Asya Pereltsvaig's favorite books about the Romanovs, Rasputin and the Russian Revolution

I love reading published correspondence: it takes me back to the times when people wrote long, personal missives instead of short Facebook comments, and you can really learn about a person through their letters.

I couldn’t put down this book because it put me face to face with the last Russian royals, Nicholas and Alexandra, and more than any other, it made me realize that they were not just historical figures but first and foremost ordinary people: husband and wife, parents to five children, relatives and friends to others.

Their personal thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears – especially for their fatally ill son Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia – affected the course of Russian history and their own fates. And with so many rumors about a possible affair between Alexandra and Rasputin, I was curious to read the letters that Nicholas and Alexandra exchanged: tender, passionate, at times erotic – even after 20 years of marriage. 

I read lots of research on Rasputin’s life and death, but this book, unlike others, grabbed my attention like a murder mystery, not a tedious historical treatise.

Although the book goes into a lot of historical detail, including the author’s interviews with descendants of some of the characters in the story, it is never dull or dry.

I was particularly inspired by the way Cook critically analyzes both first-hand accounts of, and later writings about, Rasputin’s assassination, and especially his humor: his 127-word description of how Felix Yusupov must have run on and on through the massive and magnificent Moika Palace (to commit the murder as he claimed he did!) just CRACKED ME UP! 

This is another historical couple whose love story and family dynamics I found worth learning from: she was not merely a rich and beautiful princess but proved to be a very wise woman who turned the flamboyant playboy Felix Yusupov into a model husband and father.

After surviving with the pair of them through his tumultuous youth and her difficult childbirth, the murder of Rasputin, revolution, escape from Russia, and more, I didn’t want to say goodbye to the characters in this amazing saga. 

I love contemplating what happens to the characters of a book or a film AFTER it ends, and this book took me right past the usual culmination in the story of the Romanovs: the Russian Revolution and the murder of the Tsar and his family by the Bolsheviks.

I found the story of the Romanovs surviving in immigration very poignant: as an immigrant myself, I could relate to their nostalgia for the motherland that no longer existed, their troubles and the dynamics in their immigrant families.

The story of the Tsar’s mother, Minnie, leaving Crimea on board a British gunship, surrounded by the remains of her family, and the last loyal officers on another ship singing to her just made me bawl!

This is another “aftermath of the Russian Revolution” book that I was deeply moved by.

While reading about the aristocrats who decided to leave Russia, I felt totally on the same page with them when it came to missing my family and friends left behind and the little things about the place I grew up in. But even more so, I was stirred by the chapters about those of their family members who decided to stay in Russia – and most of them did not end well, courtesy of the Bolsheviks. I kept screaming into the pages: “Leave, leave while you can!”

This book reconnected me to a chapter in history that is often obliterated – and the people who had been made “former," non-existent, both physically and in historical memory.