The Last Days of the Last Tsar Movie Review

There was no time to grieve for the last of the Romanovs after Nicholas II, Alexandra, and their five children were massacred at Ekaterinburg in 1918. The Soviet Union, then in its infancy, did not permit such a threatening luxury. Yet the sense of loss must have been intense to endure through nearly 75 years of repression. When the collapse of the Soviet Union made it safe to express such emotions, the Russian people recalled the Romanovs with affection and nostalgia. Director Anatoli Ivanov captures the sadness of the final rituals of the doomed Romanovs in his 1992 film, The Last Days of the Last Tsar. Ivanov blends archival footage with some of the most skillful re-enactments I've ever seen. In many cases, the look and tempo of the new footage so precisely matches the original films that it is only the fact that we know certain events would never have been recorded for posterity that allows us to tell the difference between them. 1971's Nicholas and Alexandra gave us the chocolate box version of the Tsar's demise. Ivanov's deeply poetic account is a far more eloquent and illuminating examination of the Romanov tragedy and its aftermath.

1992 m/C D: Anatoli Ivanov. VHS