The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina of Russia (1990, 1994)

My interest in the Romanovs began in 1976.  In the United States, a weekly syndicated television program called “In Search Of” featured episodes dedicated to various historical mysteries.  One Saturday night in October, the program aired a half-hour show dedicated to Anna Anderson and her claim to be Grand Duchess Anastasia.  After watching the show, my interest was aroused, and by a very strange piece of synchronicity, that same evening I found that a local television station here in Seattle was airing the 1956 film “Anastasia” starring Ingrid Bergman; by an even more peculiar twist, the very next night a television station from Vancouver aired the movie “Nicholas and Alexandra.”  Within the space of thirty hours, I was exposed to one documentary and two films about the Romanovs and I found the subject fascinating.  That Monday I bought a paperback copy of Massie’s book “Nicholas and Alexandra,” and read it through within a week.  I finished reading on a Sunday night and when I finished something inside me simply said, “I am going to write about these people.”  Until that time, I had hoped to become an architect, a decision that was probably best avoided back in that day and age given my loathing for math, and had never given any thought to writing, but something in the story pulled at me.

        I began work on a biography of Alexandra in December 1976, when I was twelve, relying on the libraries of my town and its college; within a year or two, I was filling in the information with materials from the Seattle library system and those obtained through inter-library loan.  In the 1970s, Romanov books, memoirs, and other materials were not as expensive as they were eventually to become and I managed to obtain a lot of valuable titles including signed copies of many autobiographies, which I soon put to use. Some of my motivation in writing about the Empress stemmed from the impressions I had of her after reading a multitude of Romanov literature, which tended to blame her without fail for all of the disasters that befell the Dynasty. While not intended as a defense of the Empress, I did envision the book as a more balanced look at her life and her motivations than had been offered to that point. All the while, I was constantly refining and learning how to write, growing into a style with which I felt comfortable.  I kept away at it, working on the book through school and into college.  My first trip overseas, to England in 1987, allowed me to access materials in libraries there, and visiting places I was writing about like Osborne House, WindsorCastle, Sandringham, and Balmoral awakened some kind of narrative style in me that I then used to completely re-write the book when I returned home.  At the time, I was a member of a small group of writers and relied on weekly readings of my chapters to help shape the book.

    In 1989, my friend and royal genealogist Marlene Eilers suggested that I contact G. Nicholas Tantzos, who operated Atlantic International Publications in New York and who had published the first edition of her book "Queen Victoria¹s Descendants.”  At the time, Atlantic was publishing several other Romanov titles, including Grand Duchess George’s “A Romanov Diary” and Prince David Chachavadze’s “The Grand Dukes” and “Crowns and Trenchcoats,” and as a young, unknown writer, I was eager to see my work in print.  Atlantic published the book as “Empress Alexandra” in the spring of 1990, though with some substantial editing of materials.  Atlantic went out of business two years later, just a year after the Russians exhumed the remains of nine of the Romanovs and their retainers outside of Ekaterinburg, and interest in the Imperial Family was quite high.  I continued research, went to Russia and to Darmstadt, where I was fortunate enough to meet the late Princess Margaret of Hesse at Wolfsgarten, and was convinced that a biography of the Empress was needed.  At that point, I decided to re-write the book, add back and revise the material that had been edited out, and expand the manuscript.  This took a year and eventually, although I was without an agent, I was lucky enough to send the proposal to an editor at the American house of Carol Publishing who had been a student of Alexander Kerensky's at Columbia and who was interested in the story.  Carol purchased the book and published it in its new form in 1994.  It would be interesting  to expand and update the book, although I am not sure that the market would sustain yet another Romanov title.

The Man Who Killed Rasputin: Prince Felix Yusupov and the Murder That Helped Bring 

Down the Russian Empire 

(UK title: The Murder of Rasputin) (1995)

After Atlantic published my biography of the Empress, I immediately began
            work on a biography of Felix Yusupov.  I had always found Felix fascinating,
            and his “Lost Splendor” was one of my favorite Russian memoirs.  Work began
            on this book in the summer of 1990 and continued on for another four years,
            during which time I was able to make a number of important contacts.

            At the time I wrote the book, one of my main interests was the murder of
            Rasputin.  I was absolutely convinced (and still am) that Felix lied about
            many details of that night, and wanted to explore theories of what may have
            happened at the Moika Palace on December 16, 1916.  I was able to make one
            trip to St. Petersburg and obtained some useful information, but could not
            do so a second time and was thus forced to rely upon many secondary sources
            to piece together what may have happened.  While some of what I postulated
            in the book may now be out of date, I am still happy that I was one of the
            first to question in print Felix’s account of Rasputin’s murder, a trend
            that has now become commonplace as more and more materials see the light of
            day.

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     c. Greg King, 2008