One morning in July of 1998, all the Romanovs still living assembled in the lobby of the recently renovated Astoria Hotel in St. Petersburg. They were waiting to attend the solemn burial of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their children, murdered eighty years earlier, who were finally to be interred together. Prince Michael of Greece was there because his grandmother, Grand Duchess Olga, was a Romanov. She left Russian at sixteen to marry...