The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport
Review of The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport
“In Ekaterinburg, as in many other Russian cities, the sharp and unavoidable disparity between Bolshevik rhetoric and Bolshevik practice was now becoming only too painfully clear.”
The Last Days of the Romanovs: The Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (2009). Published by St. Martin’s Press.
I picked this book up after reading Rappaport’s other book about the Romanov daughters, The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra.
I’m really glad I read that one before this one, because it really added to the emotional gravity of their last days since I understand the sisters and the relationship to each other and their mother a lot more.
If I had read this one cold, I wouldn’t have felt as emotional about their fate than I did when I read the other book first.
This was a really painful read, especially if you’re probably reading this, you know how it’s going to end. Rappaport uses a compilation of firsthand and secondhand accounts to weave what was both going on in the house that the Romanovs would eventually die in, as well as the external support and efforts to try and get them out of there.
Often, when we talk about the Romanovs and their demise, we don’t have the play-by-play what the planning, what was going on, how they were potentially in denial when they were led into that basement. We don’t get the gory details about brain matter and whatnot.
That’s what we’re given in this book. The horrifying details, the truth about what happened here. It’s really difficult, but it was a necessary read to understand the situation.
Content
This book is a slow burn; each chapter is a day leading up to the murder of the family and their remaining servants. We also focus on each one of the victims in each chapter, humanizing the people who were lost in this attack—most innocent, the victims of being born into this family at the wrong time. That’s the real tragedy of the murder of the Romanovs: the children should not have probably been murdered, which is why the Bolsheviks covered it up.
No one would want children to be murdered, and we begin to see that in the description of the guards at the house and those murdering them. It is said that the original guards were compelled and enjoyed the kids, creating relationships with them, which led to different Ural Bolsheviks to be instated, ones who would not talk to the kids.
But even as they prepared their guns and bayonets for the final execution, there was hesitancy. None of them really wanted to kill the kids, just the Tsar and his wife.
The writing in this story is told in a matter-of-fact narrative style, which makes it more digestable. If you’re not an academic or scholar, the language that this would’ve been written in would’ve been too difficult, too grand, to make it seem like something you could read in a couple of sittings unless you had to. This, however, I read in one sitting because the language was clear and blunt, which I enjoyed very much. I don’t tend to like stories that have too much fluff embedded into them.
There’s an excellent build-up to the great event. If we were to just focus on the everyday life of the family in captivity, it wouldn’t show us the global gravity of what was going on in Russia.
By cutting into how the story was framed in the UK, Europe, and the United States, it shows the uncertainty of what was actually going on in Russia. People didn’t know what was happening and underestimated it. They thought that the Imperial Family would be fine, but they wouldn’t be. There’s also some really interesting details that I had no idea about—like the Tsar and his wife doing cocaine and other drugs, which were considered a standard at the time.
We also cut to the Bolshevik side of things, which gives critical context on how decisions were made. Lenin would’ve never given the direct decision, so it isn’t clear if he made the final decision, but we do know about Ekaterinburg as a Soviet city. By dripping us into the mindset of local Bolsheviks, as well as seeing the kindness of the local nuns, we begin to piece together the entire story behind this murder. By separating the stories of individuals, Rappaport manages to combine them all together into one big, gory climax.
At long last, the most horrifying moment of this book comes at the execution of the family. Rappaport spares no little details—she tells you everything.
How the Tsar’s chest was ripped open with bullets, how his blood sprayed across his sitting son’s face. The screaming. How Tatiana and Olga held each other, then Olga had to watch her sister be shot in the head and then be covered in her blood for her final moments. Of the maid, who fainted, awoke to everyone dead, and fought with her bare hands a pillow.
And having read this book and the book about the sisters, it’s fitting that they died as a family. They were so close-knit as a group and religious enough that it seemed impossible to see any of them separated in the Russian Civil War. My grand wish would’ve been to see these girls grow up and live—and Alexei, although fate would not be in his favor—even if it meant them being stripped completely of their wealth and royal titles.
But if only they were able to die instantly, not having to watch each one fall. Poor Alexei, the one who they thought would die first, was the last of the family. To have watched everyone around you slowly be murdered—that’s horrible. And that’s why the Bolsheviks wanted to cover this up. Because it was so horrifying and brutal that no one could support this unless they, too, were cruel and barbaric.
However, if you read only this book, then you’re not going to get a holistic approach. It was the other book in which Rappaport discuses Alexandra, who is too sick and weak in this book to do anything in her last days, as too-involved in Nicholas’ decisions in a bad way. This book is merely about their end.
We do discuss the pros and cons of Lenin and Nicholas, but we also can’t think that this wasn’t coming for the Tsar and his wife. It was coming.
He was openly anti-Jewish, made a series of poor decisions in which innocent civilians were killed, and basically was an incompetent ruler. Alexandra only made the situation worse, as she wasn’t like from Russia since the very beginning. Yes, he was a family man, but he was an incompetent ruler.
And when you have people as brutal as the Bolsheviks coming in, it seems almost obvious about what’s going to happen. It’s just a shame that they caused even more murder and despair in the coming years.
Nicholas was never fit to be a Tsar; he should’ve just been a family man, what he was clearly good at. Rappaport does an excellent job of humanizing the family to the point in which where you get to their murder, you want to vomit because you care for them.
Overall Thoughts
This is an important book to read if you into early Soviet and Romanov history.
As someone who has read about the Romanovs superficially for over a decade, I’d never gone into such detail about their lives as I have while reading Rappaport’s books. And I’m glad it was a woman who wrote about these topics, because the gentleness and care that she put into the stories of this family has been the compassionate touch of a woman writer and historian. S
he doesn’t gloss over at how inefficient Nicholas was as a Tsar, but she also doesn’t justify why he needed to be murdered. It was inevitable with the Civil War that the family was to be killed, there was no end in sight that was good, but we tend to forget about them as people. That they were a family who all they had was each other.
