Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg, 1930.

I am no better than any other man, but I know of many who are worse.

And I’ve seen one of these, not even a man so much as a monster vaguely resembling one, taken into the familiar bosoms of those who shunned, scorned and ostracized me for nothing more than, in the veiled euphemisms of that day, ‘mistakes in grammar’…

All for my relationship with a certain Felix Felixovich. Yes, ‘relationship’ is an adequately broad term to describe what I shared with the Yussopov prince; I cannot say it was nothing more than a friendship, and I don’t know if we were truly lovers, for we were not in love. But as for the rest—I hate to acquiesce with rumors; all the stink of scandal that has haunted me since my youth, but if I am to be completely candid…

Which I cannot, now, be. Too much fate rests in what were once idle playboy's hands, and the shocking, scandalous image I once cultivated so carefully, has been replaced by another, more fitting to my current station in life.

I wonder now, looking back across the long, tumultuous years, how everything would have transpired—had the monster had his way. Had he prevented the marriage that not so much brought stability to my ever-volatile state of my heart as to my similarly-conditioned homeland. Motherland. Rodina.

For although I loved my cousin the Tsar as both a blood relation and a friend, he could not care for the vast land he inherited but never wanted. Neither could his son, especially with the crippling condition that his parents kept secret out of pure desperation. If the Romanovs were to continue occupying the Russian throne, change and reform were necessary. Russia had no chance of surviving the bizarre complexities of this new modern age, of the twentieth century, with the same archaic, inflexible monarchy that had seen it through all the hundreds of years before.

But the Tsar, my cousin Nicky, was good-hearted to the point of naivety, and, if one is to be brutally honest, incompetent as well.

And as for his wife—

The German. The deceiver and the deceived; the one who embraced the filth of that demon-ridden peasant wholeheartedly—I cannot fault only her, but I can also say no good of her. So I will say nothing at all.

For, bound as I am to her daughter, I can also say no ill of the German woman, though she is long exiled and in her grave, along her husband and son. That daughter now wears her crown—Tsarina Olga Nikolaevna Romanova, wife of Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, Emperor of all the Russias--my wife.