The Romanovs Under House Arrest

Although many books cover the lives of Russia's last royal family in some considerable detail, their time spent under house arrest in their own domestic home - the Alexander Palace, outside St. Petersburg - is often explained in a few scant pages, or a chapter at most. But when set against the Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar, these few months from February to August 1917 take on tremendous significance and deserve to be studied in detail. Therein, as events spiralled out of control, the Romanovs would find themselves virtual prisoners in their own palace.

Worse still, with the aforementioned Tsar - Nicholas II - away and ensconced in the vicissitudes of World War One, it was left to his wife Alexandra - favourite granddaughter of Queen Victoria - to commandeer a household increasingly under siege. She did this with aplomb, whilst simultaneously caring for a haemophiliac son and four daughters laid low by life-threatening measles. Alexandra's boast that she was the one who 'wore the trousers' was thus put to the test in the hardiest of scenarios, as she found herself forced both to bolster a flagging palace garrison against the possibility of attack by bloodthirsty insurgents, whilst attempting to hold together a domestic staff increasingly fearful for their own lives in the face of mob retribution. Meanwhile, the German High Command set about releasing a veritable human bacillus - Lenin himself - back toward his native Russia, in a novel attempt to destabilise the Russian war machine further still.

Not simply a blow-by-blow account of the daily lives of a monarchy defiled, this book runs in tandem with the Russian Revolution as it surges out from Petrograd and toward the idyllic suburbs that the Romanovs called their home ... without Rasputin to rally them, who can save the dynasty now?!