Yermolov (1777-1861) or Ermolov as the CiP data calls him, kept a detailed journal during the Napoleonic wars, which later served as the basis for his memoir. In addition to that 1812 Patriot War, he remembers his adolescence, the campaigns in Poland 1806-07, and his time as governor of Georgia and the war in Chechnya. American historian Mikaberidze is a specialist on Napoleonic Europe. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation :2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

During the course of most of Russia's turbulent history, czars ruled. The story of these men and women - as diverse as the lands they governed - is, in many ways, the story of Russia itself. From the birth of the Kievan state in the second half of the ninth century to the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, historians James P. Duffy and Vincent L. Ricci trace the long and twisted line of imperial rule in Russia, offering many insights into the uses and abuses of absolute power, as well as a glimpse at world history through the eyes of those who made it. The Czars is a vital page in the literature of Russian history.

All the Tsar’s Men examines how institutional reforms designed to prepare the Imperial Russian Army for the modern battlefield failed to prevent devastating defeats in both the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and World War I. John W. Steinberg argues that the General Staff officers who devised new educational and doctrinal reforms had the experience, dedication, and leadership skills to defend the empire in the new age of warfare but were continually impeded by institutionalized inefficiency and rigid control from their superiors. These officers, he explains, were operating within a command structure unwilling to grant them the autonomy necessary to effect significant reform, which proved disastrous for the army and—ultimately—the empire.

A riveting account of the last eighteen months of Tsar Nicholas II's life and reign from one of the finest Russian historians writing today. In March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated and the dynasty that had ruled an empire for three hundred years was forced from power by revolution. Now Robert Service, the eminent historian of Russia, examines Nicholas's life and thought from the months before his momentous abdication to his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The story has been told many times, but Service's deep understanding of the period and his forensic examination of previously untapped sources, including the Tsar's diaries and recorded conversations, as well as the testimonies of the official inquiry, shed remarkable new light on his troubled reign, also revealing the kind of Russia that Nicholas wanted to emerge from the Great War. The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political ferment in Russia that followed the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet socialist republic.

A figure surrounded by myth and speculation, at the center of one of history's most cataclysmic events--the Russian Revolution--Nicholas II remains haunting and enigmatic. Now one of France's most eminent historians presents a biography that goes beyond the lies and half-lies surrounding Nicholas's reign to provide an evocative portrait of this most mysterious ruler. Illustrations.