The Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family

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. (June)