My thanks and love go to my wife, Adele Biagi, who read the complete draft of the book. The last of the Russian tsars is a new interest for me, and Adele’s comments were, as always, of inestimable value. I could not have written these chapters without her help. Others who examined the draft were Semion Lyandres, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Ian Thatcher. Semion shared his expertise about the February 1917 Revolution; Sebag advised on the whole Romanov dynasty as well as on the national question in Russia; Ian provided helpful counsel on general questions about interpretation of evidence. I am indebted to them them for their willingness to take time away from their own projects.
I am also grateful to Katya Andreyev for help with Russian Orthodox Church nomenclature; to Richard Clogg for advice about the origins of Russian studies of Byzantine history; to Paul Gregory for tips on books to read on Siberian history; to Lena Katz for explaining the linguistic history of Jews in Russia; to Norman Naimark for clarifying aspects of Jewish history in the revolutionary period; to Robert Sells for his help at an early stage of the research with Romanov medical questions; to Nick Walshaw for sharing his family newspaper clippings on British naval action in the Black Sea; and to Andrei Zorin for our discussions of Russian imperial law and traditions about abdication and succession. Linda Bernard, Lyalya Kharitonova, Carol Leadenham, Anatole Shmelev and Lora Soroka at the Hoover Institution Archives assisted unstintingly whenever I had queries; I should also like to thank the Hoover Institution Library’s Maria Quinonez and Terry Gammon for their efficient delivery of rare books and microfilms, and at the Russian Library at St Antony’s College, Richard Ramage has cheerfully ferreted out missing data for me. My literary agent, David Godwin, has been an inexhaustible source of encouragement throughout the project; Macmillan editor Georgina Morley actively enhanced the final draft.
The Hoover Institution under directors John Raisian and Tom Gilligan, and its head of archives, Eric Wakin, have consistently supported the research, and I deeply appreciate the sponsorship of the Sarah Scaife Foundation. My thanks are also due to Andrew Romanoff, grandson of Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, for permitting access to his family’s papers in the Hoover Institution Archives.
In the interests of readability I have referred to Nikolai II as Nicholas and used the conventional way of rendering names for other well-known individuals such as Kerensky (rather than Kerenski). Otherwise an amended version of the Union of Congress transliteration pattern is applied. Until January 1918, Russians used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian one. In order to avoid misunderstanding I have changed all dates, where necessary, to the Gregorian calendar. The exceptions to this are in the endnotes where if someone continued to use the Julian system in his or her diary even after the change, I have left the reference intact and added the abbreviation OS (for Old Style) – Nicholas in particular was a traditionalist who disliked any change to the way that time was recorded. All translations from the Russian are my own. I have also included maps of rail networks which, as we shall discover, are useful tools to understand events in the February 1917 Revolution as well to explain why Commissar Yakovlev took Nicholas and his family on such a strange itinerary in April 1918 before reaching Ekaterinburg.
The final draft of this book was written at a time when our family experienced an energetic burst of expansion; it is dedicated to grandchildren Lara, Dylan, Joely and Keira.
Robert Service
September 2016