“A compelling account of one of Russia’s most important figures, as well as a portrait of a critical, formative period in Russian history.” —The Washington Post
During his more than six decades of rule, Alexander II was the greatest reformer tsar since Peter the Great. He was also one of the most contradictory, and fascinating, of history’s supreme leaders. He freed the serfs yet launched vicious wars. He engaged in the sexual exploits of a royal Don Juan yet fell profoundly in love. He ruled during the “Russian Renaissance” of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, yet his Russia became the birthplace of modern terrorism. His story could be that of one of Russia’s greatest novels, yet it is true.
Alexander freed 23 million Russian slaves, reformed the justice system and the army, and very nearly became the father of Russia’s first constitution and the man who led that nation into a new era of western-style liberalism. Yet it was during this feverish time that modern nihilism first arose. On the sidelines of Alexander’s state dramas, a group of radicals began to engage in terrorism, building bombs, planning ambushes, and making no less than six unsuccessful attempts on Alexander’s life. Finally, a small cell of terrorists living next door to Dostoevsky built the fatal bomb that ended the life of the last great Tsar.
In this acclaimed biography, Edvard Radzinsky delivers a vivid, page-turning portrait of one of the greatest of all Romanovs. Delving deep into the archives, he raises intriguing questions about the connections between Dostoevsky and the young terrorists, about the hidden romances of the Romanovs, and about the palace conspiracies that may have linked hard-line aristocrats with their nemesis, the young nihilists.
