About the Author

Edvard Radzinsky is the author of the bestselling The Last Tsar, Stalin, and The Rasputin File. He is one of Russia's most celebrated playwrights. He lives in Moscow, where he is also an award-winning television personality

Reviews

"Radzinsky tells Alexander's story with great flair, breathless pacing, and the novelist's eye for the telling detail and the revealing anecdote. Alexander II is a great read, vividly portraying the tsar and his splendorous court, and offering evocative sketches of the age's great writers, artists, and intellectuals who made his reign one of such rich cultural effervescence." -- The Seattle Times

Best-selling author Radzinsky (e.g., The Rasputin File), a celebrated talk-show host and playwright in his native Russia, has written a biography for general readers that could double as a social and political history of prerevolutionary Russia. Its subject, who ruled Russia from 1855 to 1881, is best known for freeing the serfs but is characterized here as a "two faced Janus" because he spent the next 15 years keeping them in their place. Alexander II lived a charmed life, surviving at least six assassination attempts, but he remained caught between "the retrogrades," or conservative element in the government, and the revolutionaries. He was disliked by the liberals, who found his reforms inadequate and turned more radical in response. On March 1, 1881, he was finally assassinated by a handmade bomb thrown at his feet. Radzinsky sees Mikhail Gorbachev as a flawed reformer like Alexander II (looking backward while looking forward) and argues that the travails of 21st-century Russia have their roots in the vacillations of this tsar. Though scholars will find no new thesis here, the book is well researched, with a flowing narrative that weaves cultural history and biography very accessibly. Recommended for public libraries and general collections on prerevolutionary Russia.-Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

"A compelling account of one of Russia's most important figures, as well as a portrait of a critical, formative period in Russian history."

-- The Washington Post
"An engagingly flamboyant, intimate portrait of the tsar who ruled the enormous empire at the pinnacle of its culture and splendor....[Radzinsky is] informative, witty, and unfailingly entertaining."

-- Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Lively and brilliant, both epic and epigrammatic."

-- The New York Times Book Review
"Radzinsky tells Alexander's story with great flair, breathless pacing, and the novelist's eye for the telling detail and the revealing anecdote. Alexander II is a great read, vividly portraying the tsar and his splendorous court, and offering evocative sketches of the age's great writers, artists, and intellectuals who made his reign one of such rich cultural effervescence."

-- The Seattle Times
"This is [Radzinsky's] best so far: Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar is dramatic, entertaining, and authoritative. Mr. Radzinsky is as comfortable in the palaces of the Romanovs as he is in the conspiratorial attics of their assassins or the studies of great writers like Dostoevsky.... Mr. Radzinsky skillfully tells the story of the czar, of course, but also of the terrorists who begin to hunt him ruthlessly in ever more ambitious plots."

-- The Wall Street Journal