When Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, inherited the throne in 1894, he was unprepared to do so. With their four daughters (including Anastasia) and only son, a hemophiliac, Nicholas and his reclusive wife, Alexandra, buried their heads in the sand, living a life of opulence as World War I raged outside their door and political unrest grew into the Russian Revolution. Maneuvering between the lives of the Romanovs and the plight of Russia's peasants...

In 1913 Russia, twelve-year-old Katya eagerly anticipates leaving her St. Petersburg home, though not her older cousin Misha, to join her mother, a lady in waiting in the household of Tsar Nicholas II, but the ensuing years bring world war, revolution, and undreamed of changes to her life.

A brilliant account of the political forces swirling through the remote Urals town of Ekaterinburg at the bitter end of the First World War. Challenges the view that the deaths of the Romanovs were a unilateral act by a maverick group of Bolsheviks, and identifies a chain of command that stretches to Moscow-- and to Lenin himself.

A novel in diary form in which the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II describes the privileged life in her family up until the time of World War I and the tragic events that befell them.

Hiding her identity as the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, Daria Gradov looks back on her luxurious childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, the machinations of an illiterate monk, and the circumstances that forced her to assume another life.