A timely & important book he brings to it rare clarity & common sense His book is a fast-paced account of the last sixteen months of the tsar's life; brief sharp but laced with well-judged feeling for the dramas of the time' Catherine Merridale Observer In March 1917 Nicholas II the last Tsar of All the Russias abdicated & the dynasty that had ruled an empire for three hundred years was forced from power by revolution In this masterful & forensic study Robert Service examines the last year Nicholas's reign & the months between that momentous abdication & his death with his family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918 Drawing on the Tsar's own diaries & other hitherto unexamined contemporary records The Last of the Tsars reveals a man who was almost entirely out of his depth perhaps even willfully so It is also a compelling account of the social economic & political foment in Russia in the aftermath of Alexander Kerensky's February Revolution the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 & the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet republic