25 Lyet Pered Rovolystsiey [Translation of Russian Title: 25 Years before Revolution]; The Reign of Emperor Nikolay II

THIS WORK IS IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE. 644 pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Typed quotations (presumed) taped to the top of pave 5. Front cover has tear at top spine. Cover has some wear and soiling. This work is about the Reign of Tsar Nicholas II. The first printing was in 1949. There are 21 untitled chapters. The period covered is from 1894 until 1917. It discusses Court Life, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the start of the Russian Revolution. Sergei Sergeiivich Oldenburg was born on 29 June 1888. His father Sergey Fedorovich Oldenburg (1863-1934), was a famed academician (1900), and Orientalist specializing in Buddhist studies. He served as permanent secretary of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (from 1904), Russian Academy of Sciences (from 1917), USSR Academy of Sciences (1925-1929), and Minister of Public Education (July - September 1917). He graduated from the law faculty of Moscow University, and later worked as an official in the Ministry of Finance of Russia. Sergei from a young age adhered to right-wing views, a member the Union of October 17. In 1918 Oldenburg went to the Crimea, where he joined the White movement. In the fall of 1920, he was unable to evacuate with the Russian Army, headed by General Baron P.N. Wrangel, because he was sick with typhoid . Having recovered, with fake documents, he traveled from Crimea to Petrograd, where he met his father, who helped him to emigrate. He settled in Paris, France, where he lived in poverty. Sergei Sergeiivich Oldenburg died at the age of 51, in Paris on 28 April 1940. Oldenburg was able to undertake such a study of Russia's last tsar, having had access to a unique collection of documents. These included copies of authentic historical acts of the Russian Empire held in the Russian Embassy in Paris on Rue Grenelle. Long before the First World War, duplicates of the originals had been made as a precautionary measure, and sent to the Russian Embassy in Paris for storage. In October 1917, the Provisional Government appointed Vasily Alekseyevich Maklakov (1869-1957), to replace Alexander Izvolsky as Russia's Ambassador to France. When he arrived in Paris, Maklakov learned about the takeover by the Bolsheviks. Regardless, he continued to occupy the splendid mansion of the Russian embassy for seven years, until France found it necessary to recognize the Bolshevik government. Fearing that the Embassy's archival documents would fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Makloakov packed them up, including Oldenburg's manuscript, the Okhrana archives, among other items and arranged for their transfer to the Stanford University. It was the Supreme Monarchist Council, a monarchist organization created by Russian émigrés in 1921, who commissioned Oldenburg to write a comprehensive history of the reign of Emperor Nicholas II. The first volume which appeared in Russian, was published in 1939 in Belgrade (Serbia), and the second was not published until a decade later, and posthumously in 1949 in Munich (Germany). "Oldenburg's work is a major document in modern Russian historiography. The final contribution of a Russian nationalist historian, it provides uniquely sensitive insights into the character, personality, and policies of Russia's last tsar. It has no rival as a political biography of Nicholas II and is without peer as a comprehensive history of his reign." His comprehensive study of Nicholas II is apologetic in nature. Oldenburg substantiates that the revolution interrupted the successful progressive economic development of Russia under Nicholas II: "in the twentieth year of the reign of Emperor Nicholas II, Russia had reached a unprecedented level of economic prosperity". Oldenburg's fundamental historical research on the life and reign of Emperor Nicholas II, is sadly overlooked or simply ignored by Western historians. …