“Michael and Natasha: The Life and Love of Michael II, the Last of the Romanov Tsars”, by Rosemary and Donald Crawford

464 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0380731916

A beautiful divorcée creates a national scandal by marrying a dashing but ineffectual nobleman, and all of the passion, despair and war converge to ravage both their country all of Europe, thus dooming their love affair. Edward and Wallis, you say? Oh, no no no; try Natasha and Michael, as in Natasha Sergeyevna Sheremetyevskaya, Countess Brasova, and Michael Alexandrovich, Grand Duke of Russia and the last emperor of the Russian Empire (technically: as Michael II, he ruled for part of one day after his brother Nicholas II abdicated in 1917). In Michael and Natasha: The Life and Love of Michael II, the Last of the Romanov Tsars, by freelance journalists and husband-and-wife team Rosemary and Donald Crawford (she’s a former society columnist; he’s a lawyer and publisher), the doomed tale of these two is pieced together mostly through contemporary love letters and family correspondence, which show the pair to be heroically romantic and consistently neurotic, i.e. when Michael writes “It isn’t possible to love more than we love each other” Natasha responds with “I…was always content with the crumbs which you gave me of your time and splendor”. I mean…jeez. You see, the Romanov family vehemently opposed Michael’s marriage to a non-royal two-time divorcée and was bent on making life miserable for the couple, and after reading this fitfully engaging fairytale-gone-awry, one even wonders if maybe Russia’s pampered autocrats got what they deserved when revolution swept them away in 1917.

Our protagonist, the Grand Duke Michael, was the dashing younger brother of the “doomed” (one of the authors’ favorite adjectives) Czar Nicholas II. Under the prevailing system of male primogeniture, Michael was heir to the throne until the birth of Nicholas and Alexandra’s only son, the Czarevich Alexei, in 1904. During an adolescence and youth that were somewhat prolonged, Michael enjoyed the carefree playboy life of one of Europe’s richest, most eligible bachelors. Our heroine Natasha met Michael in December 1907 at the riding school of the Blue Cuirassiers, an elite cavalry regiment to which he belonged. A lawyer’s daughter, she had already been once divorced and was remarried to a cavalry officer with whom she had a 5-year-old daughter. But Michael knew none of these things when he saw her and fell in love at first sight; what he did know that Natasha was beautiful, sexy and irresistible. Needless to say, Natasha’s charms were entirely lost on Michael’s relatives, and the Romanovs watched with mounting horror as he pursued his inamorata with stubborn insistence, casting religious and social decorum to the wind. That devoted family man, Nicholas II, and his meddling wife, Alexandra, found Michael’s behavior reckless, irresponsible and appalling. But Michael and Natasha were too hooked on each other to heed familial or societal scorn (if anything, the calumny heaped on Natasha seemed only to fire the Michael’s desire, judging by their previously unpublished love letters reproduced here).

In 1910 she gave birth to their son, George, and Michael paid Natasha’s husband the enormous sum of 200,000 rubles to agree to a divorce, whereupon he married his paramour in a clandestine ceremony performed in a Serbian Orthodox church in Vienna. The outraged Russian imperial court responded by calling Michael's new wife a “malicious vamp” and removing Michael from his position as Regent for the Czarevich Alexei. For the next few years, the couple wandered around Europe as ostracized exiles, staying in the fanciest hotels in fashionable locales before leasing an estate in England before ultimately returning to Russia. When Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, he named Michael to succeed him as Czar, since Alexei was gravely ill with hemophilia. But Michael ruled for only a matter of hours before signing a manifesto effectively turning all power over to the newly established Provisional Government. In the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks sent Michael to Perm where he was shot in the woods nearby in June 1918 (the first of the Romanovs to die). Michael’s grave has not yet been found. Never sure of what happened to her husband, Natasha fled Russia disguised as a nun, lived in England for a spell before moving to Paris, where she died forgotten and impoverished in a garret in 1952. Her son, George, had died in a car crash in 1931. The Romanovs who had escaped from Russia finally accepted Natasha as a member of the family in 1928, long after it mattered.

The Crawford’s essentially tell two stories here: the compelling account of a private romance and enduring love, and a less focused narrative of the historical circumstances that determined the couple's fate. For whole sections Michael and Natasha reads like the society pages: a chronicle of clothes, meals, balls, cars, yachts and the beautiful people who enjoyed them, evidently the work of the chirpy and unanalytical Rosemary Crawford. With the coming of World War I and the Russian Revolution, however, the writing turns ponderous, impersonal and clogged with historical and political detail, apparently the stern tone of Donald Crawford taking over. While exhaustively researched, Michael and Natasha is also lengthy and overly detailed, and largely fails to capture the drama that abounded in the last years of this star-crossed pair. It should appeal to fans of royal romances, however.

“Worlds That Weren’t”, by Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, Walter Jon Williams

295 pages, ROC, ISBN-13: 978-0451458865

Perhaps every historian’s – professional and amateur alike – favorite pastime is speculative or alternate history, a form of fiction in which a fundamental change creates a world different from what we now occupy. Worlds That Weren’t contains four such novellas, all written by experienced creators of alterative worlds, with Harry Turtledove leading off this compilation with The Daimon, where in ancient Greece the philosopher Sokrates joins former student Alkibiades in a war against Sicily. In S. M. Stirling’s Shikari in Galveston, a 19^th Century meteor shower results in an empire based out of India and a 21^st Century America which hasn’t progressed much since. The main character in Mary Gentle’s The Logistics of Carthage is a warrior woman fighting in mid-15^th Century North Africa who is visited by a woman archaeologist from the future. The fourth story, Walter Jon Williams’ The Last Ride of German Freddie puts German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche right in the middle of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

There is no doubt that each author deserves kudos for all of the in-depth research they most certainly undertook to develop these stories. Imagination alone warrants much credit, as well (I mean, c’mon, how many philosophy students, no matter how bored they might occasionally find themselves, would think of matching Nietzsche up against the Earp brothers?!) But a problem does exist. To get the most out of speculative or alternate history stories, how much of the history does a reader need to know? While even grade-schoolers know that the South didn’t win the Civil War and that Hitler was defeated in World War II (two favorite alternate history subjects), and they would be fairly sure a meteor shower didn’t strike in the 1800s leaving India in charge of most of the world, how many of us would know offhand whether or not Sokrates fought in Sicily or who controlled North Africa in the 1400s? It is important to know when reading an alternate history story at what point history changes. In the case of the four novellas in Worlds That Weren’t, as with most alternate history stories, the change took place before the story began. Unless the reader is a scholar or an armchair historian, he may be left wondering what happened in the real world and what didn’t. The authors and/or editors of Worlds That Weren’t perhaps tried to compensate for a supposed lack of knowledge on the reader’s part by including at the end of each novella a concise paragraph consisting of true facts. My advice for the layperson picking up this book for the first time is to look at this paragraph first. You’ll spend less time being distracted by your own questions.