The Fate of the Romanovs - Softcover

King, Greg; Wilson, Penny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471727970 ISBN 13: 9780471727972

Publisher: Trade Paper Press, 2005

Synopsis

Abundant, newly discovered sources shatter long-held beliefs

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 revealed, among many other things, a hidden wealth of archival documents relating to the imprisonment and eventual murder of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their children. Emanating from sources both within and close to the Imperial Family as well as from their captors and executioners, these often-controversial materials have enabled a new and comprehensive examination of one the pivotal events of the twentieth century and the many controversies that surround it.

Based on a careful analysis of more than 500 of these previously unpublished documents, along with numerous newly discovered photos, The Fate of the Romanovs makes compelling revisions to many long-held beliefs about the Romanovs' final months and moments. This powerful account includes:
* Surprising evidence that Anastasia may, indeed, have survived
* Diary entries made by Nicholas and Alexandra during their captivity
* Revelations of how the Romanovs were betrayed by trusted servants
* A reconstruction of daily life among the prisoners at Ipatiev House
* Strong evidence that the Romanovs were not brutalized by their captors
* Statements from admitted participants in the murders

About this title

About the Author

GREG KING is the author of five previous books and the forthcoming The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power, and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II. A noted historian on Imperial Russia and the Romanov Dynasty, he is a frequent contributor to television specials in the United States, Canada, and Britain.

PENNY WILSON is a historian who specializes in Russia's late Imperial period. The authors' Web site is thefateoftheromanovs.com.

From the Back Cover

Acclaim for The Fate of the Romanovs

"A startlingly revisionist history of the last months of the Imperial family that compellingly destroys the tired old romantic clichés."
—Financial Times

"The Fate of the Romanovs is both encyclopaedic and compelling."
—Evening Standard

"This book is sure to become the standard for which all future books on the Romanovs will be based."
—Marlene Eilers, author of Queen Victoria's Descendants and publisher of Royal Book News

Based on a careful analysis of more than 500 previously unpublished archival documents, The Fate of the Romanovs shatters the mythology surrounding the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 to present the most extensively researched and current examination of one of the twentieth century's most gruesome and controversial events.

From the Inside Flap

Rumors, mysteries, and tales of horrifying privation and torture have echoed through the years, inspiring wild speculation and fantastic claims of the " truth" of the final days of Russia' s Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Now, in the first comprehensive account of their imprisonment and murder since the family' s remains were enshrined in St. Petersburg, The Fate of the Romanovs challenges earlier descriptions of these events with a wealth of fresh evidence and a careful re-examination of established facts.

Drawing from more than 500 previously unpublished documents, authors Greg King and Penny Wilson make compelling, controversial revisions to commonly held beliefs. They reveal that the family was not treated in a barbaric fashion during their captivity, but rather with a great deal of civility. They also dispel the legend that the family members remained devoted to each other throughout their ordeal; months of uncertainty and anxiety led to a slow but inexorable disintegration of family bonds.

This vividly narrated expose delves deeply into the long-secret archives of the Russian Revolution to discover that Lenin did not order the family' s execution- as had been previously thought- and to reveal who actually made the decision and how it was carried out. Secret documents also disclose that the KGB orchestrated the 1978 " discovery" of the Romanov grave and that the Soviet government had known of its existence from the beginning.

Most shocking of all is the confirmation that two of the tsar' s children may have escaped execution and that the fabled Grand Duchess Anastasia could well have been one of them. Shocking inanother way is the revelation of successful efforts of Imperial hangers-on to barter for their own freedom using the Romanovs' vast cache of jewels.

Every claim and assertion in this startling new report is supported with copious documentary evidence from multiple sources. The authors cite many accounts from those closest to the actual events, including memoirs by the commandant of the Ipatiev House in which the family was imprisoned; Victor Netrebin, who participated in the murders; Bolshevik officials who revealed the betrayal of the Romanovs by their servants; and a physician who was given access to the Imperial prisoners. They also quote the statements of guards Alexei Kabanov and Alexander Strekotin and draw information from Romanov family papers, including personal letters and documents on the fate of the Romanov remains.

Supplemented with numerous, never-before-published photos and a helpful cast of characters numbering in the hundreds, The Fate of the Romanovs explodes myths, confirms long-dismissed theories, solves mysteries, and poses intriguing new questions about events that, though they occurred nearly a century ago, continue to fascinate the world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Fate of the Romanovs

By Greg King

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2005 Greg King
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780471727972

Chapter One

The Ruin of an Empire

Ashrill whistle shattered the silence of the snowyafternoon as the Red Cross train slowly steamed into the sidingat Tarnopol. Weary soldiers, bundled against the freezingrain, shuffled noiselessly along the crowded platform, heads bent low,eyes hollow and resigned. Amid the sea of disconsolate faces, J. P.Demidov, muffled in a thick astrakhan coat and hat, made his way acrossthe siding, jumped into a waiting motorcar, and left the despair of thestation in his wake.

It was the first winter of the Great War. In the devastation ofRussian-occupied Galicia, a rising tide of miseries threatened to overtakethe Imperial Army. Four months earlier, poorly trained, uneducatedpeasants proudly wore their new uniforms as they marched west,toward the advancing German and Austro-Hungarian armies under thelate summer sun; for many, the clean leather boots had been the firstpair of decent shoes they owned. But the four months could have beenfour years for the changes they wrought. Uniforms were ragged, mud-died,stained with food, sweat, urine, and their comrades' blood, and thenew boots-so impressive in the bright August sunshine-revealedtheir shabby manufacture as the Imperial Army waded through themarshes of Poland and the Danube. Disease and dejection hung likespecters over these men, slowly replacing the patriotic ideals and shortconflict promised in the far-off days of summer.

Demidov's motorcar snaked through the streets of Tarnopol,clogged with refugees shuffling through the slush among the ruins ofbombed buildings as they dodged piles of fallen brick and burnedtimbers. The pale, expansive sky, dotted with leafless fingers of gnarledtrees, disappeared into a shadowy stretch of swirling snow, broken onlyby ribbons of black crows that scattered and spread at the distant thudof enemy artillery fire. Misery was everywhere.

The Red Cross train on which Demidov arrived sat at the platform,angrily belching smoke into the winter sky. Dispatched by the Duma,the Russian parliament, it carried new bandages, linens, uniforms, supplies, andfresh medical personnel to replace the depleted Russianstores. Russia's presence in Galicia was hard-won, a much-needed boostto the nation following disastrous defeats in eastern Prussia. But theGalician campaign, waged by hungry and demoralized men slowlyoverwhelmed by growing discontent of war, marked the beginning of aweary bond shared by soldiers across the Continent.

As a deputy in the Duma, Demidov had supervised the legislature'sRed Cross train on its journey across the vast sweep of the RussianEmpire; having safely delivered it, he remained in Tarnopol, directingthe distribution of supplies. One night he met a middle-aged woman,said to be a mystic. Without warning, she fell into a trance and began tomurmur a string of prophecies. When Demidov asked about the war,she replied that the Russian army would suffer defeat in Galicia, soldiersgiving themselves over to the enemy. The Allies would be victorious,but Russia would not last out the war.

"What about the emperor?" Demidov asked.

"I can see him in a room, on the floor, killed," she slowly answered.

"And the empress?" Demidov pressed.

"Dead, by his side," she replied.

"Where are the children, then?"

"I cannot see them," she announced. "But beyond the corpses of theemperor and the empress, I can see many more bodies."

Demidov left, shaken. The following day he boarded a train andreturned across the frozen winter landscape to Petrograd. The capitalprovided a stark contrast to the wretched scenes in Galicia: here, thewide boulevards were jammed with French motorcars and fashionablecarriages, conveying privileged passengers to the pastel palaces liningthe icy Neva River. Here, life carried on largely as before; in Galicia, ithad ground to a tragic halt. But the tranquillity would not last. Intwenty-six months the mighty Russian Empire collapsed, victim of arevolution that enveloped the glittering world of the imperial court.And the seer's vision of regicide became horrific fact only eighteenmonths later, when the 304-year-old Romanov Dynasty came to itsbloody, inexorable end in a small cellar room in the Ural Mountainsmining town of Ekaterinburg.

* * *

The romanov dynasty had ruled Russia for nearly three hundredyears when, in 1894, Nicholas II acceded to the imperial throne. As theempire entered the twentieth century, the decades of fear and respectenveloping the imperial house had eroded, replaced with antipathy andalienation. The dynasty languished on an ethereal plane, subsumed inits own Byzantine opulence and a sense of impending doom. Shortlyafter the last emperor came to the throne, the young writer DimitriMerezhovskii ominously recorded: "In the House of the Romanovs ...a mysterious curse descends from generation to generation. Murdersand adultery, blood and mud.... Peter I kills his son; Alexander I killshis father; Catherine II kills her husband. And besides these great andfamous victims there are the mean, unknown and unhappy abortions ofthe autocracy ... suffocated like mice in dark corners, in the cells of theSchlusselburg Fortress. The block, the rope and poison-these arethe true emblems of Russian autocracy. God's unction on the brows ofthe Tsars has become the brand of Cain."

In their centuries of rule, the Romanovs had wavered between failedreforms and brutal repression, bourgeois domesticity interrupted bymurderous family plots. Though rich in artistic and cultural wealth,their empire bore little resemblance to a modern industrial state. Thevast majority of Russia's 140 million subjects were uneducated peasants,their lives governed by a centuries-old struggle for survival; the handfulof privileged aristocrats lived in splendid isolation in their baroqueand neoclassical palaces in St. Petersburg and Moscow, spoke Frenchand English instead of Russian, and spent holidays gambling away fortunesin Baden-Baden, Nice, and Monte Carlo. Yet between these twoextremes stretched a growing class of urbanized peasants seeking a betterlife as factory workers, only to discover poverty and despair; and thesmall intelligentsia of merchants, lawyers, and students who devouredphilosophical works and questioned the autocracy.

Russia entered the twentieth century poised on the edge of a volcano,demanding a steady hand and firm character to guide it throughthe uncertain waters of the modern era. It was the empire's misfortune,and Nicholas II's personal tragedy, that he took the throne at this crucialmoment. Hopelessly ill equipped to deal with the burdens of hisexalted position, and incapable of decisive action in the face of impendingcatastrophe, he presided over the dynasty's last years as an impotentspectator, unwilling and unable to avoid the wave of horrors that sweptover Russia and drowned his country and his family. Even his birth onMay 6,1868, seemed to hint at the tragedy to come. In the liturgicalcalendar of the Russian Orthodox Church, it was the Feast of St. Job, anill omen to the impressionable Nicholas. With tragic fatalism, Nicholaspassively ascribed every catastrophe that befell his empire, every terribledrama suffered in his private life, to "God's will."

He was the eldest of the six children born to the future emperorAlexander III and his wife, Marie Feodorovna, a daughter of KingChristian IX of Denmark. A second son, Alexander, was born in 1869,but lived for less than a year. In Nicholas's first fourteen years, the familygrew rapidly. He was joined in the nursery by two brothers, GrandDuke George Alexandrovich, who was born in 1871, and Grand DukeMichael Alexandrovich, in 1878;and two sisters, Grand Duchess XeniaAlexandrovna, in 1875,and Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, in1882. Raised in an atmosphere of familial love that stressed subservienceas a cardinal virtue, Nicholas was unfailingly deferential, yetsuffered under his father's heavy hand. Alexander made no attempt todisguise his disappointment in the shy, sensitive young boy who wouldone day follow him to the imperial throne. He "loathed everything thatsavored of weakness," recalled one official, and his eldest son bore thebrunt of his wrath. In an attempt to shape Nicholas in his own image,Alexander bullied him, crushing his instincts and even insulting him infront of his friends by yelling, "You are a little girlie!"

Never one to argue, Nicholas simply accepted this treatment; witheach passing year he became increasingly quiet and withdrawn, hamperedby indecision and a lack of self-confidence, a situation his motherencouraged. Not particularly well educated, Marie Feodorovna was aclinging, possessive woman who spoiled Nicholas as much as her husbandbullied him. She kept her son in an oppressive cocoon where heremained emotionally dependent. Friends and influences beyond thisartificial world were regarded with suspicion, and allowed only withgreat reluctance. Happy though they may have been with this bourgeoisfamily life, Alexander and Marie fatally crippled their eldest son. Hepassed into adulthood immature and incapable of reasoned judgment;instead, he was subject only to emotion, relying on instinct and onpassion-whether familial love or religious fervor-when making importantdecisions.

This claustrophobic existence was heightened by the terrible uncertaintysurrounding the imperial throne. At age twelve, Nicholaswatched helplessly as his grandfather Alexander II bled to death beforehis eyes, victim of a revolutionary bomb. Six years later, on the anniversaryof the tragedy, Nicholas and his family barely escaped assassinationthemselves when six men, carrying the workings of crude bombs, werediscovered in the streets of St. Petersburg. An investigation found thatthey were part of a larger plot, driven by revolutionary students at St.Petersburg University; after a brief trial, the conspirators were foundguilty and hung, the last public executions in imperial Russia. Amongthose who went to the gallows was a young man named AlexanderUlyanov, elder brother of the boy who would become Vladimir Lenin.

Such incidents seared Nicholas's own conception of his future, a situationexacerbated by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the political tutor whowarned that violence was the natural outcome of any move towarddemocracy in Russia. The tutor made no intellectual distinction betweenthe violent revolutionaries who engaged in acts of terror, and the majorityof students and the intelligentsia who peacefully campaigned forreform, a dangerous and inaccurate foundation on which the youngNicholas built his few political views. Pobedonostsev emphasized themystical nature of the Russian autocracy as a unique bond between sovereignand people. According to him, "real" Russians, loyal Russians,stood unquestionably behind the imperial throne, accepted the autocracyas divinely mandated, and prayed fervently for their sovereign. Inturn, the emperor was endowed with divine grace, answerable to no onebut his own conscience. Democratic concessions, Pobedonostsevdeclared, only disguised encroachment of the emperor's divine rights, asevering of this mystical relationship with the Russian people.

Nothing in Nicholas's education prepared him for what was tocome. He had a passion for history; spoke Russian, French, German,Danish, and English; liked dancing; and impressed those whom hemet with his quiet, thoughtful demeanor. Nor did his five-year careeras an officer in the Preobrajensky GuardsRegiment provide any intellectual ormoral development. Rather thanassume leadership, Nicholas reactedpassively to military life, happy totake orders and follow a regimentedroutine with a rigidlydefined hierarchy where hisentire path was laid out for himby senior officers, leaving nounwelcome questions of choice.Even when he came to the imperialthrone, at age twenty-six,Nicholas remained distinctlynaive and immature, lacking thevision and force of will necessary toguide his country through the tumultuousdecades that followed.

Nicholas had a string of divertingyouthful romances, but his truepassion lay elsewhere. He first met Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhinewhen she attended the wedding of her sister Elizabeth, known as Ella,to his uncle Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, in 1884. Within a weekthe sixteen-year-old tsesarevich was convinced of his love for the shy,twelve-year-old German princess, and this conviction deepened in thewinter of 1889, when she stayed with her sister and brother-in-law inSt. Petersburg. That winter, Nicholas was a handsome young officerwith light brown hair and deep blue eyes, a dashing figure in hisImperial Guards uniform if, at five feet, seven inches tall, just slightlyshorter than the princess herself. Alix, too, had blossomed into a quietlybeautiful young woman, with golden hair and blue-gray eyes. The skating parties,balls, and dinners gave way to an extensive correspondenceafter she returned to her home in Darmstadt, and the young loversfound eager conspirators in Serge and Ella, who used their position atcourt to influence Alexander III and Marie Feodorovna.

In the case of Alix of Hesse, there was much to overcome. Beautifulthough she was, she failed to win over the imperial couple during hervisits to Russia. Confirmed into the Lutheran Church at age sixteen,Alix was preternaturally serious, and consumed with religious passion;coupled with a prim Victorian morality and distaste for frivolity, she leftunfavorable impressions on those she encountered. Her emotions wereguarded, her social skills undeveloped, creating a veneer of boredom, ofdisinterest, and of distinct unease. Her cousin Queen Marie of Romanialater declared that Alix was "not of 'those who win'; she was too distrustful,too much on the defensive.... She had no warm feeling for anyof us and this was of course strongly felt in her attitude, which was neverwelcoming. Some of this was no doubt owing to shyness, but the wayshe closed her narrow lips after the first rather forced greeting gave youthe feeling that this was all she was ready to concede and that she wasfinished with you then and there.... She made you, in fact, feel anintruding outsider, which is of all sensations the most chilling anduncomfortable. The pinched, unwilling, patronizing smile with whichshe received all you said as if it were not worth while answering, was oneof the most disheartening impressions I ever received. When she talked,it was almost in a whisper, and hardly moving her lips as though it weretoo much trouble to pronounce a word aloud. Although there was littledifference in age between us, she had a way of making me feel as thoughI were not even grown up."

After her mother's premature death in 1878, Alix found herself in aworld dominated by forceful women.



Continues...

Excerpted from The Fate of the Romanovsby Greg King Copyright © 2005 by Greg King. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Trade Paper Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471727970
• ISBN 13: 9780471727972
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672