Nicholas and Alexandra - Robert K. Massie
Nicholas & Alexandra - Robert K. Massie
Non-Fiction
Pages: 616
This is one of those books that I have been meaning to read for what feels like forever, and now I finally have I wish I'd read it earlier. Massie is one of those authors who makes history not feel like history - he really brings it to life and makes it feel real and immediate. Reading this book, I really felt like I was reading about people, real flesh and blood people with thoughts and feelings and dreams. Too often history reduces people to 'historical figures', cyphers for the great events surrounding them.
And I liked these people, especially Nicholas. He definitely seems like one of those figures from history for whom inheriting a crown was possibly the worst thing for him. He reminds me of King Stephen in a lot of ways - he lost so much when he won the crown. Nicholas comes across as such a good kind man - a loving husband, a wonderful father, a man who truly and deeply loved hisw country and wanted the best for her. But he was not a good Tsar, he was not a good leader. I found myself reading this book with increasing dread, knowing what was coming and wanting it to be different, for his sake.
What I found most fascinating about this book is how history can come down to the smallest of things. 'For the want of a nail', and all that. That one small boy's suffering and misfortune could shape the fate of the world... With Alexis' haemophilia there would have been no Rasputin; without his influence Alexandra would not have interfered in government so much; there would have been more stability, and the hatred that deflected from her to the rest of the family wouldn't have been so vicious and corrosive; had Nicholas not felt he needed to fight for his son's inheritance because his son was too weak to do it himself, Russia might have drifted naturally from autocracy to the kind of constitutional monarchy that England had. Had the monarchy not fallen there would have been no Revolution, no Bolsheviks, no Lenin and Stalin, no Soviet Union - and who knows what the world would have been then?
Non-Fiction
Pages: 616
This is one of those books that I have been meaning to read for what feels like forever, and now I finally have I wish I'd read it earlier. Massie is one of those authors who makes history not feel like history - he really brings it to life and makes it feel real and immediate. Reading this book, I really felt like I was reading about people, real flesh and blood people with thoughts and feelings and dreams. Too often history reduces people to 'historical figures', cyphers for the great events surrounding them.
And I liked these people, especially Nicholas. He definitely seems like one of those figures from history for whom inheriting a crown was possibly the worst thing for him. He reminds me of King Stephen in a lot of ways - he lost so much when he won the crown. Nicholas comes across as such a good kind man - a loving husband, a wonderful father, a man who truly and deeply loved hisw country and wanted the best for her. But he was not a good Tsar, he was not a good leader. I found myself reading this book with increasing dread, knowing what was coming and wanting it to be different, for his sake.
What I found most fascinating about this book is how history can come down to the smallest of things. 'For the want of a nail', and all that. That one small boy's suffering and misfortune could shape the fate of the world... With Alexis' haemophilia there would have been no Rasputin; without his influence Alexandra would not have interfered in government so much; there would have been more stability, and the hatred that deflected from her to the rest of the family wouldn't have been so vicious and corrosive; had Nicholas not felt he needed to fight for his son's inheritance because his son was too weak to do it himself, Russia might have drifted naturally from autocracy to the kind of constitutional monarchy that England had. Had the monarchy not fallen there would have been no Revolution, no Bolsheviks, no Lenin and Stalin, no Soviet Union - and who knows what the world would have been then?