Nicholas II: The Life and Death
19 hrs. 3 min.
Language
Russian
Author
Edward Radzinsky
Author
Edward Radzinsky
Narrator
Sergey Chonishvili
Narrator
Sergey Chonishvili
Description
May 14, 1896, Moscow… Kremlin cathedrals rang with bells. A young Nicholas and a fair-haired beauty, the queen, entered the Uspensky Cathedral. And the bell peal died away, along with the ancient square filled with people. Uspensky Cathedral. The ceremony of the sacred coronation. And the great moment arrived: the Sovereign received the crown from the hands of the metropolitan and placed it on his own head…
July 18, 1918. Yekaterinburg. “The corpses were thrown into a pit and the faces and all bodies were covered with sulfuric acid, both to make them unrecognizable and to prevent the stench from decomposition… After covering them with earth and brushwood, they laid railroad ties on top and drove over them several times—there were no traces of the pit left.”
The last tsar was executed brutally, together with his family, without trial or investigation—denied his final word, unlike Louis XVI or Charles I. This injustice must be corrected. For thirty-six years, Nicholas kept his diary without interruption. He began it as a fourteen-year-old in 1882 at the Gatchina Palace and finished it as a fifty-year-old prisoner in Yekaterinburg. Fifty notebooks were filled from start to finish in his neat handwriting. But the last, the fifty-first notebook, is filled only halfway: life was cut short—and there remained empty, gaping pages, carefully numbered in advance by the author. This diary contains no reflections and rarely any judgments. It is simply a record of the day’s main events. But his voice remained there. The mystical power of genuine speech… This silent, closed man will tell. He will lead you through his life himself. He is the author. And this is his last word.
Also, don’t miss earlier audiobooks by Edward Radzinsky: “Love Madnesses of Giacomo Casanova,” “Walks with the Executioner,” “A Few Encounters with the Late Mister Mozart,” “John the Torturer,” “The Theatre of the Time of Nero and Seneca,” “Koba. The 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,” “Rasputin,” “Alexander II.”
July 18, 1918. Yekaterinburg. “The corpses were thrown into a pit and the faces and all bodies were covered with sulfuric acid, both to make them unrecognizable and to prevent the stench from decomposition… After covering them with earth and brushwood, they laid railroad ties on top and drove over them several times—there were no traces of the pit left.”
The last tsar was executed brutally, together with his family, without trial or investigation—denied his final word, unlike Louis XVI or Charles I. This injustice must be corrected. For thirty-six years, Nicholas kept his diary without interruption. He began it as a fourteen-year-old in 1882 at the Gatchina Palace and finished it as a fifty-year-old prisoner in Yekaterinburg. Fifty notebooks were filled from start to finish in his neat handwriting. But the last, the fifty-first notebook, is filled only halfway: life was cut short—and there remained empty, gaping pages, carefully numbered in advance by the author. This diary contains no reflections and rarely any judgments. It is simply a record of the day’s main events. But his voice remained there. The mystical power of genuine speech… This silent, closed man will tell. He will lead you through his life himself. He is the author. And this is his last word.
Also, don’t miss earlier audiobooks by Edward Radzinsky: “Love Madnesses of Giacomo Casanova,” “Walks with the Executioner,” “A Few Encounters with the Late Mister Mozart,” “John the Torturer,” “The Theatre of the Time of Nero and Seneca,” “Koba. The 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,” “Rasputin,” “Alexander II.”
