Customer Reviews
Tsar's family come alive - By: M, 07 Aug 2008 
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 & his family were imprisoned, & locks us into that oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere. Nicholas, Alexandra & the duchesses come alive for us, not as saints or villains, but as a real family, loving each other, finding solacein 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 pleasurein 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 & world war close around them.
This is a short book, which makes it all the more compelling because you can read itin a couple of sittings & maintain that tension & mood. I have been defeatedin 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, & consequently still-unfinished several years after it toppled off my bedside table & 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 - By: C. Zaba, 05 Aug 2008 It isn't easy to take on the Tsars. You're entering a minefield - the politics & bloodletting of the Russian Revolution & everything that followed: Stalin, the hunger, the Second World War, purges & worse. To reach back through all that, & get at the true nature of the last days of the last Tsar of Russia & his ill-starred family, is an achievement indeed.
For me this book has a terrifying relentlessness about it. I read it sitting on a beachin Sicily, the blue Med lapping at my toes, a weird experience when,in the book, I was therein that stifling Ypatiev Housein the hot Russian summer, no air conditioning, nothing at all to do, nowhere to go, staring my fatein 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 & 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, & the unbearably innocent girls responded eagerly to the order & ran down happily to the basement where the gunmen would be.
And the murders! They went on & on, twenty minutes of carnage, so incompetent, so bloody. The author makes us see, feel, smell it. There's no escape. It is gruesome & it is real. I'min that cellar with them & so is every reader.
Afterwards, the sheer uselessly hopeless incompetence of their murderers meant burialin an unmarked scratch grave next to the road for no better reason than the car finally gave up & 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 griefin Russia now that bleeds hopelessly on. On the 90th anniversary of the deaths of the family, they've at last found a worthy chroniclerin Rappaport, whose level, even & unflinchingly steady voice takes us through & past these events, places themin time, & leaves us with the scent of liliesin a wood, & the murmur of the all-night vigil of a thousand voices who haven't forgotten, & will not, ever forget. And neither will I.
Ekaterinburg - By: Lady Het, 19 Jul 2008 Using her extensive research of diaries, letters & 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, & factional fighting amongst the Bolsheviks she explains how, after the Tsar's abdication, the Imperial family finally come to be imprisonedin the Impatiev Housein 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 & 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 & their servants endure the stifling heat, the oppressive atmosphere & lack of privacy of their apartment, cut off from the outside world, the windows sealed shut & whitewashed over.
She draws such intimate & detailed portraits of Nicholas, Alexandra & the children, that the family come vividly to life as they cope with their confinement. The Tsar resigned, Alexandrain constant pain, comforted by her daughters & her strong orthodox faith. The four Grand Duchesses, as they learn to wash their clothes, scrub floors & bake bread. Serious Olga, practical Tatiana, caring Maria & mischievous Anastasia, & Alexy, their brother, frail & 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 intensifiesin the house. Yurovsky's purpose is to arrange & carry out the efficient & secret liquidation of the Romanov family. The tension builds as the night chosen for the murders arrives & Yurovsky's meticulous plans begin to unravel. The subsequent horrific & botched killingsin the cellar are gut wrenching & 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 Russiain the following years resultingin 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 & moving book, which I recommend unreservedly.
Ms. Rappaport possesses a remarkable ability to breathe life into people and places long gone - By: Steven Lavallee, 02 Jul 2008 I amin absolute awe of Ms. Rappaport's research & writing abilities, particularly her keen descriptiveness & her uncanny ability to "see" & report on circumstances, people, a house, a city -and a mood- as vividly as if this all happenedin front of her eyes yesterday, instead of almost a century ago. Though describing gloom & fear & 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 writtenin English or French on this subject, I found Ms. Rappaport's perspective on the times & the individual characters to be surprisingly enlightening. Ms. Rappaport has successfully synthesized an enormous amount of information from both well-known & rarer sources. With it, she conjures a sometimes agonizingly realistic picture complete with atmosphere, an overwhelming sense of tension, & visual descriptions that propel the reader backwardin time to a city, a house & circumstances that long afterwards lingerin the mind as vividly & 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 - By: Klaus Meyer, 30 Jun 2008 I have just finished your book & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & how they coped with the new situation. The personality of Alexandra, her illnesses, the illness of the Heir & 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, & 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.
Allin all, I enjoyed this book immensely, it is fascianting, well written & gives the reader much stuff for further thought. I can only recommend this book!
