Valentina Kovalova, a cousin to Tsar Nicholas, fled Russia in 1917 after Bolsheviks slaughtered her family. She took her infant son to Germany but left his twin brother whom she thought was dead. She married a man who became a close confidant and friend of Hitler. As WWII commences, her husband commands a U-boat, and her sons fight on opposite sides. She moves in the inner circle of Nazi society while hiding Jews and occasional Allied soldiers in her home until Himmler discovers her involvement in the resistance.

Seventeen-year-old Valentina Kovalova considers her Romanov blood to be a blessing until Bolsheviks kidnap her. Their leader becomes her lover and helps her to go home. He returns to his rebels without knowing she is pregnant. Her father shuns her, his cousin Tsar Nicholas abdicates, and Valentina delivers twin sons in the midst of war and revolution. Bolsheviks kills her parents and two sisters. Valentina flees to Germany with her infant son, leaving behind his twin brother whom she believes is dead. She inherits the extensive estate of her aunt and marries a handsome man from a prominent family. He becomes a confidant of Adolf Hitler. Her husband thinks the Fhrer will restore Germany to her rightful glory. Valentina recognizes him for the madman he is. At great risk to herself, she refuses to support him and hides a Jewish girl in her home.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year The untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation. Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires. Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.

She was an orphan, ushered into the royal palace on the prayers of her majestry. Yet, decades later, her time spent in the embrace of the Romanovs haunts her still. Is she responsible for those murderous events that changed everything? If only she can find the heir, maybe she can put together the broken pieces of her own past-maybe she can hold on to the love she found.

Thoracic surgeon Jack Connor rushes to the emergency room in Fairfax County, Virginia, for a former army buddy, Sid McCloud, who has been shot in the chest. Jack takes him to surgery and saves his life, but someone tries again to kill Sid the next morning. Sid tells Jack about a terrorist plot to assassinate the president. Soon the terrorists succeed in killing Sid, and they frame Jack for the murder. Jack must hide from the police, the FBI, and the terrorists as he tries to clear his name and to save the president. Only Sids ex-wife, who was once a close friend, believes Jack. She helps him to hide and to search for the killers.

Treasure-hunting team Sam and Remi Fargo’s search for a Romanov fortune brings them into perilous contact with an ambitious neo-Nazi clan in this New York Times bestselling adventure. In 1918, a ransom of enormous size was paid to free the Romanovs from the Bolsheviks, but, as history knows, the Romanovs died anyway. And the ransom? During World War II, the Nazis stole it from the Russians, and after that--it vanished. Until now. When a modern-day kidnapping captures the attention of husband-and-wife team Sam and Remi Fargo, the couple soon learn that these long-lost riches may be back in play, held in trust by the descendants of a Nazi guerrilla faction called the Werewolves. It is their mission to establish the Fourth Reich, and their time is coming soon. As the Fargos follow the trail across Europe, Northern Africa, and South America, they know only one thing. This quest is greater than anything they have ever done--it is their chance to make someone answer for unspeakable crimes, and to prevent them from happening again.

A saga of love and lust, personal tensions and rivalries, antagonisms and hatreds, The Flight of the Romanovs describes the last century of the Russian imperial dynasty, the Romanovs, from the youth of the future tsar Alexander III in the 1860s until the death in 1960 of his daughter, Olga Alexandrovna, the last grand duchess. John Curtis Perry and Constantine V. Pleshakov use a wealth of previously untapped sources, including unpublished diaries of many of the principal characters, interviews with people who knew them well, and never before published photographs to create a history of a family and a time. Along the way we learn of the relationships between Alexander III and his children, the conspiracy against Rasputin, Duke Dimitrie's affair with Coco Chanel, the hostile behavior of the House of Windsor toward the Romanovs, and the war between the Romanovs and the secret police. Concluding with a discussion of the imperial restoration movement in Russia today, The Flight of the Romanovs is a must-read for anyone interested in the Romanov family, Russian history, and the history of European royalty.

Russian historiography has focused on the power of the central state. The national historiographies of the peoples that were once part of the empire, on the other hand, concentrate on their own nation, and the empire for them is only a burdensome context in which a particular nation was "waking up," and fighting for independence. Miller addresses the fabric of interaction between the imperial authority and local communities in the Romanov empire. How did the authorities structure the space of the empire? What were the economic relations between the borderlands and the centre? How was the use of different languages regulated? How did the central authorities and local officials implement policies regarding different population groups? How did the experience, acquired in particular borderlands, influence the policies elsewhere--among others--through officials who often changed their place of service during their careers? How did the local elites and communities react to the policies of the imperial authorities? How did they uphold their special interests if the empire encroached on them, but also--how did they collaborate with the empire and how did they use imperial resources for local interests?