The Last of the Tsars The Last of the Tsars The Last of the Tsars is a play by Michael Bawtree. The action takes place in Russia between 1912 and 1919, and follows the fortunes of the Romanov family and of Russia in the tumultuous years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, and beyond, to the assassination of the Romanov family by the Bolsheviks. The story is told through the eyes of Tsar Nicholas's brother Grand Duke Michael, who had been exiled from Russia by the Tsar in 1912 when he married a divorcee. Michael was called back to Russia at the outbreak of
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