Book description
A vivid and compelling account of the final thirteen days of the
Romanovs, counting down to the last, tense hours of their lives.
On 4 July 1918, a new commandant took control of a closely
guarded house in the Russian town of Ekaterinburg. His name was Yakov
Yurovsky, and his prisoners were the Imperial family: the former Tsar
Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children, Olga, Tatiana,
Maria, Anastasia and Alexey. Thirteen days later, at Yurovsky's
command, and on direct orders from Moscow, the family was gunned down
in a blaze of bullets in a basement room.
This is the story of those murders, which ended 300 years of Romanov
rule and began an era of state-orchestrated terror and brutal repression.
Helen Rappaport's most recent book is the acclaimed
No Place for
Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War
(Aurum). A fluent Russian speaker and specialist in Russian history and
19th-century women's history, she was the Russian consultant in 2002 to
the National Theatre's Tom Stoppard trilogy,
The Coast of Utopia
. She is also the author of biographical reference works on Joseph
Stalin, Queen Victoria and women social reformers. She and William
Horwood are co-authors of
Dark Hearts of Chicago
(Hutchinson, 2007), a thriller about journalist Emily Strauss of the
New York World.
