Like many of you, I am fascinated by the story of the fall of the Russian dynasty. I read everything I can find, from coffee-table books to serious scholarship, and have found no other book that so clearly explains the many threads of politics, world events, and family dramas that surrounded and contributed to the demise of the Romanovs. This narrative is clear and explanatory, and the information about the entire Romanov family was enlightening. After years of listening to me go on an on about the latest "Romanov book" I was reading, my historian father also picked up "The Flight of the Romanovs" and became hooked. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this topic.

I am a relative newcomer concerning the history of the Romanov family, but this has changed now. This book is just incredibly fascinating, there are so many facts as well as samll anecdotes that it is just pure delight to read this well written and extremely well researched book. The book demonstrates the lavish lifestyle of the last Romanovs, describes all the relationships between the European royal families in the late 19th and early 20th century, and goes into every single detail of the relationships within the Romanov family. The second half of the book describes the hardships hte Romanovs had to endure under the Bolshevik regime and how all their lives changed so drastically after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the Bolsheviks came to power.

The only slightly negative thing which came to my mind while reading this book was the vast number of names in some parts of the book. It sometimes hapens that there are eight different names in one sentence, referring to three different generations from three different parts of the Romanov family.

But this still does not cloud the impression from reading this extremely informative book which is absolutely readable for non-historians who are just interested in this topic.

While most people consider the story of the Romanov's ended in the basement of the Ipateiv house on July 17, 1918, this wonderful description of the flight and plight of other members of the Romanov family held my attention continously. Unfortantely, because of my lack of familiarity of the uncles, aunts, cousins, children, grandparents, etc., etc., I kept returning to the concise family tree. The authors show a wide variety of activities of these relatives before and after the revolution and convey how some were "hanger-ons" and lived the life of royalty, while others kept the dream alive of returning to a czarist Russia. But all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed learning of the after affects of being driven out of Russia.