Short review: Not worth buying (maybe worth borrowing from a public library).
Long review:
Robert Conquest is a British historian who has written biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, but Imperial Russian is neither his field of expertise nor a interest of his. He starts the book thanking his wife in the acknowledgements section and goes on admitting that "the last of the Russian tsars is a new interest for me".
Conquest does not feel much sympathy for Nicholas or Alexandra and the general impression is that the book was a suggestion of his agent: "Why don't you write something about Nicholas II for the centenary of his abdication?"
The author states about
Nicholas: "Longevity in power had given an unwarranted confidence in his own judgement" (p.7) and "His actions were those of a ruler who always thought he was right" (p.
. That is certainly a novel view: almost any other source claims that the problem was exactly the opposite: an autocrat who lacked completely confidence and hesitated before taking any important decision.
But
Alexandra gets a worse treatment in the book than Nicholas. She is "ignorant, opinionated" (p.9), "imperious and opinionated" (p.39), "opinionated" (p.40) [
He obviously likes the word], "predictably vociferous" (p.56), "had a hauteur" (p.28) [I had to look the word up in a dictionary: it means "haughtiness, arrogance"], "was behaving with her usual hauteur" (p.178)....
Conquest does not explain why an empress with such a "hauteur" would train to become a nurse and work at a military hospital, replacing dirty bandages and assisting at operations. Something, as far as I know, no other queen or president's wife did.
Rasputin is a "monk" (a interesting fact you probably did not know): "The grumbling persisted in the Duma, where disappointment mounted about Nicholas's refusal to compromise after the Rasputin murder. At court, it was understood that the Imperial couple wanted no mention of the monk by name: they found the whole matter acutely painful." (p.17)
The desecration of his tomb and the disappearance of his body is described as "one small episode": "Nicholas and his immediate family adjusted themselves to their new circumstances, but one small episode disturbed them" (p.37). If something similar happened to one of his friends recently passed away, would Conquest talk about it as "one small episode"?
Robert Service does not avoid common cliches: "He who had dispatched thousand of
political prisoners to Siberian forced labour, imprisonment or exile would himself be transported to detention in Tobolsk" (p.5). Well, I have read Conquest's biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and I have not found in them the less evidence of political prisoners doing forced labour: they got a pension from the government that covered all their basic expenses, they translated books, they studied Marxism, they hunted, they fished, they got together, they bickered among themselves and when they decided so, they escaped from exile [Stalin had also time to impregnate a local girl in her early teens] But no evidence of "forced labour".
"Here was the quintessence of the Romanov family outlook: anti-Semitism mixed with Christian monarchism, expressed in a language that combined racialist slang and pious pomposity" (p.101) - Here is the quintessence of Conquest's style: wide generalizations and intrusive judgements, expressed in the language of scholarly pomposity.
Eastern Front, Eastern Front.... The Russian Empire had not had an "Eastern Front" since
