The Last of the Tsars the First World War, where he served in the Russian Army. When Tsar Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, he did so in favour of Grand Duke Michael, who himself abdicated some 48 hours later. So Michael was in fact 'the last of the Tsars.' The play was commissioned by the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1966, after another play on the same subject, "Nicholas Romanov" by William Kinsolving, had been tried out by the Stratford Festival Company at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in February, 1966, and found insufficiently dramatic. In spite of the shared general theme,
The Revolution Betrayed known by his pseudonym Leon Trotsky, was one of the top leaders of the 1917 October Revolution which brought a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (the Bolsheviks) (RSDLP) to power in Russia. Trotsky had long been one of the leading Marxist revolutionaries in Imperial Russia, sentenced in 1900 to exile in a distant part of Siberia for his activities against the regime. After a period of European exile, Trotsky returned to Russia during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, where his electric oratory made him a leading figure in the St. Petersburg Soviet until his arrest in December