The Fate of the Romanovs , livre ebook

THE FATE OF THE
Romanovs
THE FATE OF THE
Romanovs
Greg King and Penny Wilson

JOHN WILEY SONS, INC.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2003 by Greg King and Penny Wilson. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Photo credits: pages 32, 47, 52, 61, 81, 100, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 122, 130, 139, 162, 173, 193, 201, 239, 248, 266, 304, 306,404,492, 519: Atlantis Magazine; pages 64, 65,148, 252, 412, 427, 522: Dimitri Volkogonov; pages 121, 224, 269, 273, 323, 354, 361, 439: Ian Lilburn.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
King, Greg, date.
The fate of the Romanovs / Greg King and Penny Wilson,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13 978-0-471-20768-9 (cloth : alk paper)
ISBN-10 0-471-20768-3 (cloth : alk paper)
ISBN-13 978-0-471-72797-2 (paper : alk paper)
ISBN-10 0-471-72797-0 (paper : alk paper)
1. Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918-Assassination. 2. Nicholas II,
Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918-Family. 3. Russia-History-Nicholas II,
1894-1917. I. Wilson, Penny, date. II. Title.
DK258.6.K56 2003
947.084 1-dc21 2003000585
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
To Peter Kurth
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world-and never will.
- MARK TWAIN
Contents
Foreword
Cast of Characters
Introduction
Authors Note

1 The Ruin of an Empire

2 A Traitor to the Revolution

3 The House of Special Purpose

4 It Was Dreadful, What They Did . . .

5 The Seventy-eight Days

6 Russia in Chaos

7 The First to Die

8 The June Conspiracies

9 A Happy Hour with the Grandest People in the World

10 The Coming Storm: Enter Yurovsky

11 Murderous Intentions

12 G tterd mmerung

13 The Four Brothers

14 Aftermath

15 The Investigations

16 Holy Relics of Our Saints

17 Unearthing the Past

18 An Unknown Grave from the Soviet Period

19 Bones of Contention

20 It s All Secret, All Political

21 The Secret of Koptyaki Forest

22 Drowned in This Mist of Holiness
Epilogue

Appendix 1 Ekaterinburg Guards

Appendix 2 Inventory of Romanov Possessions in Ekaterinburg

Appendix 3 The Romanovs Jewels

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index
Foreword
When Greg King and Penny Wilson asked me to write a short foreword for this book, I said that I d be honored. This statement conceals more than it looks. After thirty years involvement in what I happily call the Romanov Wars, I find myself still entrenched among the rebels- if anything, somewhat further to the left. In 1983, my first book, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson , argued for a complete revision of thinking about the most famous Anastasia claimant, who died the following year. I pled her case again, briefly, in Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra (1995), even though, by that time, DNA testing on Mrs. Anderson s remains had seemed to prove conclusively that she was a fraud. I still think otherwise, and am known in the trenches either as Anna Anderson s tireless champion or-more often-as some kind of nut on this story.
In saying this, I salute Greg and Penny s courage in asking me aboard, but imply nothing about the independence of their work. They know that they ve entered both a quagmire and a minefield, and that their account of the last days and murder of the Russian imperial family will find objection in many quarters. It has never been otherwise. When I began researching the story seriously in 1970, the accepted version of the death of the Romanovs had hardened into stone. This is the tale that everyone knows-of the tsar, his wife, their five children, and four remaining servants held prisoner by the Bolsheviks at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, who were woken in the early hours of July 17, 1918, ordered to dress, and taken downstairs to a cellar, where all eleven were shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned to death. The bodies were taken into the forest, hacked to pieces, soaked in petrol, and burned; the larger bones were then dissolved in sulfuric acid, and what remained was tossed down an abandoned mineshaft, leaving nothing behind but a suspicious trail of immediately identifiable objects: icons, jewelry, belt buckles, the burned remains of six women s corsets- accounting exactly for the number of female victims-and Jemmy, Anastasia s dog, who was supposedly yapping like mad during the execution and callously killed with his mistress. Looking back, I can scarcely believe how naive we were.
It wasn t until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that anything like a clear picture of the Ekaterinburg murders emerged. In the West, this process had started sometime before, first at the marathon Anastasia trials in Germany, and later in a series of books that knocked holes in the Sokolov Report, the official record of the White Russian army s investigation of the Romanovs disappearance. Murders without corpses are difficult to prove, and when these murders are royal they explode exponentially, touching every chord of history, passion, symbolism, patriotism-and intrigue. In 1992, Edvard Radzinsky s The Last Tsar .; edited by the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was an international best-seller, reproducing for the first time documents, testimony, and interviews about the Ekaterinburg murders from Russian archives. These proved, if nothing else, the incompetence, bewilderment, and almost comical bad timing of the tsar s assassins. But they also proved, to any open mind, that the Bolsheviks were liars lying to liars, and that this was especially the case if they were asked to sign their names to official reports. In 1989, the remains of the imperial family had been found in the woods outside Ekaterinburg-all but two of them, that is, Alexei and one of his sisters-though whether it s Anastasia or Marie remains a source of predictable discord and controversy.
I went to Ekaterinburg myself in 1992, after the first forensic examination of the Romanov bones by American scientists. The city s nose was still out of joint. Many were convinced that the skeletons couldn t possibly be authentic; others resented the decision of the Center - Moscow-to invite American scientists to Ekaterinburg over the heads of the local authorities, all of whom, in any case, were at war with each other: the coroner, the district governor, the archivists, the scientists, the Church, the men who found the bodies, and the sudden profusion of monarchists, who urged me not to trust this one or that one because he is out with the members of the emperor s family! In the meantime, as my translator said, It is forbidden to take pictures of the skeletons, and above all to sell them to foreigners. The only person I met in Ekaterinburg whose passions weren t inflamed was Dr. Ludmilla Koryakova, an archaeologist at Ural State University, who was ordered practically at gunpoint in 1991 to excavate the bones. Her words bear emphasis:

There was nothing like the proper atmosphere or precaution, no preparation, no tools and no instruments. . . . We had one bulldozer, some mil itary trucks, and several spades. Everything was done too quickly. . . . Everybody got digging, not just the experts. The evidence had already been considerably destroyed by earlier excavations. The skeletons were no longer lying in the way they had been dumped. . . . Many were destroyed. I thought at first that the corpses had been dismembered, because they were so brutally treated. The skulls were smashed beyond recognition-there were just holes where the faces had been. I Ve seen a lot of skulls and bones but never so many that were so badly damaged.
This is the subject of the book you re about to read, the first comprehensive account of the Romanov murders to appear since their bones were walled up in 1998 at the Cathedral o