The last Czar and Czarina have not had a good press in history, he was weak and rather vacuous as a ruler, she was domineering and rather neurotic. Apparently a huge number of letters have survived written between the pair, as well as letters from their four daughters and son, all of whom perished in the notorious cellar in Ekaterinburg on the orders of the ruthless Lenin. This volume is made up of correspondence from the years 1889 to 1914, whose subjects range from private love letters to affairs of state, supplemented by various diary extracts and memoirs bringing things up to 1918.
Nicholas and Alexandra were very ordinary, even banal people, who might have lived blamelessly as the rulers of a minor German or Baltic kingdom, but were fatally out of their depth" during the breaking of nations and the fall of empires.