Nicholas and Alexandra

New York: Atheneum, 1967. First Edition [Stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. [2], xvii, [1], 584, [4] pages., illus., endpaper maps, occasional footnotes, genealogy, notes, bibliography, index, some soiling fore-edge, DJ soiled, worn, with edge tears/chips. Robert Kinloch Massie III (born 1929) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian and biographer. He has devoted much of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's royal family from 1613 to 1917. He studied United States and European history at Yale and Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie worked as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959–62 then at the Saturday Evening Post. In 1967 Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of Nicholas II and Alexandra of Hesse, the last Emperor and Empress of Russia. In 1971 the book was the basis of an Academy Award-winning film of the same title. In 1995, in his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Massie updated Nicholas and Alexandra with much newly discovered information. He was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987–91, and currently serves as an ex officio council member. While president of the Guild, he called on authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The story of the love that ended an empire. In this commanding book, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of Imperial Russia to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble. Nicholas II or Nikolai II (18 May [O.S. 6 May] 1868 – 17 July 1918) was the last Emperor of Russia, ruling from 1 November 1894 until his forced abdication on 15 March 1917. His reign saw the fall of the Russian Empire from being one of the foremost great powers of the world to economic and military collapse. Due to the Khodynka Tragedy, anti-Semitic pogroms, Bloody Sunday, the violent suppression of the 1905 Revolution, the execution of political opponents and his perceived responsibility for the Russo-Japanese War, he was given the nickname Nicholas the Bloody by his political enemies. Russia suffered a decisive defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, which saw the annihilation of the Russian Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima, loss of Russian influence over Manchuria and Korea, and the Japanese annexation of South Sakhalin. The Anglo-Russian Entente, designed to counter German attempts to gain influence in the Middle East, ended the Great Game between Russia and the United Kingdom. As head of state, Nicholas approved the Russian mobilization on 31 July 1914, which led to Germany declaring war on Russia on the following day. It is estimated that around 3.3 million Russians were killed in World War I. The Imperial Army's severe losses and the High Command's incompetent management of the war efforts, along with the lack of food and other supplies on the Home Front, were the leading causes of the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Following the February Revolution of 1917 Nicholas abdicated on behalf of himself and his son, and he and his family were imprisoned. In the spring of 1918, Nicholas was handed over to the local Ural Soviet; with the approval of Lenin, Nicholas and his family were eventually executed by the Bolsheviks on the night of 16–17 July 1918. The recovered remains of the Imperial Family were finally re-interred in St. Petersburg in 1998. In 1981, Nicholas, his wife and their children were canonized as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, located in New York City. On 15 August 2000 Nicholas and his family were canonized as passion bearers, a title commemorating believers who face death in a Christ-like manner, by the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia. Condition: good / fair.

Keywords: Russia, Royalty, Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, Tsar Alexander III, Gregory Rasputin, Hemophilia, Vladimir Lenin, Russian Revolution, Romanov, Benckendorff, Ekaterinburg, Alexander Kerensky, Paleologue, Stolypin, Tsarskoe Selo

[Book #72415]

Price: $50.00

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