Book Review #63: The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra

[jethrien]

Title: The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra
Author: Helen Rappaport
Genre: Biography
Thingummies: 3

Synopsis: The world's richest princesses would have been so much happier if they were middle class.

Thoughts: To read this account, you would think that the last generation of Romanovs were completely innocent, totally sheltered middle class children instead of the beneficiaries of one of the richest, most oppressive monarchies in the world.

To be fair, they're kind of both.

Nicholas and Alexandra were about as temperamentally unsuited to be autocrats as one might imagine. Pretty much everyone would have been better off if Nicholas had been a country gentleman. So their girls were raised in almost complete isolation from the glittering Russian court.

But this book does little to acknowledge the underlying reasons why the monarchy was toppled. So sympathetic it is to its subjects that any sense of proportion is lost. Their eventual captors twirl their mustaches. Which undoubtedly they did--workers had fairly good motivations for jeering at the fallen royal family, after life in crippling poverty, ruthless oppression, and a devastating war that was essentially over family politics. None of which is particularly acknowledged.

But it's a good insight into the worldview of the doomed aristocrats. And the sense of doom is palpable. At several points, one of the girls might have escaped by marrying out of the family. Each time, they refuse, wanting to stay in Russia. And so they do, for the remainder of their shortened lives.

Frustratingly, we do not see that remainder. The author had previously written a book about the last two weeks of the Romanovs. She dithers in the introduction over how much to repeat herself. In the end, she basically decides not to repeat herself much at all--the book cuts off abruptly, with a short postscript about what happened to some of the other people mentioned after the Revolution. If one did not know what had happened, one might guess that there was a tragedy but have no idea what. It's self-indulgent and egotistical. If she had kept writing at the same pace, she might have been able to cover the events of the final days in four or five pages, which would have greatly improved the book for everyone who had not read her previous work.

Comments

OK, here's the story I heard from people who would know:

[freekofnature.livejournal.com]

At one time in my misspent youth, in order to graduate H.S. we all were required (sentenced) to do some community service. They took one look at me and assigned me to work in a Senior citizens "Assisted Living" center. There were many elderly Russians there who were refugee's from the old Soviet Union, and since I spoke passable Russian (I was unusually good with languages) I spent long hours just listening to them tell the old stories. Well, one of them, who was a "secret service" person in his youth and amateur historian of the Bolsheviks later in life, once told me this story:
When the Czar, Czarina, and the pricesses were incarcerated by the Bolshevik irregulars in Ekatrinaberg, in a big farmhouse while the central committee at the time tried to figure out what to do with them, the Czarina decided to hide the crown jewels (they were partial to diamonds) in the "undergarments" of the princesses! They spent the majority of their time there sewing the diamonds into their clothing. When Lenin ordered them executed, in revenge for his brothers exile and subsequent death in Siberia which was ordered by the Cheka (the Czarist secret police, who after the revolution were turned into the NKVD - KGB). A hastily assembled crew of these armed newly deputized peasants, was sent to murder them, the Bolshevik way, with pistols at close range. They shot at the princesses and were stunned and scared out of their wits when the bullets did not harm the princesses at all! (This was before bullet proof vests were invented). The assassins, being very superstitious fled the scene in terror, believing that they were in fact demi-gods, and would not go back and "finish the job!" The local Soviet asked Moskva what to do, and they sent a team of "specialists" there to finish the job properly, i.e. deliver a "coup de grâce." The burial party which was a hastily organized team of new Red Army local conscripts, when they emptied out the wagon carrying the dead Romanov's at the burial site were startled to see diamonds (Brillianty) falling out all over the place as they moved the bodies! They grabbed and stole all the diamonds they could find, threw the remains into a nearby cave, and left the Soviet Union with the crown jewels as quickly as they could, they lived in wealth and splendor with their ill gotten gains in Paris where they disappeared when France fell to the invading German army in WWII.

And that is what I heard about the end of the Monarchy in Russia.