Alexander II,
the Last Great Tsar
by Edvard Radzinsky
Free Press

Edvard Radzinsky has thrown another bone to Romanov obsessives and wide-eyed suckers for history-mystery. It's a prequel to the best selling author's panting biography of Tsar Nicholas II, subjecting Nicky's equally ill-fated grandfather Alexander II to that special brand of Radzinsky revelation. (If you declare it shocking, they will be shocked.)

Monumentalism is to be expected, of course, when dealing with figures such as Stalin, Rasputin, and yes, the hapless Nicholas and his attractive, blood-spattered family. But Radzinsky is a bit of a carnival barker — given a genuine attraction, he insists on turning it into a specter, a mystery or a genuine freak of nature.

With Nicholas still uncontested as the Last Tsar and Catherine and Peter pretty well splitting the market in Greatness among Russian autocrats, Radzinsky has fudged a bit to come up with a superlative epigram for his latest subject — who lands on the cover with the parsed quantifier, "The Last Great Tsar."

Alexander II is entitled to some encomiums to be sure. He abolished slavery in Russia and minced his way towards a constitutional monarchy. There is still academic debate over just how effective his progressive policies were, and just how sincere he was in their execution. Radzinsky acknowledges this ... somewhere. But since representative government isn't all that sexy in the first place, Radzinsky gives Alexander a whole new legacy — that of The Last Great Tsar ... In Bed.

The backstory here is one of a dynastic succession under the sheets. It begins with Peter himself, who bedded his comely cook; scurries past his daughter, who slept her way to the throne; reminds us of Catherine's prowess — she managed to both cuckold and murder her mild-mannered husband; before arriving at Alexander, "the last in a line of lusty Romanov men."

As a young heir to the throne (we can fairly hear Radzinsky's soft hands rubbing in delight), Sasha flirted with various continental cousins (England's young Victoria among them,) before settling on a German princess who bore a remarkable likeness to his own mother. Then, asserts Radzinsky, he took up the cape of Don Juan — cavorting with ladies-in-waiting and inviting Sadists (the originals) for private audiences. As a middle-age monarch Alexander, Humbert-like, fell for a schoolgirl, gave up his Casanova ways and became an indiscrete bigamist.

Radzinsky devotes much of the latter half of his story to the relationship between the Tsar of all Russia and the love-of-his-life, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, (or as Radzinsky would have her, "the heroine of one of the most dramatic affairs in the history of the lusty Romanov men, an affair that was one of the factors in the demise of the empire"). There are many problems with the claim, the first of which is that it is just plain silly to credit the Camilla Parker Bowles of Petersburg with the unfolding of a calamitous revolution. It also rankles to read so much about these virile Romanov men, when the vast majority of seduction and treachery alluded to by Radzinsky was that of wily women — all of them Prussian princesses who juggled cuckolds and coups on a regular basis. But the most obvious problem in Radzinsky's grandstanding is that there is not a chapter in a Radzinsky-authored book that is NOT a dramatic affair or a factor in the demise of the empire.

Edvard Radzinsky is a potboiler historian par excellence. It's a creature we know well in America, land of the free and the unauthorized biographer. Russia has fewer such sensational archivists — in large part because official history, as it emerges from the secret documents of a bloody, bloody regime, is already shocking. Radzinsky's mission, in each of the best-selling histories he has written, has been to make the already fantastic truly unbelievable. Unfortunately, he usually succeeds.

I was reminded of this (as if I needed reminder after 450 pages of alternating boredom and revulsion towards the episodes plucked from the vagaries of scholarly "research") when I took up some of Radzinsky's fictional works. "The Death of A Gallant Century," for example, is a novel built around the court intrigues and boudoir secrets of Catherine the Great. It contains at least a half-dozen anecdotes that have been recycled in his later non-fictions, but this novel manages to live up to the page-turner speed Radzinsky aspires to. This was history brought alive — in stark contrast to grotesque attempts to "arouse" the past. I prefer a good old-fashioned bodice-ripper to a biography that suggests that The Last Great Tsar took his mistress from behind on the eve of his assassination.

Radzinsky is a gossip at heart, a tabloid historian with a penchant for corsets and coats-of-arms. Let us hear more about monarchs who cavort with the cooks — but please let's not confuse a randy scepter with the origin of Greatness.

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)