Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Empress Alexandra, their four daughters, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and their son, Grand Duke Alexei are one of the best documented ruling families in history. Historian Andrei Maylunas listed the multitude of source material concerning Russia’s last Imperial family in the introduction to A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story. The Imperial couple and their children all kept diaries and engaged in extensive correspondence. They were photography enthusiasts who took more than 150,000 photographs of each other for their family albums. They appear in thirty hours of film footage showing both state occasions and family holidays.

As Russia’s ruling family, their movements were recorded by their security detail and their public appearances were covered by domestic and foreign journalists. After the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the murder of Nicholas, Alexandra and their children in 1918, surviving relatives, courtiers and members of their household wrote memoirs in exile detailing their impressions of the Romanovs. In the 1990s, the excavation of the family’s mass grave outside the Ural mining town of Yekaterinburg provided yet more information about their lives and deaths.

Despite this wealth of source material, ECS Banks’ work, Road to Ekaterinburg: Nicholas and Alexandra’s Daughters 1913 – 1918 is the first book devoted to the daily lives of the four Grand Duchesses. In the numerous books about their parents, they are often reduced to broad stereotypes encapsulated by a remark once made by their Aunt Elisabeth, “It is Olga the Clever, Tatiana the Fair, Marie the Good, and Anastasia the Terror (reprinted in ed. Arturo Beeche, The Grand Duchesses: Daughters & Granddaughters of Russia’s Tsars, p. 159). The youth of the four Grand Duchesses at the time of their deaths (they were in their late teens and early twenties) also encourages portrayals of them as “children” who obeyed their parents without question and rarely expressed opinions of their own.

In contrast, Banks’s research reveals the growing independence of the Grand Duchesses between 1913 and 1918. While Nicholas and Alexandra wanted their daughters to have happy marriages like their own, they also expected them to marry royalty, as the Fundamental Laws governing the Imperial Family of Russia dictated. All four of their daughters, however, volunteered in hospitals during the First World War and developed attachments to ordinary Russian officers.

Eligible Princes and Grand Dukes seemed to make little impression on Nicholas II’s daughters. Olga appears to have barely noticed her first royal admirer, Prince Christopher of Greece and actively disliked the future King Carol II of Roumania. Nicholas II’s young cousin Grand Duke Dmitri was treated as an older brother by the Grand Duchesses and the awkward gestures of Grand Duke Konstantin’s younger sons did little to encourage the young women to see them as potential husbands. (For example, Olga wondered aloud what to do with the stag’s head that the young Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich sent her as a gift after one of his hunting trips). Instead of arranging illustrious marriages for Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, Nicholas II found himself arranging marriages and military transfers for various ordinary Russian officers to end their friendships with his daughters, hoping that the next Prince might make a more favourable impression.

Banks structures her book as a day by day account of the lives of the Grand Duchesses. This approach has both strengths and weaknesses. It reveals just how much their lives changed with the advent of the First World War as summer holidays in the Crimea were replaced by full time work in military hospitals, then changed again when the family was placed under house arrest  in 1917. Describing the daily lives of the Grand Duchesses also provides a kind of social history of Nicholas II’s family and household, detailing the fashions, food and reading material of the Imperial residences.

Unfortunately, Banks’ structure also results in a lot of repetition. She states on numerous occasions that Alexandra did not like her daughters to have idle hands and that Olga was a mediocre tennis player because embroidery and tennis were quotidian activities for the Grand Duchesses. The book would also be improved by including more full dates, particularly in the pre-revolutionary chapters. Too many paragraphs in the early chapters begin with “The following day” or “On Wednesday” without including the month or day. Those who have read the extensive memoir literature and collections of documents concerning the Romanovs will recognize Banks’ sources but the absence of footnotes impedes use of the author’s extensive research by scholars.

By synthesizing the known source material about the daily lives of the Grand Duchesses and analyzing their reading material and cultural tastes, Banks uncovers the complex personalities of these young women and their emerging adult lives during the First World War and Russian Revolution in Road to Ekaterinburg: Nicholas and Alexandra’s Daughters 1913 – 1918. As Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia reached their teens and early twenties, their expectations gradually differed from those of their parents. The Romanovs remained a devoted family until the end of their lives but there is clear evidence that if they had survived the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Grand Duchesses would have made their own choices about their marriages and futures.

Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires is a biography of four princesses raised at the margins of European royal society who became consorts to the most influential monarchs who reigned during the First World War. Three of these women would lose their thrones in the conflict find themselves in straightened circumstances once more. Princess Augusta Victoria “Dona” of Schleswig-Holstein’s father, Duke Frederick VIII was exiled from his duchies after losing Prussian support for his rule, as part of Otto von Bismark’s plan for the unification of Germany. Dona’s marriage to the future Kaiser Wilhelm II was controversial as there were many who did not consider the daughter of a deposed duke to be a grand enough consort for a future German Emperor.

Princess Victoria Mary “May” of Teck had a father with morganatic ancestry and a mother who was a comparatively impoverished cousin of Queen Victoria. She spent part of her adolescence in Florence after her parents fled the creditors who gathered outside their grace and favour apartment at Kensington Palace. May’s circumstances changed dramatically when Queen Victoria decided she would make a suitable consort for her grandson Albert Victor and then his brother, the future King George V despite her morganatic ancestry and impecunious parents.

In common with the House of Schleswig-Holstein, Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt’s family found themselves on the wrong side of Bismark’s unification of Germany, and had persistent financial problems alleviated by Queen Victoria’s generosity to her motherless grandchildren. Marriage to Emperor Nicholas II of Russia catapulted the shy young Alix into the most opulent court in Europe as the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. A generation younger than Dona, May and Alix, Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma was also raised in financially straightened circumstances as the seventeenth of her father, Duke Robert’s, twenty-four children. Zita’s husband, Archduke Karl became the last Emperor of the Hapsburg Empire in 1916, at the height of the First World War.

Justin C. Vovk, an independent historian based in Hamilton, Canada has experience writing sweeping composite biographies of royalty, having previously written In Destiny’s Hands: Five Tragic Rulers, Children of Maria Theresa. His approach provides a portrait of royal society and court politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encompassing both the provincial courts and the grand centres of power. Fluent in English, German and Slovenian, Vovk draws upon published works and extensive archival material from the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria to craft compelling three dimensional portraits of Europe’s Imperial consorts during the First World War.

The greatest accomplishment of Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empiresis Vovk’s recovery of Dona and Zita from the margins of history. Dona has been criticized by both her contemporaries at the German court and subsequent historians for her perceived haughtiness, bigotry and subservience to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Vovk provides analysis of the last German Empress that incorporates both her well known character failings and her often overlooked strengths including her close involvement in the upbringing of her children and promotion of charitable causes benefiting poor women, including vocational training for underprivileged girls.

While most consorts of deposed monarchs are blamed for their husbands’ political failings, Dona remained a popular figure despite the collapse of the House of Hohenzollern and exile of the German royal family, an accomplishment that was not matched by Zita and Alix. Zita’s brief tenure as the Hapsburg Empress may appear to preclude a political role but Vovk’s archival research and interviews with her descendants reveal the full involvement of the consort and the House of Bourbon-Parma in Emperor Karl’s attempts to make a separate peace for Austria during the First World War. The collapse of these efforts directly contributed to the overthrow of the Hapsburg dynasty.

Vovk also provides fresh analysis of May’s family life, particularly the conflicting accounts of her parenting and the influence of her financially precarious childhood on her decisions regarding her household as an adult. The weakest sections of the book are those pertaining to Alix’s tenure as Empress of Russia. Vovk does not appear to have used Russian language archival sources and he is insufficiently critical of the memoir literature written about the Imperial family after the Revolution, which leads to some inaccuracies in the text.

Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires is a fascinating composite biography of four obscure princesses who married the rulers of powerful empires during a period of intense political turmoil. Their marriages and political influence shaped the course of European history during the First World War. Vovk has rescued the last German and Austrian Empresses from comparative historical obscurity and placed them in context with the last Empress of Russia and one of Britain’s most respected Queens.

When Emperor Nicholas II abdicated the Russian throne in 1917, there was no counterrevolution. The monarchy had lost the confidence of Russian society from the nobility to the peasantry and the last Tsar found himself almost entirely alone. Nicholas returned to the Alexander Palace under house arrest accompanied by a single member of his household. The response of Russia’s diverse nobility to the March Revolution ranged from optimism for the country’s future under a more representative government to grudging acceptance of the sweeping political changes.

By the 20th century, the Russian nobility consisted of at least 1.9 million people or 1.5 of the population of Nicholas II’s Empire. Since there was only the beginnings of an urban middle class in Late Imperial Russia, the nobles held most of Russia’s wealth and were the most educated sector of society, staffing the professions, the officer class and the cultural elite. Despite the violence suffered by numerous noble country estates in the wake of Nicholas II’s abdication, the nobility largely aspired to contribute their skills to the new regime and help build a prosperous Russian state. The Bolshevik Revolution in the fall of 1917 permanently changed the fortunes of the nobility. For Vladimir Lenin, ironically a member of the hereditary nobility, Russia’s aristocracy were “Former People” tainted by class origins that could never be overcome by themselves or their descendants.

Douglas Smith’s moving account of the destruction of the Russian nobility, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, is the first book in any language to focus on the fate of Russia’s nobles after the Revolutions of 1917. The terrible human cost of Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Stalinist regime has been discussed in Orlando Figes’s recent works including The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia and A People’s Tragedy but Smith’s work documents the unique hardships faced by the nobility by chronicling the fortunes and tragedies of two noble families: the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns. In contrast to the thousands of nobles who fled Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power, the majority of the members of both the Sheremetev and Golitsyn families remained in Russia during the Soviet period with terrible consequences. Very few would still be alive by the end of the Second World War.

Although Nicholas II plays little part in the narrative after his abdication, the worldview of the Sheremetev and Golitsyn patriarchs sheds light on the decisions made by the last Imperial family in 1917 and 1918. A number of recent works, most notably  The Fate of the Romanovs by Greg King and Penny Wilson have criticized the last Imperial family for not making more effort to flee Russia. Although Nicholas was alienated from the nobility at the time of his abdication, he had enjoyed a typical noble upbringing including military service in the officer corps. The former Emperor would have shared the sentiments expressed by Count Sergei Sheremetev and Prince Vladimir Golitsyn: that leaving Russia in its time of turmoil was a kind of cowardice and that the Bolshevik regime could not possibly survive in the long term.

The persecution of Russia’s nobility, even those who attempted to assimilate into the Soviet regime also sharply illuminates the violence inherent in Lenin’s ideology. Popular audiences usually associate Soviet atrocities with the rule of Joseph Stalin but the quotes Smith provides from Lenin’s writings demonstrate that the first Soviet leader viewed social class as a fixed category and was determined to eliminate whole families based on their ancestry, regardless of their acceptance of his rule. Lenin believed that Robespierre had not gone far enough during the Terror that followed French Revolution because he only sent “active” opponents to the guillotine instead of eliminating anyone who might be a passive opponent. In common with Jung Chang’s and Doug Halliday’s biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, Smith reveals the full scope of the atrocities perpetrated by a 20th century tyrant.

The publication of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy will hopefully contribute to more balanced teaching of the Russian Revolution in high schools and universities. Smith observes that history is not only written by the victors but about the victors. Since there was no restoration of the monarchy in Russia as there was following the English Civil Wars and French Revolution, the voices of the nobility were obscured. The surviving members of Russia’s noble families observed that foreign visitors to the Soviet Union were not interested in their stories. Volumes of primary sources prepared for undergraduate European history survey classes still focus on the writings of the victors of the Russian Revolution rather than the victims. Douglas Smith’s groundbreaking work will hopefully address this imbalance, restoring the fate of the nobility to its true place in Russian history.

On the cover of Russell E. Martin’s comprehensive study of Russian royal bride-shows, A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia is Grigorii Sedov’s painting, “Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich selects his bride.” Sedov painted this work in the late nineteenth century when the customs of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Muscovite court, which were largely abolished when Emperor Peter the Great moved the capital to St. Petersburg, inspired Russia’s artists, writers and composers.

Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich Selects His Bride by Grigory Sedov

Martin judges Sedov’s painting to be the most accurate representation of the bride show, where every Russian ruler from Ivan the Terrible’s father, Vassily III, to Peter the Great selected a wife from the daughters and sisters of the mid ranking court gentry. The teenaged Tsar Aleksei is shown tentatively holding out a rose to a group of six young women, who are dressed in their finest gowns and jewellery but demurely avoid meeting their sovereign’s eye.

In contrast to modern reality television shows such as The Bachelor, the woman who received the rose would not only gain wealth and fame but her relatives would emerge from comparative obscurity to receive prestigious positions at court. In Sedov’s painting, barely visible behind the young Tsar, is a shadowy nobleman, undoubtedly advising his master to choose a particular lady and her family to elevate with his favour. With the fortunes of so many people dependent on the Tsar’s choice, the potential for intrigue and sabotage was high, making royal bride shows events of immense political significance and personal drama.

Russell E. Martin, a professor of Russian history at Westminster College has done extensive scholarly work about royal bride shows and A Bride for the Tsar includes a wealth of previously unpublished archival sources. His research reveals the roles prominent boyars (nobles) and their wives played in the selection, how the arrival of a new royal bride affected the political and social dynamics of the Russian court, and how matches with foreign princesses fell out of favour in the sixteenth century only to become popular again in Peter the Great’s reign (1682-1725). Martin also describes examples of bride shows at other courts throughout Europe and Asia, theorizing that the Russian bride show had Byzantine antecedents. One of the last foreign marriages before Tsars began choosing local brides was the union of Ivan the Great and Sophia Paleologue, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Martin’s research is how the bride shows reveal aspects of the personalities of the early Tsars of Russia and their wives and demonstrates who were the most influential figures at each ruler’s court. For example, the seven successive wives of Ivan IV “The Terrible” are described as “shadowy figures” by historian Natalia Pushkareva in Women in Russian History but documents relating to the seven successive bride shows that undoubtedly took place in Ivan’s reign reveals the place of their families at the Tsar’s court. The decision of the first Romanov Tsar, Mikhail, to repudiate his first betrothed, even when an investigation revealed she was the victim of a court plot to sabotage her chances of marrying the sovereign, reveals the strong influence of his mother over his decisions.

Martin also presents evidence that challenges conclusions put forth in popular works about Russia’s Tsars. Peter the Great’s biographers, such as Robert K. Massie, have described the marriage of Peter’s parents, Tsar Aleksei and Natalia Naryshkina as a love match that blossomed in the household of her godfather, Artamon Matveyev. The documents relating to the bride show where Aleksei selected Natalia as his second wife reveal that there was another candidate who may have been the Tsar’s first choice. Natalia most likely owed her position to her godfather’s ambition and the sympathy she received as the target of a plot to undermine her reputation rather than any chance to form a personal rapport with her future husband.

A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia is a well written and exhaustively researched study of the bride show, one of the most important events at the sixteenth and seventeenth century Russian court. A Tsar’s choice of bride changed the dynamics of his court, bringing an unknown young lady to the throne and her relatives into positions where they could change the course of Russian history.