Volume 30, Number 13 · August 18, 1983
Fall of an Empire
By Neal Ascherson
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat
by Ryszard Kapuscinski, translated by William R. Brand, by Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand
A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 164 pp., $12.95
A tiny, very old man sat alone in a silent palace with his valet for company. Outside, where the millennial empire had already collapsed and become—almost in the space of days—a memory as distant as Justinian's Byzantium, rain fell and fog closed in. Sometimes the King of Kings sat in his office and contemplated his telephones, more than a dozen, which were also silent. Sometimes he went to the chapel where the valet read to him from the Book of Psalms. Finally, there came the morning in 1974 when the tanks came to the palace and three officers in uniform entered to read the act of dethronement. 'The Emperor, standing, heard out the officer's words, and then he expressed his thanks to everyone, stated that the army had never disappointed him, and added that if the revolution is good for the people then he, too, supports the revolution and would not oppose the dethronement.' They took him out and helped him, bewildered, into the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, then drove him off to confinement. He died almost a year later.
Review, 2932 words
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