title: Twilight of the Romanov Dynasty
author: Loscher, John D.
description: "In my best guess, Czar Nicholas the Second of Russia is a throwback to something around the year seventeen hundred...perhaps even earlier than that " William Donaldson would live to see firsthand how these words from his boss were completely accurate. For a recent college graduate like William, such archaic and inflexible viewpoints added up to the Romanov family's ultimate damnation. Time would eventually prove him right... During his travels across the European continent during the summer of 1914, William got to meet a young Winston Churchill, Bernard Law Montgomery, and Adolph Hitler. Arriving in Saint Petersburg, the capital city of Imperial Russia on the day World War I begins, William finds himself forcibly conscripted into the United States Foreign Service. In his eventual role as a civilian military observer, William Donaldson, a most reluctant Attache to the United States Embassy in St. Petersburg, Russia, would get to witness that demise personally. For an unwilling, but dedicated, American diplomat, such unprecedented access to the Russian military would reveal the malaise and ultimate bankruptcy which was the Imperial Romanov Court at the turn of the twentieth century. Accompanied from battlefield to battlefield along the Eastern Front with his devoted White Russian interpreter and lover, Sonjya Mastrova, William meticulously documents the decline and subsequent devolution of Imperial Russia's sovereign liege. As the military and political situation steadily progresses from bad to worse, William concludes that the final overthrow of the 300-year-old Romanov autocracy is no longer a question of if, but when. The only nagging issue William struggles to determine is simply this: "What type of government will replace the monarchy?"