Giants in their own time (with the exception of the diminutive Nicholas II), the Romanov tsars no longer rule Russia in any literal sense. However, some spectacularly ghoulish deaths (these include a mass shooting at close range in a cellar, being dropped down a deep mineshaft while still alive and being blown to bits in a carriage) have guaranteed enduring fame for the Romanov dynasty – and provided splendid material for trustworthy popular historians like Helen Rappaport and Frances Welch. 

Nothing, it would appear, is more likely to ensure public interest than a dedicated attempt at eradication. It took three exhausting days of sawing, acid saturation and burning with gasoline to make the bones of Nicholas II and his family disappear. ‘No one can ever know what happened,’ declared the leader of the disposal unit. Fat chance. In 1979, the graves were discovered. In 1998, Boris Yeltsin presided over the equivalent of a state funeral for the last of the tsars. In 2000, Nicholas and his immediate family were canonised. So, in due course, was their doctor. Today, the Romanovs’ grand homes, toe-curlingly well restored (perhaps with a touch of guilt), are shrines. At Tsarskoe Selo, there is an eerily perfect replica of Tsarina Alexandra’s mauve boudoir, looking just as cosily suburban as it did back in 1917, the year of her husband’s abdication.

While Welch creates a tenderly intimate portrait of the last, doomed tsarina and her three German-born sisters, Rappaport focuses on another German princess, Juliane of Saxe-Coburg (known as ‘Julie’), an aunt of Queen Victoria, whom she calls ‘the Empress Russia Never Had’. Seldom told, the sad story of Julie’s life