8 Books About Royal Russian History

In this commanding book, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of Imperial Russia to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble.

A captivating, thoughtful, and eye-opening look at the four tragic Russian grand duchesses, killed in their early teens and twenties in 1918. Though they’ve captured the public imagination, their intelligence, thoughtful personalities, and private lives had never been fully explored until Helen Rappaport’s revealing and informative bestselling biography.

Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinating story of the final days and brutal murder of the Romanovs as seen through the eyes of their young kitchen boy, Leonka. Historically vivid and compelling, THE KITCHEN BOY is also a touching portrait of a loving family that was in many ways similar, yet so different, from any other.

An intimate and heartrending true account of Russia’s 20 tsars and tsarinas as they turned a war-ruined principality into one of the greatest empires, only to lose it all, THE ROMANOVS’ cast of characters includes Ivan the Terrible, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria, and Lenin. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s dazzling epic reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence, and wild extravagance.

In this magnetic novel, Anastasia Romanov, living in exile in menacing circumstances in Siberia after the revolution, secretly falls in love with a young guard named Sasha who might have the power to help save her family. Inspired by the mysteries surrounding the Romanovs, ANASTASIA’S SECRET is a compelling and romantic vision of what might have been.

RASPUTIN definitively captures the true life of a man—whose debauchery and sinister political influence is the stuff of legend—in all his complexity as a servant of God, a voice of peace, a loyal subject, an adulterer, a drunkard, and an esteemed confidant of the Romanovs.

Part love story, part historical epic, and part tragedy, this propulsive novel tells the story of 88-year-old Georgy Jachmenev as he travels back to the Winter Palace of the czar and faces the memories of that house and the revolutions that drove him away. He intends this to be his final journey back to the Russia he once knew and loved, but finds himself haunted by the past.

Dramatic and highly entertaining, THE WINTER PALACE is a passionate novel about Catherine the Great and her secret alliance with a young servant girl at court that carried the princess into power through an enforced marriage, illicit seductions, and, at last, the shocking coup to assume the throne of all of Russia.