The Romanovs Under House Arrest: From the 1917 Diary of a Palace Priest

Having read extensively about the Romanovs over the years I was surprised to discover that this fairly short, beautifully bound book provided me with one of the most intimate portraits of the day-to-day lives of the Imperial Family that I’ve yet come across.Archpriest Afanasy Belyaev was the Rector of the Tsar’s Feodorovsky Cathedral at Tsarskoe Selo and served as father confessor to the Russian Imperial Family during the first five months of their captivity when they were under house arrest in the Alexander Palace.During that period he kept a diary, selected excerpts of which form the basis of this book. Across just 60-odd pages this chaplain’s diary affords a rare glimpse into the private, family life of the Romanovs in the period immediately after the Russian Revolution but before the Bolshevik putsch.The lives recorded here are not those one would necessarily associate with an Emperor and his family. Facing confinement and adversity, it was, it seems, their Orthodox faith which sustained them as they attend almost daily liturgies despite, or perhaps because of, the tumultuous events taking place around them. Indeed, it is the genuine piousness of the Tsar and his family, as shown here, which makes their ultimate fate, ‘here in earth’, all the more tragic.