The Russian Romanov dynasty came to an abrupt end on the
night of July 17, 1918, when the imperial family was executed by the
Bolsheviks. Or did it? Compelling new evidence reveals that Tsarevich
Alexei, the fourteen year-old son of Nicholas II and heir to the Russian
throne, may have escaped the bloodshed and been adopted by a local family
in a nearby village.
Meticulously researched and documented, The Escape of Alexei details how
Bolshevik soldiers bungled the execution, leading to confusion and chaos
during the shooting. Young Alexei was merely wounded and unconscious when
he was loaded onto the back of a truck with corpses of his murdered family
and driven to the secret burial site. Falling out of the truck en route
and left for dead, he was found by sympathetic soldiers who attended to
the young hemophiliac's wounds and helped him escape, introducing him into
a peasant family where he grew up under the name of Vasily Filatov.
The world of Russia's heir to the throne turned upside down. Vasily
Filatov became an apprentice shoemaker, and eventually a high school
geography and history teacher. He married, had children, and told his
family the story of the Tsarevich's escape in the third person, as
historical narrative. he never explained how, as a village teacher living
under the oppressive silence and censorship of the Soviet Union, he was
fluent in several foreign languages, had an in-depth knowledge of the
private life of the Romanov family, and an uncanny grasp of the details
surrounding the 1918 execution. With the advent of perestroika in the
1980's, the Soviet archives were finally opened to the public and, to his
family's amazement, many of the incredible stories that Vasily Filatov had
told his with and children were revealed to the world as historical fact.
In this startling volume, three well-respected scientists provide a
convincing, thoroughly documented account of how such an extraordinary
escape was possible, and how the executioners managed to cover up the fact
that the body of the heir to the throne was missing. Drawing on official
records and documents from Russian archive, the grisly personal accounts
of soldiers who took part in the execution, and utilizing the latest
scientific and forensic technology, the authors offer evidence that Alexei
Romanov and Vasily Filatov were on and the same.
Filatov died in 1988. But his widow and children provide intimate
reminiscences that bring this astonishing tale to life. And 101
black-and-white personal photographs reproduced throughout the text
demonstrate the remarkable physical resemblances between members of the
Romanov and Filatov families.
You might argue that there's no point to this English-language edition of a Russian book, because only the most feverish Russian monarchist could take seriously, as a political issue, the question of whether the last Tsar's heir survived the Bolshevik massacre at Ekaterinburg. But this is a bit like saying that it doesn't matter how Amelia Earhart died: a mystery is a mystery, each with its own special claims on our attention. We know that Cheka thugs buried two fewer bodies than they fired at, and forensic evidence shows that if those two got away, they were almost certainly Nicholas's two youngest children, Anastasia and Alexei. There have been many Alexei pretenders in Russia, but none with so well-documented a claim as the one presented (a little breathlessly) here, on behalf of the schoolteacher Vasily Filatov, who died in 1984. Computerized facial matching says that he must be Alexei, and there is an enormous amount of other circumstantial evidence. Intriguing ... as, in a rubber-necking sort of way, is the forensically detailed reconstruction of what happened on the murderous night of July 16 to 17, 1918. But note that the relevant genetic information about Filatov has not been disclosed. Many experts, using just the methods emphasized here, were convinced beyond doubt that Anna Anderson must have been Alexei's sister Anastasia ... until DNA samples showed up. So caveat lector. What really drives this book is the series of grainy, haunting images of Filatov: was he just a peasant turned teacher, or did those deep, inscrutable eyes, which do look so very, very like the eyes of the young tsarevitch, hide for six decades a terrible story about crawling away from a pile of corpses? --Richard Farr
