Here are 100 books that Rasputin's Killer and his Romanov Princess fans have personally recommended if you like
Rasputin's Killer and his Romanov Princess.
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My hometown of Saint Petersburg, Russia, is the stage on which the most important events of Russian history played out: I grew up visiting the palaces where the Romanovs once lived, taking ballroom dance classes in the very same dance room where Felix Yusupov once did, and walking right past the courtyard where Rasputin was killed. After I left Russia, I continued to read, study, and eventually teach Russian history. I’m also a huge fan of murder mysteries, so the assassination of Rasputin – the whodunit of the 20th century and, as it turned out, a perfect murder – captured my imagination and became my lifelong passion.
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.
The riveting and harrowing story of the Russian nobility caught in the upheaval of the Revolution
Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Kansas City Star and Salon
Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heartbreaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. It is the story of how a centuries-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the tsar and empire, and…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
My hometown of Saint Petersburg, Russia, is the stage on which the most important events of Russian history played out: I grew up visiting the palaces where the Romanovs once lived, taking ballroom dance classes in the very same dance room where Felix Yusupov once did, and walking right past the courtyard where Rasputin was killed. After I left Russia, I continued to read, study, and eventually teach Russian history. I’m also a huge fan of murder mysteries, so the assassination of Rasputin – the whodunit of the 20th century and, as it turned out, a perfect murder – captured my imagination and became my lifelong passion.
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 –…
My hometown of Saint Petersburg, Russia, is the stage on which the most important events of Russian history played out: I grew up visiting the palaces where the Romanovs once lived, taking ballroom dance classes in the very same dance room where Felix Yusupov once did, and walking right past the courtyard where Rasputin was killed. After I left Russia, I continued to read, study, and eventually teach Russian history. I’m also a huge fan of murder mysteries, so the assassination of Rasputin – the whodunit of the 20th century and, as it turned out, a perfect murder – captured my imagination and became my lifelong passion.
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!
The murder of Rasputin on the night of 16-17 December 1916 has always seemed extraordinary: first he was poisoned, then shot and finally drowned in a frozen river by Russian aristocrats fearful of his influence on Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. Or was he? Dramatic new evidence from previously unpublished documents, diaries, forensic reports and intelligence records now means the plot takes a remarkable twist.
Grigori Rasputin is probably one of the best-known but least understood figures in the events that ultimately led to the downfall of the Russian tsars. His political role as the power behind the throne…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
My hometown of Saint Petersburg, Russia, is the stage on which the most important events of Russian history played out: I grew up visiting the palaces where the Romanovs once lived, taking ballroom dance classes in the very same dance room where Felix Yusupov once did, and walking right past the courtyard where Rasputin was killed. After I left Russia, I continued to read, study, and eventually teach Russian history. I’m also a huge fan of murder mysteries, so the assassination of Rasputin – the whodunit of the 20th century and, as it turned out, a perfect murder – captured my imagination and became my lifelong passion.
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!
A saga of love and lust, personal tensions and rivalries, antagonisms and hatreds, The Flight of the Romanovs describes the last century of the Russian imperial dynasty-a century that saw the greatest social and political upheavals in all of recorded history. Drawing upon a wealth of untapped resources from Russian, British, and American archives, including unpublished diaries of many of the principal characters and never-before-published photographs, Perry and Pleshakov render an indelible portrait of a family and their time, from the youth of Alexander III in the 1860s to the death, one hundred years later, of his daughter Olga Alexandrovna,…
One of the great job benefits of being a newspaper reporter is the wide array of interesting people I get to meet. Not only getto meet but in fact, get paid to meet and to tell their stories. Some of them are famous, and that’s fine. Much more interesting, I think, are the ordinary folk nobody knows who are doing something extraordinary. And then there is a third category that I find most interesting of all: The people who have something to hide. They are mysteries who don’t want to be cracked, and I find them irresistible.
It was on my favorite TV show as a kid, In Search of… starring Leonard Nimoy, that I first heard of Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The tsar was murdered with his entire family in 1918 – or so it was thought. So who was this old woman living in Virginia claiming to be Anastasia? Decades later, I saw the headlines reporting that DNA tests proved Anderson was an imposter, but I never knew one percent of the story before diving into The Resurrection of the Romanovs. Reading along while a mystery from my childhood was so painstakingly solved was great fun. If only now they could find the Loch Ness Monster.
The truth of the enduring mystery of Anastasia's fate-and the life of her most convincing impostor The passage of more than ninety years and the publication of hundreds of books in dozens of languages has not extinguished an enduring interest in the mysteries surrounding the 1918 execution of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family. The Resurrection of the Romanovs draws on a wealth of new information from previously unpublished materials and unexplored sources to probe the most enduring Romanov mystery of all: the fate of the Tsar's youngest daughter, Anastasia, whose remains were not buried with those…
I can’t explain the fascination with Rasputin, but one hears the name so frequently via the Boney M pop song, so I took that as the inspiration - and the title - of my book. I saw a book about him in Waterstones one day and had to pick it up, even though it was so big it might’ve doubled as a doorstop. But from then I was hooked; I read everything I could, watched more, and researched until I actually went to Russia. And then I research some more!
This one read more like a novel than a historical work, which I what I went for - partially - when writing my own work on the subject.
Also, it’s one of the few books sympathetic to Alexandra and doesn’t descend to calling her ‘neurotic’, ‘hysterical’, or any other such slurs designed to denigrate women.
Taking advantage of material unavailable until the fall of the Soviet Union, this biography of Alexandra, the last tsarina, explores: her childhood bereavement; her long struggle to attain her romantic goal of marriage to Nicholas; the anguish of her pathological shyness; the struggles with her in-laws; a false pregnancy; her increasing eccentricities as she became more preoccupied with matters of faith; and her growing dependence on a series of occult mentors, the most notorious of whom was Rasputin.
Disappointed with life and his faltering relationship, forty-nine-year-old Stan is charmed when he meets a younger man named Asher—in his dreams. Asher grants Stan an irresistible gift: the chance to be five years younger every time they meet. As their connection deepens, Stan knows he can’t live in Asher’s dreamworld,…
I’ve always loved satire. In college, I wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of a two-man team, and most of my work features at least some comic elements. For example, my novel The Whale: A Love Story is a serious historical novel about the relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne that also offers moments of comedy to honor Melville's comic spirit (Moby-Dick, while ultimately tragic, is a very funny book). The most serious subjects usually contain elements of the absurd, and the books I love find humor in even the gravest situations.
Set in Moscow on the eve of the Russian Revolution, this novel’s plot does not scream “funny,” but it’s one of the most deeply funny books I’ve ever read.
An English printer living in Russia wakes up one day to find that his wife has left him and taken their children away, and revolutionaries have broken into his shop to print manifestoes.
From this unlikely setup, Fitzgerald spins a hilarious tale of loss, love, and redemption.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks .
Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank’s wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation.
How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican…
Sören Urbansky was born and raised in East Germany next to the Iron Curtain. Since embarking on an overland journey from Berlin to Beijing after high school, he became hooked by peoples’ lifeways in Northeast Asia. In college, Sören began studying history in earnest and grew intrigued by Russia and China, the world’s largest and most populous countries. He has published widely on this pivotal yet forgotten region. Sören is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington and is currently embarking on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments from a global perspective.
Published in 1999, David Wolff’s To the Harbin Station was a pioneering work that paved the path for many historical studies that followed, and which remains an unparalleled analysis of Russia’s only colony and its imperial expansion into China in the two decades leading up to the 1917 revolution. The monograph is more than an urban history of Harbin. It is the history of a region, a railroad, and the nature of late tsarist imperialism.
In 1898, near the projected intersection of the Chinese Eastern Railroad (the last leg of the Trans-Siberian) and China's Sungari River, Russian engineers founded the city of Harbin. Between the survey of the site and the profound dislocations of the 1917 revolution, Harbin grew into a bustling multiethnic urban center with over 100,000 inhabitants. In this area of great natural wealth, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American ambitions competed and converged, and sometimes precipitated vicious hostilities.
Drawing on the archives, both central and local, of seven countries, this history of Harbin presents multiple perspectives on Imperial Russia's only colony.…
Julia P. Gelardi has obtained a Master’s degree in History and spent many years immersed in the world of European royal history. The author of numerous articles and seven books on European royalty, three of which have been published by St. Martin’s Press, Julia has done extensive research in various archives, including the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. She continues to search the world for elusive books on royalty to add to her library and is always on the lookout for new topics to write about and share with her readers.
A skillfully written account and engaging portrait of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna (1882-1960), younger sister of Tsar Nicholas II. Olga Alexandrovna’s life was no less dramatic than that of her brother, Nicholas II. Daughter, granddaughter, and sister to Russian emperors, Olga – a woman devoid of vanity and imbued with a strong faith – lived a life that could never be replicated. Immersed in the splendors of the Russian court, Olga also suffered through the Russian Revolution, and ultimately left Russia for a life of exile in Denmark and Canada. The Last Grand Duchess is Olga’s memoirs as told to Ian Vorres whose deft presentation of her story is to be applauded. Published in 1965, The Last Grand Duchess not only delves into Olga’s life but that of her family and other historical figures and brings a unique insight into the last Romanovs and Tsar Nicholas II in particular.
When she died in exile in 1960, Olga Alexandrovna was the last Grand Duchess of Russia, the favorite sister of Czar Nicholas II who was executed with his wife and five children during the Revolution. Born in splendor difficult to imagine today, she endured a lifetime of relentless tragedy with courage and exceptional powers of adjustment.
The Last Grand Duchess is a valuable account of the final decades of the house of Romanov as seen through the eyes of its last surviving member. Through Olga, we meet Queen Victoria, George V of England, Rasputin, Mrs. Anderson - on whose story…
The Parent's Guide to Birdnesting
by
Dr. Ann Gold Buscho,
Based on research about how divorce can affect children, you will learn how to best support your children's resilience, as well as your own. For parents who are separating and want to put their children first, birdnesting could be the interim or long-term shared parenting solution you’ve been looking for.…
After a relatively short career in research science, Helen Azar switched gears and returned to graduate school to fulfill a dream of becoming a reference librarian. She worked at the Free Library of Philadelphia for ten years, during which time she became a published author. While researching for her first book, The Diary of Olga Romanov, Helen visited Russia several times, and worked in the Rare Book Fund at the Museum at Tsarskoe Selo, which holds the imperial book collection. Today, Helen lives on the beautiful far south coast of New South Wales, Australia; she continues writing about Russia's last imperial family and leads Romanov history tours. She also administers The Romanov Family website and is the content creator for a YouTube channel In the Steps of the Romanovs.
Very well researched and well written, the author weaves historical facts into the story with elegant ease, which makes it not only fun to read but also informative. There was even a point when I had to double-check to make sure this was really a work of fiction and not a real memoir by Victoria Battenberg. You really get to know her in this book, and realize that she was not just one of the more obscure of Queen Victoria's granddaughters, but an interesting character in her own right, who was a witness to the crucial historical events of the late 19th and early 20th century.
The Royal Mob is the story of the four beautiful Princesses of the House of Hesse, granddaughters of Queen Victoria, who come of age during the zenith of European Royalty. Each makes a brilliant marriage that will bring her both happiness and heartbreak. The eldest, Princess Victoria, marries the handsome Prince Louis of Battenberg, the former lover of Lillie Langtry. The next, the exquisite Elisabeth, is swept off to the unbelievable splendor of the Romanov court by Grand Duke Serge, while Irène dazzles Prince Henry of Prussia and takes her place at the court in Berlin. Alix, the youngest, marries…
