The personality of Nicholas II attracts everyone's attention today. Who is he: a bloody despot or a victim, a weak-willed representative of an exhausted dynasty or a person who deliberately abandoned the power that burdened him. The book by V. Pankratov, commissar of the Provisional Government, who was next to the royal family in Tobolsk exile, allows the reader to better understand the character of the executed emperor, imagine his inner circle in the last months of his life, and feel the atmosphere of that cruel revolutionary time.