The basic premise of this book is that it is worth presenting to the public a view of the life and reign of Nicholas II very different to the one commonly held either in the West or in Soviet Russia. To say that this book is more sympathetic than most to Russia's last monarch does not mean that it is an attempt to whitewash Nicholas II or to deny that he was by personality and temperament in many ways ill-suited to the task which fate called upon him to perform. Still less does it attempt to absolve the last Romanov sovereign from responsibility for a number of important errors committed during his reign. What I do intend is to attach the trivialization of Nicholas and his regime, and to question the unthinking imposition of Western liberal or socialist assumptions and values on the history of late imperial Russia. - Preface.