The story of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra has fired the world's imagination ever since their violent deaths during the Russian Revolution. In this biography, first published in 1967, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Massie sets out to show how the personal tragedy of the young heir's haemophilia, and the decisive influence it brought Rasputin, became fatally linked with the collapse of Imperial Russia. The book presents an account of one of history's most dramatic episodes, and a portrait of the two people caught at the centre of the maelstrom.