Джейн Йолен: The Last Tsar's Dragons

A success if you and your family lived through it, that is. Not all of our main characters do make it to the end, though except for Rasputin and the Romanovs and their bloody deaths, we only hint at the others in the novella. Bornstein (Trotsky) made it through the revolutionary years and about twenty years beyond, though he was first exiled from Russia and then escaped to Mexico, where one of Stalin’s lackeys (whom he mistook for a friend) took him out with an ice pick to the head.

Along the way, we learned a lot about haemophilia, the mad monk, the uxorious but-not-particularly-smart last tsar, his unsung wife who really did do a lot for the poor in Russia, though she’d always been considered a foreign interloper who was called called “German Alix” by the courtiers.

Jane felt bad for the murders of the Romanovs, though she always believed that Rasputin got what he deserved. Adam puts it a bit differently: “I feel bad for the children but am pretty solid on my preferred fate for dictators.”

The dragons? Mostly, we made them up!

The killing of the mad monk, Rasputin, on December 30, 1916 is the stuff of saints’ tales or Grand Guignol plays. But for years, the details of his death were exactly as described in our story. Except for the dragons, of course. But new examination of his bones in 2016 seems to show he was more reasonably executed by a bullet to the back of the head. His death, and the death of his influence, would help precipitate the downfall of the Romanovs—the tsar’s family. Frankly, we prefer to believe the mad monk was killed by dragons.

As for the Romanovs, this is the actual timeline leading to their brutal murders.

February 1917: Russian Revolution.

After the revolution, the tsar and family are placed under house arrest.

March 15, 1917: The tsar is forced to abdicate.

August 1917: The tsar and family are taken to the Siberian town of Tobolsk.

April 1918: The Romanovs (as the tsar and family are now called) are moved to the Russian town of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, to a smaller accommodation where the windows of their rooms are painted shut and Anastasia is even shot at when trying to open a window on one stifling summer day.

July 17, 1918: At night, the Romanov family are led into a cellar and there shot, bayoneted, and battered with the barrels of guns. Death by dragons would have been swifter, cleaner, more merciful, so we gave that to them.

For eight years, the new Soviet leadership told lies about the fate of the tsar and his family, even hinting that they were alive and in exile. The Soviets only acknowledged in 1926 that the entire family had been murdered.

In 1981, Nicholas II and his entire family—wife, daughters, and son—were proclaimed passion-bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. A passion-bearer is a saint killed not because of his faith, like a martyr, but one who dies in faith at the hand of murderers.

1989: The bodies of Nicky and his family were exhumed and re-interred in St. Petersburg, joining most of his forebears back to Peter the Great within the walls of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

2018: A hundred years after their deaths, the Romanovs were declared saints. Murdered for their faith. As The Guardian has put it: “Yurovsky, the commissar who planned and implemented the killing, was of Jewish background.” So it is possible that there was a whiff of anti-Semitism in the canonization.

Trotsky, Lenin, and Borutsch (later Pavel Axelrod) all worked on the Russian revolutionary paper, Iskra , whose motto was “From a spark a fire will flare up.” Quite a bit on the nose once dragons are involved, but there you go.

In 1903, at the historic Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, all three of the men’s philosophies diverged, and Borutsch ended up with the Mensheviks opposing Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Trotsky started with the Mensheviks but eventually switched his allegiance to the Bolsheviks. It didn’t end well for either of them.

The entire minutes from this historic meeting, which lasted for months and had to be moved from Brussels to London partway through due to police interest, can be found online at https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903.

Koba graduated from robbery, kidnapping, and protection rackets to become one of the most fearsome dictators in all of history, Joseph Stalin.

There were actually two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The February Revolution overthrew the tsarist government and established a provisional government. Just eight months later, the famed October Revolution put paid to all that and established the Soviet government. We largely ignored the February Revolution for purposes of our story, because, well, it didn’t last very long and frankly, they didn’t have any dragons.

And finally, a note about those larcenous Chinese eunuchs. Jane thought that was way over the top, but Adam showed her the evidence. Yes, larcenous Chinese eunuchs burned down a building in the Forbidden City to hide the fact of their embezzlements in 1923. Well, it was the customs house, not dragon barns. But nevertheless, it stayed in. History is strange enough—even without dragons.

Beloved fantasist Jane Yolenhas been rightfully called the Hans Christian Andersen of America and the Aesop of the twentieth century. In 2018, she surpassed 365 lifetime publications, including adult, young adult, and children’s fiction; graphic novels, nonfiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, short-story collections, anthologies, novels, novellas, and books about writing. Yolen is also a teacher of writing and a book reviewer. Her best-known books are Owl Moon , the How Do Dinosaurs series, The Devil’s Arithmetic , Briar Rose , Sister Emily’s Lightship and Other Stories , and Sister Light, Sister Dark .

Among Yolen’s many awards and honors are the Caldecott and Christopher medals; the Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, Golden Kite, and Jewish Book awards; the World Fantasy Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award, and the Science Fiction Poetry Grand Master Award. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates.

Yolen lives in Western Massachusetts and St. Andrews, Scotland.

Adam Stemple( www.adamstemple.com) is the author of eight novels, including Pay the Piper (with Jane Yolen), winner of the 2006 Locus Award winner for Best Young Adult Book. Of his debut solo novel, Singer of Souls , Anne McCaffrey said, “One of the best first novels I have ever read.”

Stemple has co-authored two series of novels with Jane Yolen—the Rock ’n’ Roll Fairy Tale series, and more recently, The Seelie Wars . His short fiction includes a series set in feudal Japan featuring a samurai master and apprentice as a sleuthing duo, which was written for the historical fiction magazine Paradox .

In addition to writing, Stemple is a musician, web designer, and professional card player. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“To include dragons in the Russian Revolution seems like the kind of inspired idea that, in lesser hands, could not possibly live up to a reader’s expectations; but Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple take that idea and soar with it, spinning a tale of alternate history that is both wondrous and sublime. The book is elegant, quotable, and at the end, I simply wished for more.”