‘The Last Czars’

The story of Russia’s Romanovs is one that shocks and intrigues at every retelling.

While many may be familiar with Disney’s take on the grand duchess Anastasia, fewer realise the brutal reality underpinning the animated story of an evil sorcerer, a young girl and a great escape.

In Netflix’s ‘The Last Czars’ (2019) we dive head first into Russia on the eve of revolution. It’s 1896, Nicholas II, the last czar, is about to officially take the throne alongside his German wife Alexandra ‘Alix’ Feodorovna and, to the superstitious, bad omens plague them from the start.

Framed as a woefully ignorant pair who blunder through their royal duties while peasants plot revolution outside the palace walls, the Romanovs star in an enduring cautionary tale about out of touch leaders in gilded cages who wake up to the red hot realities of their nation’s hunger, unemployment and discontent far, far too late.

Told through a compelling mix of historical drama and documentary, ‘The Last Czars’ features a selection of historians and experts, interspersed between the dramatisations, who shed light on the attitudes, idiosyncrasies and details of the day. The effect is like an episode of ‘The Crown’ but with some talking heads woven through.

Taking place during three moments in time, the docuseries incorporates the past, the literal present and the fictional present which is Berlin in 1925. At a medical facility in the German city a young woman says she is the grand duchess Anastasia, and her childhood tutor arrives to verify her claims.

Based on the true story of Anna Anderson – a Polish factory worker with a history of mental illness who claimed to be the Romanov grand duchess until her dying day – the scenes in 1925 illustrate the beginning of a persistent fascination with the youngest duchess, who was executed by the revolutionary Bolsheviks along with her family in 1918.

To hear the historians tell it, the rumour of Anastasia’s escape was actually a boon to the family’s murderers as many people agreed that killing the last czar’s children was beyond the pale. Even in the face of Nicholas II’s plagued reign which saw thousands of Russians dead in stampedes, ill-advised wars and eventually baying for a level of governmental power through the Duma (assembly).

But perhaps most damning to the Romanovs was their detested reliance on a self-proclaimed holy man and self-styled mystic named Grigori Rasputin. Arriving at the royal place after being banished from his home in Siberia where he was a named criminal and rapist, Rasputin’s orgiastic holy pilgrimage in the wake of his crimes leads him to the Romanovs’ palace.

Why they would welcome a man of such disrepute?

The czar’s sole male heir, Alexei, was a hemophiliac – a secret they kept from Russia as the condition connoted weakness, was seen as a curse and, at the time, people with this ailment rarely lived to adulthood.

Rasputin, God save them, was able to stop the boy’s bleeding.

This ability is why ‘the mad monk’ was able to rise quickly in the upper echelons of Russian society and eventually became the royals’, at least the czarina’s, most trusted advisor.

A tragic story about crumbling ideology, incompetent leadership, the fall of Russia’s last royal family and the violence that spawns and is a byproduct of revolution, ‘The Last Czars’ is overthrow at its most ungovernable and instructive to us all.

Slickly produced although one will have to mind the British accents and complete disregard for authentic turns of phrase, ‘The Last Czar’ is an educational and diverting six episodes starring Ben Cartwright as the drunken, sex-crazed Rasputin, Robert Jack as the inept czar Nicky and Susanna Herbert as the doomed and delusional Alix.

‘The Last Czars’ (2019) is now streaming on Netflix.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com

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