Winning… and Losing

Note: On Tuesdays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

I’m reading The Romanovs: 1613-1918 (by Simon Sebag Montefiore, who also wrote the Stalin book I read last summer). I’ve long been fascinated by the tragic story of the last tsar of Russia and his family (and, truth be told, took the confirmation name Anastasia for his youngest daughter rather than the fourth century Serbian martyr remembered in Canon of the Mass)....