The story itself, broadly familiar from popular treatments over the years, is well told by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa in “The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs.” ...
"Putin becomes, in the words of one monk I interviewed, an 'echo' of the last czar," Riccardi-Swartz notes. "Folks like this monk see Putin's Russia as the last bulwark against the modern West ...