The Race to Save the Romanovs
The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue Russia's Imperial Family
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the HWA Sharpe Books Non-Fiction Crown Award
A work of investigative history that will completely change the way in which we see the Romanov story. Finally, here is the truth about the secret plans to rescue Russia’s last imperial family.
On 17 July 1918, the whole of the Russian Imperial Family was murdered. There were no miraculous escapes. The former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children – Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey – were all tragically gunned down in a blaze of bullets.
Historian Helen Rappaport sets out to uncover why the Romanovs’ European royal relatives and the Allied governments failed to save them. It was not, ever, a simple case of one British King’s loss of nerve. In this race against time, many other nations and individuals were facing political and personal challenges of the highest order.
In this incredible detective story, Rappaport draws on an unprecedented range of unseen sources, tracking down missing documents, destroyed papers and covert plots to liberate the family by land, sea and even sky. Through countless twists and turns, this revelatory work unpicks many false claims and conspiracies, revealing the fiercest loyalty, bitter rivalries and devastating betrayals as the Romanovs, imprisoned, awaited their fate.
A remarkable new work of history from Helen Rappaport, author of Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this devastating, complex, and fast-moving narrative, everything from monarchical rivalries to sickness and bad weather play into the brutal demise of the Russian imperial family in 1918. Historian Rappaport (Caught in the Revolution) begins this gripping story in 1894 with the marriage of Nicholas Romanov, heir to the Russian throne, and Hessian Princess Alix, who, like her grandmother Queen Victoria, carried the potentially lethal hemophilia gene. Kaiser Wilhelm facilitated the doomed match, but in a couple of decades Russia and Germany were at war, and revolutionary fervor was rising in Petrograd. Rappaport rehashes some history from her previous books and gives salient new details on British procrastination and backpedaling in offering asylum to the imperial family after Nicholas's abdication in March 1917. She describes the confusion within the provisional government about what to do with the ex-czar and the misguided hope that Kaiser Wilhelm might make the family's safe exit from Russia a condition of the armistice ending Russia's involvement in WWI. Relying on fresh archival material, Rappaport dispels some mystery about secret Western rescue plans that is to say, she clarifies that they were nonexistent. Regarding myriad Russian monarchist rescue plots, she admits that rumors and misinformation make unraveling the truth "an impossible task." This is a well-researched account of a colorful, suspenseful, and tragic series of events.