Full of colorful anecdotes and sharp character sketches, this breezy account of life in exile entertains. Catherine the Great—the wife of Peter’s grandson—and herself an avowed Francophile, was, during her reign from 1762 to 1796, the most vigorous promoter of Franco-Russian cultural links. Some, like Bunin, Chagall and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The Russian discovery of the French capital in fact goes back to the time of the modernizing tsar, Peter the Great, who made a visit to Paris in 1717 and fell in love with Versailles.

Certainly, at least if Helen Rappaport’s barnstorming book After the Romanovs is anything to go by, they had some of the most amazing stories. He proceeded to make his way to France, avoiding Paris and volunteering to help clean the mine fields in Northern France, near Lille. Olga, herself a most forceful personality, urged Paul to save her from the disaster of social ostracization, and with his brother Vladimir’s help, he managed to persuade Nicholas II to agree to granting Olga a divorce. Vladimir never quite came to terms with the fact that he was not emperor himself (though his wife certainly nurtured that hope for their sons after his death). She also has written extensively on late Imperial Russia, the 1917 Revolution and the Romanov family.But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland, sometimes leaving with only the clothes on their backs. Excellent … Helen Rappaport, one of today’s leading experts on the last Romanovs, has dug deeply in archives around the world and uncovered a wealth of new information that is certain to make The Race to Save the Romanovs the definitive work on the subject … thanks to her excellent book, she has put to rest the fallacy that any one person could have saved the last Romanovs, either from the Bolsheviks or from themselves. Helen Rappaport has an excellent command of detail and the complexity of her subject and is able to carry the narrative in a very readable fashion while maintaining a level of gravitas that her themes require. Most Russians have resigned themselves to this state of affairs at great costs leading to the well known Russian ability to suffer despite great accomplishments in art, literature, music, math and science.

Tall “like a column of marble,”32 slim and elegant in his uniform of commander of the Horse Guards—for he was a military man like his cousin Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolaevich—Grand Duke Paul was quietly handsome with a neat but large bushy mustache and gentle brown eyes that stared out of an austere, oblong face. President Fauré accompanied Nicholas and Alexandra on a whistle-stop tour of the Paris Opera, the Louvre, and Notre Dame, the mint, and the Sèvres factory. The public spoke of the sisters in a genteel, superficial manner, but Rappaport captures sections of letters and diary entries to showcase the sisters’ thoughtfulness and intelligence.

A special Franco-Russian cheese was created; Russian-style clothes were labeled as a “Gift from the Tsars.