About the book: 1997 / The fate of the last Russian Tsar has become the subject of much speculation today. Who is he really? “Bloody Nicholas,” as school history textbooks assured us quite recently, or the Holy Great Martyr, as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad believes? The author is far from idealizing his hero. But he is convinced: Russia was doomed to go through the terrible path of revolutions, civil war, and survive the era of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The point is not at all how and what decisions the king made. The monarch was betrayed by his subjects: the aristocracy, ahead of which were representatives of the royal family, the so-called “enlightened society” and only then the people. The fate of the last Russian Tsar, who humbly surrendered himself and his family to desecration and death, cannot but worry us also because their execution was the beginning of extrajudicial night reprisals, the victims of which were millions of our compatriots. The illustrative series of the book includes a significant number of rare photographic documents..