Rappaport has dug deeply in archives around the world and uncovered a wealth of new information that is certain to make The Race to Save the Romanovs the definitive work on the subject. The story is both fascinating and tragic ... Rappaport does away with the mistaken notion that it was all somehow King George’s fault ... Now, thanks to her excellent book, she has put to rest the fallacy that any one person could have saved the last Romanovs, either from the Bolsheviks or from themselves.
July is the centenary of the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children. The story has retained its popular allure, despite being told many times before. Romanoviana has been kept alive by the classical echoes of hubris before the fall and the lurid violence of the murders — several of the Romanov daughters were bayoneted to death...Adding to the drama of the final act was the long build-up. The Romanovs endured 15 months of captivity, grimly awaiting their fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks ... This makes for a gripping narrative, which Helen Rappaport recounts with a light touch in The Race to Save the Romanovs. She has uncovered many missing pieces in the story, from the diplomatic wrangling over the tsar’s fate to a number of 'hare-brained' rescue schemes hatched by monarchist sympathisers.
A deep dive into archives and obscure sources, Rappaport’s book exposes the feckless and ultimately futile ideas to rescue the imprisoned Romanovs that surfaced between Nicholas’s abdication and the family’s murder in the summer of 1918 ... Much of the book focuses on the action— and inaction—of King George V; indeed, one gets the sense that Rappaport’s intent is to rehabilitate the man often blamed for refusing to grant sanctuary to his Russian cousins ... In the end, even Rappaport has to agree that George 'may have been a moral coward' in forcing his government to abandon asylum ... Rather than blaming King George for forcing his government to withdraw asylum, Rappaport’s finely researched and elegantly written book asserts that 'responsibility should be more widely, and equally, apportioned.' It’s a fair point.
