A Fatal Passion: The Story of the Uncrowned Last Empress of Russia

Readers anticipating another Nicholas and Alexandra will find here only a phantom pretender, disregarded even by most czarist loyalists. Like the murdered empress, Alexandra, Victoria Melita (1876-1936) was a granddaughter of England's fecund Queen Victoria. But the resemblance ceases there. Under pressure from the old queen, she married her cousin Ludwig Ernst of Hesse, who, it turned out, was homosexual. Divorcing him after a decade of misery, in 1905 Victoria Melita (""Ducky,"" as she was known to her family) married her handsome Romanov lover, Grand Duke Kirill, who in 1918 would become legitimate successor to a vanished throne. Reigning until his death in 1938 from the oblivion of Coburg, where his father-in-law briefly had been duke, and then from a village in Brittany, Kirill lived with his empress in a twilight exile. Ducky predeceased her husband, dying of a stroke in 1936, leaving two children, Kira and Vladimir. Most of the marginally interesting narrative details family matters that are a prelude to their entrapment in the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, which passes like a thunderstorm in these pages. A sentimental soap opera, the book opens with extravagances of language before settling down to subroyal domesticity. If names and locales were altered, Ducky's story might make afternoon television. Sullivan is the author of Presidential Passions. Illustrations not seen by PW. (May)