Rating: 
Summary: Thoroughly even-handed
Review: "Russia should let the evil Tsar go free. To kill him would be a big mistake," wrote journalist and critic Aylmer Maude presciently in 1917. "It would turn a discredited autocrat into a hero and martyr.""Fate of the Romanovs" is all about how that process came to pass. Thus it starts by outlining the life and reign of Nicholas II, notorious in his own age for his anti-semitism and personal resistance to democratic government. The authors also take an unblinkered look at his family life, famously close and loving, but also stifling and lonely for the children.
They achieve this by a careful critical reading of the family's own documentary evidence and first-hand accounts by people who knew them. In prison, thrown upon one anothers' close and constant company for the first time, the family began to experience exactly the problems any normal family with adolescent children runs into. King and Wilson demonstrate
that many of the people guarding the family were normal adolescents too, and not the brutal torturers of monarchist legend. Many were not even Bolsheviks, but those who were Bolsheviks became so because they hated the oppressive Tsarist regime and believed in a better world to come. Indeed,
one of the biggest surprises of the book is the humanity it reclaims for Yakov Yurovsky, notorious leader of the murder squad, who (unlike Nicholas II) was apparently haunted for the rest of his life by the appalling crimes he committed in the name of Russia's future. The account of the murder
itself is almost unbearably moving in its description of the deaths of the family's loyal doctor, the Romanov children, and particularly the Empress's terrified maid. It brings to life as no other account I have read - including ones written by authors with far more obvious sympathy for the monarchist cause - the appalling, drawn-out, blood-drenched horror of the
event for all involved. King and Wilson then update the story of the investigation of the murders, the discovery of the grave, the identification of the bodies and finally the chaotic funeral, each and every event being fraught with political considerations. Contrary to some reviewers curious assertions, they do not allege that anyone escaped the massacre, but simply demonstrate how fear of such
an escape might have been a factor in the minds of those identifying the bodies in the grave when it was realised that two were missing. They confess and examine the multiple problems involved in the anthropological and DNA analysis of the remains, while making it quite clear that they believe the bones to be those of the Romanov family. In that respect as in
many others, this book stands levels above many other recent offerings on the murder, which have used selective presentation of problematic evidence to support a specific agenda. Material from many such recent works is necessarily re-examined in order to demonstrate where the authors think they go wrong. However, I have no idea why one reviewer makes a reference to Kurth and Lovell since this book isn't about claimants, updates the story
considerably from when such books were written, and includes an enormous amount of new primary information about the family's imprisonment too. This book is by far the fullest account of the last days and murder of Nicholas II's family yet written. It is both a history and a historiography, written with a fluency of style that keeps it moving along but in no way detracts from the vast array of evidence both known and new which the authors have assembled in support of each of their assertions. "Fate of the Romanovs" manages to evoke sympathy for the imperial family as a pathetic collection of individuals without falling into the trap of reading history backwards and seeing them all as blameless victims whose murder foreshadowed and epitomised what was to come under Communism. It is very far from being a Romanov hagiography, but it is certainly no Bolshevik apologia either. Altogether an excellent book, recommended to anyone literate.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic research
Review: "The Fate of the Romanovs" by Greg King and Penny Wilson shows that infinitely detailed research can destroy the myths surrounding the deaths of the Romanovs. The writing is superb and the format is detailed and exceptional. This book is a must read for any student of the Romanov Dynasty.
Rating:
Summary: Comments -- and a correction
Review: 1. The reader from Austin, Texas is quite wrong. We, Greg King and I, did long and careful research in several Russian archives. The footnotes and bibliography bear this out, as well as the dozens of Russians thanked in our Acknowledgements for their assistance. 2. The proof for the "claim" that Gibbes was a homosexual is, indeed, found in a footnote. The reader from the US must have overlooked it. In the epilogue, on page 507, footnote 14 leads to the note on page 616 that reads "Trewin, 141-145, and Welch for further information." Meaning that the reader from the US will find extensive discussion of Gibbes and his life and character in Frances Welch's excellent The Romanovs and Mr Gibbes. 3.A "fairy tale" never has 2600+ footnotes. 4.The review submitted by "tomandpenny" was written by reader Susan Richardson of Oxford, Mississippi, and forwarded through me as she does not have an Amazon account. I was not able to make her name and email address appear in the name area. I will be writing to amazon to correct this.
Rating: 
Summary: Rediscovering the "Last Imperial Family"
Review: after reading numerous books on Nicholas & Alexandra and the Revolution itself, i found this book a more realistic view towards the family. While it dispells many of the "Fables" surrounding the family itself it does reflect the author's feelings as it relates to the closeness of the family and the fears they faced while in captivity. I would recommend this to anyone who is an avid "fan" of early Russia.
Rating: 
Summary: Not even handed
Review: After reading The Secret Plot to Save the Tsar, I was anxiously awaiting this effort by Penny Wilson and Greg King. Unfortunately I am very disappointed. First, since I had just read The Secret Plot to Save the Tsar in which it was pointed out that the local Ekaterinburg Soviet ordered the execution of the Romanovs and not Lenin, I was surprised to see that one of the reviewers credits Wilson and King as the first to make this claim. Not true. Read and compare. Moreover, for example, the unsubstantiated statement regarding Gibbs, the Russian Orthodox priest, being a homosexual was jarring. I checked for a footnote. It does not exist. Where is the proof for this claim? This is only one example. The list is long.
I recently went on a google royalty chat room for the first time. And as I was reading the book I realized that the book is characteristic of the wild charges and unseemly language used by one of the authors - the text of which has been posted by another - on the royalty chat rooms. In fact, the tone and style of the book is akin to the tone and style of the chat room. The publisher would like to constitute this work as scholarly. But alas, some of the "new information" is not so cleverly disguised gossip passed on, in much the same way as in the chat rooms, by the authors as facts. A significant part of the book is a rehash of material (flushed out by adding some additional editorial) already presented by Mangold and Summers, Occleshaw, and McNeal among others. The "new material" seems to get lost. I had hoped to see some academic blessing of the book. However, to date not a single university professor has weighed in with a comment or a review. Now I see why. If you want to add another work regarding the "Ekaterinburg Chapter" of the Romanovs' last days perhaps you should do so - just in order to have a complete library. But if you demand a work of history that is not fraught with rumor and mean-spirited assertions about the life style and activities of people who are no longer alive to defend themselves - don't bother. Oh and don't bother to check the web site by the authors either. The over-stated sound of gun shots that never seems to end from the time you strike the enter key is beyond bad taste. What were they thinking? However, the authors must feel the shock factor will appeal to some of today's audiences. Even so, there are those of us who do read history to avoid just that advertising and marketing phenomenon. All in all, in my opinion, the same lack of judgment on the web site is also evident in The Fate of the Romanovs. I'll not post my name because I just found (after reading the royalty chat rooms for the first time) that one could be the subject of some overly emotional posters who appear to enjoy verbally assaulting each other instead of supporting intellectual honesty that fosters independent thoughts and opinions. If it is documented history you want - make another selection.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: For anyone who has read Pipes, Figes, Radzinskii, or Massie, this book will seem less than scholarly and subject to many questions. The authors claim to have discovered new "facts" surrounding the fate of the Romanovs which in many cases, seems less like documented evidence and more like speculation based on alleged statements or reconstructed "records." Readers should also be forewarned that some sort of animus or agenda seems to percolate beneath the surface of the book. This begins with the dedication page which offers a quote from Mark Twain (a man who wrote a number of notoriously idiotic things about the Russian Monarchy and led a sort of personal campaign advocating its abolition) suggesting the need to "de-mythologize" history and the past. In step with this program, the authors paint "full-blooded" portraits of an earnest, idealistic Lenin gone bad because of his brother's execution at the hands of a tyrannical Imperial government; a poor, hardworking Yakolev, a family man and conscientious patriot, caught up in a swirl of confusion; Red Army guards, salt of the earth men, trying to forge a new and better country. All of this sort of drivel is set in contrast to a bumbling, anti-Semitic Tsar, an hysterical Tsarista, and a family of sad, almost forsaken children. All of this has the "unintended" (?) effect of making the Romanovs guilty in the eyes of some sort of universal justice, absolving the good Bolsheviks that were just trying to make the world a better place. Additionally, the authors are rather selective and/or incomplete in their portrayal of events and issues. In an obvious example, in one of the later chapters the authors address the controversy surrounding the canonization of the Royal Family in a way that demonstrates both their ignorance of Orthodoxy and the situation surrounding the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) and the Moscow Patriarchate (MP). First, they do not offer any kind of real discussion explaining this split, nor do they detail important specifics surrounding it and the decision on the part of Patriarch Sergius (MP) to serve the interests of the Soviet state in its campaign to abolish and subvert the Church. ROCOR, comprised of Bishops who had been taken in by the Serbian Church in the early days of the Revolution, followed the directive of Sergius' Bolshevik-murdered predecessor, Patriarch Tikhon, who instructed them to find a safe haven and protect the Church in its integrity. As detailed in Daniel Peris' book, "Storming the Heavens," and in an interesting chapter in the book, "The Sword and the Shield," the MP was clearly and obviously controlled at different times by the NKVD, CHEKA, and KGB, used as a front for all kinds of intelligence and propaganda work, including the persecution of Christians and other religious groups. In fact, the current Patriarch, Patriarch Aleksei, whom the authors quote in criticism of the Royal Family's canonization, worked as a KGB agent with the code name "Drozdov" (see Sword and the Shield). The question arises, then, why would the authors quote Aleksei as if he is a reliable source on the canonization of the Royal Family when for the greater part of his "career" he has been paid to promote and justify "the Revolution"? Of course he is going to deny their status as martyrs! If he admits they are martyrs he admits to the illegitimacy of the Revolution, since the Tsar is the anointed of God, and he admits to the MP's guilt in not attempting to remove this moral sin and pollution. Further, the authors here do not offer any sort of brief survey of theology or Church history and tradition to place in context much that surrounds these and other debates regarding the Monarchy, the Church, and the issue of canonization. They seem to be completely ignorant of Russia's Byzantine heritage and, as a result, seem mystified by "all them weird actin' Russkies." And, in regard to the issue of whether or not Lenin ordered the murder, to say there is no direct evidence seems about as reasonable as suggesting that there is no evidence for Hitler's ordering the burning of the Reichstag. In the end, does it really absolve those involved?
Rating:
Summary: The hand that restrained
Review: For those familiar with the controversies surrounding the remains of the Romanovs, this book provides interesting details about the grave, whether it was disturbed at various times (for the burying of a cable), and to what extent any of this might raise questions about KGB involvement and the use of the Romanovs for propaganda purposes. If you have read Massie's book on the forensics, portions of this book extend that discussion and raise interesting questions. One drawback, however, is the history surrounding their murder and the suggestion that Bolshevik terror in the early days of the coup were actually the result of a lack of control. The suggestion is that their murder was more the result of chaos and a lack of discipline and order rather than a conscious decision on the part of Lenin to kill them. This claim, given what many other historians have presented, seems simply false. With the murder of the Czar, a murderous political movement was unleashed that claimed the lives of over a hundred million people from Russia and China to Cuba and Latin America. To dismiss the Romanovs and their fate as the necessary and just end to some sort of grand historical grievance and outrage is not only historically uninformed but simply ignorant and rather boorish at best.
Rating:
Summary: A voluminous tome and well-researched book
Review: Having completed King and Wilson's aformentioned historical analysis of the fate of the Romanovs, it is without a doubt a must-read for anyone interested in the collapse of the Russian Empire and what brought about that fall. This account is largely unbiased, multifocused on personal, historical, and emotional factors that shaped the downfall of the Romanov Empire, and provide the reader with a plethora of information that shapes the context of time in which the events occur. Although a bit treacly at points, the book is vastly entertaining and does not require its reader to slog through the pages. For lovers of history, this is an excellent read for setting background on the political structure of late 19th and early 20th century Europe and the dynamics that brought about 2 World Wars. Indeed, a thoroughly researched account and well written!
Rating:
Summary: Solid research, and a good read
Review: I am admittedly a Romanov fan, one of those the authors of this book would describe as people who, under the spell of faded photographs of four beautiful girls in white dresses and a handsome boy in sailorsuits, romanticize an era and sanctify a family. I have noticed quite a few reviewers wanting to stone these revisionist historians for sacrilege, but I would not. Differing points of view never hurt anybody. I really appreciated their well documented research (there are about a zillion footnotes) and candid observations. I do agree with them that most people are neither black nor white, but somewhere in the middle (though I still believe some communists to be the bloodiest butchers this century produced, as testified by the millions tortured and murdered by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other assorted red despots and their cohorts ). We Romanov devotees ARE guilty of deliberately seeing Nicholas only as the devoted husband and father, and ignoring the fact that he was also an inept ruler who did next to nothing to alleviate the suffering of his millions of poverty stricken subjects. Reading the original material critically (including letters written by the family itself) would reveal Alexandra as a loving wife and mother, but also possesive and paranoid. I enjoyed reading about the children's personalities, I think the authors' is one of the most balanced and realistic analyses I ever read, showing them to be more human than most would allow them to be. And I was relieved to read that the guards were not the drunken beasts of monarchist lore, but average young men, guys with whom the girls openly flirted (though this did nothing to relieve any of the horror I felt reading all the gory details of the executions). I would also have to disagree with the reviewer that claims the authors are trying to revive the Anastasia controversy. What they are trying to say is that evidence from the bodies show that it is Maria that was found, and not Anastasia. And that thus far (despite numerous searches in the Ekaterineburg forrest) her and Alexei's bodies have not been found. All in all, a huge book, tedious at times, and though I don't always agree with the authors' assumptions and conclusions (the revised Yurovsky was an especially hard pill to swallow), I still think it's good reading for those interested in the subject (or in a good mystery), and a must have for us, zealots who can keep an open mind.
Rating:
Summary: one of the better recent Romanov books
Review: I found it to be well researched and a good read. It has a wealth of information both old and new. It's a compelling historical drama that I can easily recomend to anyone interested in the Romanovs and this area of history. I don't quite understand why some who admit they haven't even read the book are writing reviews to pan it.
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