The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia

This is the compelling story of the woman credited as a major factor in the destruction of the Russian Empire. It is the first full biography of Alexandra in thirty years and the first to explore her childhood motivations and influences.Just age six when her mother died, Alexandra, a German princess, was reared under the tutelage of aunts but always remained under the watchful if faraway eye of her grandmother, Queen Victoria. As a shy, introverted teenager, "Alix" visited Russia for a six-week holiday and caught the eye of Nicholas, the young heir to the Russian throne.Nicholas and Alexandra fell in love. They might have lived as a contented bourgeois couple if fate hadn't placed them on the throne and set them on a collision course with tragedy.To research this book Greg King pored through Russian archives and interviewed surviving members of the Romanov family. This first paperback edition has material based on new findings about the bones of the murdered royal family.