under both Lenin and Stalin. But you would never guess that, reading this book. While the author Mark Steinberg dwells with excrutiating detail on the personal and political failings of Nicholas and Alexandra, which contributed to the downfall of their dynasty, he neglects to put their murders into any larger historical context. Everything ends in 1918. In fact, in 1918 the terror was just beginning, and it would make the murders in Ekaterinburg look like a mere dress rehearsal (which, in a sense, they were). Steinberg has much to say about the public's tendency to "romanticize" the Romanovs, but he doesn't offer any new insights into the underlying reasons for our continuing fascination with the family. Nevertheless, by publishing this book he himself profited from that fascination. Books about the Romanovs were extremely popular when this particular one came out. Perhaps the rush to publish and cash in on popular demand explains the overall poor quality of the translation of key documents (which unfortunately do not retain the flavor of the original Russian), as well as the many factual errors in this book. In the photograph section alone, there are three glaring mistakes: two of Nicholas' daughters, Olga and Marie, are misidentified as Alexandra in two separate photographs (is it really that hard to distinguish between teenaged girls and their middle-aged mother?); in yet another photograph, all of the imperial children are misidentified with the sole exception of the only boy, Alexey. Furthermore, it is simply not true that most of the documents in this book had not been published previously in the West. Most of them had already appeared in other books, and in better translations, too. Steinberg's so-called "objectivity" really amounts to no more than moral relativism and superficial historical analysis. People who want to read an in-depth, objective, and thoughtful account of the Russian Revolution should read Orlando Figes' excellent history, A People's Tragedy; people who want an in-depth account of the murders and the events leading up to them should read Robert K. Massie's The Romanovs: The Final Chapter or Edward Radzinsky's admittedly very subjective biography of Nicholas II (where, in fact, most of the documents pertaining to the murders were originally published). Personal accounts of the family are available in dozens of contemporary memoirs. Sergei Mironenko's Nicholas and Alexandra: A Lifelong Passion, is a far more inclusive collection of excerpts from the family's personal letters and diaries (including the children's); the translations are very well done and the book as a whole is quite simply excellent. Unfortunately, a large amount of historical material from Russian archives still awaits translation into English. For example, there are several accounts of the murders by perpetrators and other firsthand witnesses which have been published in Russia but which, for whatever reason, Steinberg chose not to include here. Finally, I would suggest that one of the reasons some of us "romanticize" (remember?) the last Romanovs is that they have come to symbolize the millions of (mainly anonymous) victims of the Soviet regime. Of the eleven people murdered in the Ipatiev House by the Bolsheviks on the night of July 16-17, 1918, only two, Nicholas and Alexandra, had ever held any political power. The remaining nine people were all, by any definition, complete innocents: four girls (Olga, 22 years old; Tatiana, 21; Marie, 19; Anastasia, 17); their brother, Alexey, not yet 14 years old; the family physician, Eugene Botkin; the cook Kharitonov, the valet Trupp, and the maid Anna Demidova. There is a symbolic power in remembering these victims, for persons of both sexes and of every age, class, and profession would be murdered by the Soviet state in the next forty years. Interestingly, Steinberg doesn't provide us with any photographs of the murdered servants. Apparently, he's as much of a romantic snob as the rest of us.
Rating: 
Summary: HORRID READ!
Review: This book is absolutely horrible. The photos are mislabeled (Olga and Maria as Alexandra?!) and there's nothing new and interesting. I don't think it deserves even one star.
Rating:
Summary: HORRID READ!
Review: This book is absolutely horrible. The photos are mislabeled (Olga and Maria as Alexandra?!) and there's nothing new and interesting. I don't think it deserves even one star.
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