About the Book

A portrait of the twilight years of Isarism by Count Sergei Witte (1849-1915), the man who built modern Russia.

Witte presents incisive and often piquant portraits of the mighty and those around them—powerful Alexander III, the weak-willed Nicholas II, and the neurasthenic Empress Alexandra, along with his own notorious cousin, Madam Blavatsky, the "priestess of the occult".