Books about Russia

While I'm waiting to get my information packet from Tom Clark of VIM and waiting for my passport to come in, I started reviewing some of the books I've read about Russia.

Of course, my interest in all things Russian was first hooked by the story of Anastasia and I read "Anastasia, the Lost Princess" by James Blair Lovell in 1992. (I love the movie with Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman but it has very little to do with the real story of the end of the Romanov dynasty. The Disney animated movie doesn't even have that much reality about it.) From there I moved on to Robert K. Massie's "Nicholas and Alexandra", the inspiration for the movie of the same name. Although somewhat romanticized and written before much archival information was released after the fall of Communism, it gives a fairly accurate picture of the last years of Nicholas II and his immediate family. Anna Anderson Manahan wrote her own story "I Am Anastasia" (with the help of Peter Kurth, I think) claiming to be the long-lost surviving Grand Duchess.

I left the royal family behind for a while to read ice skater Ekaterina Gordeeva's poignant story of her life and love with her husband in "My Sergei" who died during a skating practice session.

Anastasia wasn't the only royal child supposed to have escaped the slaughter in Ekaterinburg; Vadim Petrov wrote about "The Escape of Alexei". In "The Flight of the Romanovs" John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov wrote about what happened to the Romanov survivors who made their way out of Russia before and during the Revolution. Back to individual biography, I read about Nicholas' wife in "Alexandra: the Last Tsarina" by Carolly Erickson.

In the realm of fictionalized history, Robert Alexander wrote about "The Kitchen Boy". The real kitchen boy was sent away from the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg but Alexander turns the story into an escape plot for another Grand Duchess, Maria. He also wrote a novel based on the life of "Rasputin's Daughter".

I have a lot more books to write about but I'll save those for later. Stay cool!