Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire by Dominic Lieven
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Overview: In recent years there have been a number of biographies of Nicholas II. Why then is another one necessary? The answer is that this book has aims very different to those of its predecessors. The latter have concentrated their attention on Nicholas as family man, father of a haemophiliac heir, protector of Rasputin, or victim of the tragedy at Ekaterinburg in July 1918.
The basic premise of this book is that it is worth presenting to the public a view of the life and reign of Nicholas II very different to the one commonly held either in the West or in Soviet Russia. To say that this book is more sympathetic than most to Russia’s last monarch does not mean that it is an attempt to whitewash Nicholas II or to deny that he was by personality and temperament in many ways ill-suited to the task which fate called upon him to perform.
This book is very much a study of the reign as well as the man. It attempts to understand Nicholas’s personality but also the system of government over which he presided and the empire which he ruled. Russia in the last decades of the empire was a fascinating, vibrant but by no means happy society. Unless one understands its problems and the political context in which Nicholas II operated, his ideas and actions are bound to seem incomprehensible, trivial and absurd to the Western observer. In fact, there was rather more sense and logic behind them than is usually imagined.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
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Nicholas_II_-_Twilight_Of_The_Empire.pdf
Nicholas_II_-_Twilight_Of_The_Empire.pdf
