Nicholas and Alexandra
"Unless you heed the voices of those who know the state in which Russia finds herself ... the result will be utter despair." Thus was Tsar Nicholas II advised in 1913, to no avail. The decent but pathetic and none too brilliant monarch was brutally murdered in the summer of 1918, along with his nervous wife, Alexandra (who had fallen under the spell of the wild-eyed peasant monk Rasputin), and their five children. On the cover of this ambitious--and completely successful--book is a formal portrait of the ethereally beautiful royal family, in delicate finery and pearls; on the back, a shot of their mass grave, a bleak field in the middle of nowhere. As the catalog of a huge exhibition drawn from the State Hermitage Museum and the State Archive of the Russian Federation, this book is filled with color plates of the sumptuous trappings of court life in turn-of-the-century Russia: jeweled Fabergé eggs, coronation paintings, Russian icons, satin ball gowns, soldiers' uniforms, crowns, and other treasures. But the soul of the book is the archival material: royal-family photos, political documents, telegrams, letters between Nicholas and Alexandra, locks of royal baby hair, and grisly eye-witness accounts of the Romanoffs' murders, as told by those who did the deed. More than 100 curators, historians, and art historians have created this lengthy, comprehensive book detailing the beginnings of what Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum, calls "the tragedy of 20th-century Russia." Yet it reads like a fatal thriller, one with opulence, evil, and error at its core.--Peggy Moorman