Alexander II. Life and Death

We still seek answers to мучable questions: Why, from the tsar called in Russian history “the Liberator,” who destroyed the shameful Russian slavery and reformed all of Russian life, did Russian society turn away by the end of his reign? Why was the fruit of the first Russian restructuring—an immensely powerful terrorist organization—something unseen in Europe until then? Why were the children of his own restructuring the ones who killed the great reformer? Russian terror, born in the time of Alexander II, foreshadowed the terror of our century. And even in today’s newspapers, you can read the same phrases and the same ideas that once occupied those long-gone Russian terrorists in the days of Alexander II. They were the first! Even the very concept of “war against terror” belongs to Alexander II—its time. Hence the banal, but (alas!) eternal aphorism: “The main lesson of History is that people draw no lessons from History.” It has served as an epigraph for this book. As it does also the diary entry of the tsar’s brother, the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich: Blood and violence accompanied the history of his forebears—the tsars of the Romanov dynasty. And the murder of their own rulers became a secret Russian tradition in the eighteenth century. Part of our hero’s lineage.

Also don’t miss the previously released audio books by Edvard Radzinsky: “Romantic follies of Giacomo Casanova,” “Strolls with the executioner,” “A Few Encounters with the Late Mr. Mozart,” “Ivan the tormentor,” “The Theatre of the Time of Nero and Seneca,” “Koba. A monologue of an old man,” “Napoleon: life after death,” “The Iron Mask. The Age of Musketeers,” “Stalin. Life and Death,” “Princess Tarakanova. The Last of the Romanovs.”