Over six decades, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has been explaining a century of conflicts and misunderstandings between Russia and Japan with rare linguistic versatility, bringing to his work unremitting forensic research. He has also analysed the disintegration of the Russian monarchy and the bewildering chaos of revolution. In this book, he examines microscopically how the Romanov dynasty lost power.

The saga of the fall of Nicholas II and Alexandra has been told many times – as a tear-jerking epic about a loving family unable to control its subjects and as the story of pig-headed martinets destroyed by those they had wronged. Hasegawa combines both approaches. Day by day, he follows the monarchy’s collapse through the letters, diaries and telephone calls of both major and minor figures. We sense predestination: an unbridled, ill-advised emperor and unhinged empress appoint ministers (including at least one deranged syphilitic mystic) who consult nobody. Hasegawa depicts Russia as a country riven with divisions, a place where revolutionaries and policemen infiltrate each other’s organisations, and where, despite economic and social progress, a gulf has opened up between the populace and the state.

Sometimes, Hasegawa portrays the Romanovs’ fall as avoidable: had Rasputin been murdered earlier, had Nicholas listened to advice, the outcome might have been different. However, it was military defeat that proved fatal to the Russian ruler, as it did for the rulers of Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Even