The Last Tsar

November 1, 2024

Award-winning Hasegawa (professor emeritus in history at Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) offers a new history of Tsar Nicholas II, positing that Nicholas's mismanagement of the monarchy and refusal to compromise on reform led to his assassination and the rise of the Soviet Union. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from November 1, 2024
The life of Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, has been repeatedly examined. This new biography by noted scholar Hasegawa (Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, 2017) examines the final days of the Romanov dynasty in February and March 1917. Russia's armies were proving no match for the Germans, largely because of unpreparedness and officer-level failure. The state of the antiquated economy added to Russians' suffering. As events in capital city Petrograd unfolded at the end of February, Nicholas refused to grant some form of parliamentary government. Bread riots and mutiny quickly coalesced into demands for his abdication. Despite the fact that virtually all his advisors and military commanders agreed, Nicholas, egged on by his out-of-touch wife and the malevolent Rasputin, made overthrow of the tsarist government inevitable. Nicholas abdicated in favor of his son but within hours changed his mind, as he feared the hemophiliac tsarevitch wouldn't long survive him. As historians largely agree, Nicholas was a pious and good father but an altogether incompetent tsar. Hasegawa suspensefully recounts scenes of Nicholas aboard his imperial train as he tried to return to his family. Hasegawa's analysis of alternative outcomes to the unfolding tragedy makes for compelling "what-ifs" and provocative history.

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November 15, 2024
The fall of clueless Russian Czar Nicholas II. Although hobbled by an absolute monarchy and slow to industrialize, Russia was getting its act together by the end of the 19th century. Its czars, although often reactionary, took governing seriously. Hasegawa, professor emeritus in history at UC Santa Barbara and author ofRacing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, emphasizes that Nicholas was an exception. He became czar at age 26, when his father died prematurely, though he had already shown little aptitude but much fascination with the trappings of power, if not the details. Scholars universally deplore his marriage to German princess Alexandra, who was far more strong-willed than her husband and became wildly unpopular. The book delivers a compelling biography of the pair up to early 1917, when Russia's wartime miseries erupted in widespread violence. In meticulous detail, Hasegawa recounts the czar's imprisonment and the bloody end of his dynasty. It's a scholarly tour de force in which the author has absorbed the participants' massive documentation and familiarized himself with a huge cast of characters, most unfamiliar even to history buffs. This should not be anyone's introduction to the Russian Revolution, but readers of Robert K. Massie's classic 1967Nicholas and Alexandra and its follow-up, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, will appreciate the events revealed by Hasegawa's fine-tooth comb. An extraordinarily detailed account of the last czar's last days.

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