This is a vivid and compelling account of the final thirteen days of the Romanovs, counting down to the last, tense hours of their lives. On 4 July 1918, a new commandant took control of a closely guarded house in the Russian town of Ekaterinburg. His name was Yakov Yurovsky, and his prisoners were the Imperial family: the former Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexey. Thirteen days later, at Yurovsky's command, and on direct orders from Moscow, the family was gunned down in a blaze of bullets in a basement room. This is the story of those murders, which ended 300 years of Romanov rule and began an era of state-orchestrated terror and brutal repression.

Reviews

‘An effective and engaging synthesis … With skill and imagination [Rappaport] juxtaposes the escalating chaos outside with the day-to-day tedium of the prisoners … The result is an intriguing personal angle’ Sunday Times

‘Freshly compelling’ New Statesman

‘Stunning … The most detailed, authentic and gripping account of the bloody end of the Romanovs that I have ever read. Chilling and poignant, this is how history books should be written’ Alison Weir

Author Biography

Helen Rappaport's most recent book is the acclaimed No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War (Aurum). A fluent Russian speaker and specialist in Russian history and 19th-century women's history, she was the Russian consultant in 2002 to the National Theatre's Tom Stoppard trilogy, The Coast of Utopia. She is also the author of biographical reference works on Joseph Stalin, Queen Victoria and women social reformers. She and William Horwood are co-authors of Dark Hearts of Chicago (Hutchinson, 2007), a thriller about journalist Emily Strauss of the New York World.