Greg King and Penny Wilson - The Fate of the Romanovs

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.

Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 7508400, fax (978) 6468600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Ill River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 7486011, fax (201) 7486008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 7622974, outside the United States at (317) 5723993 or fax (317) 5724002.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

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 9780-47120768-9 (cloth : alk paper)

ISBN-10 0471-207683 (cloth : alk paper)

ISBN-13 9780-47172797-2 (paper : alk paper)

ISBN-10 0471-727970 (paper : alk paper)

1. Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 18681918Assassination. 2. Nicholas II,

Emperor of Russia, 18681918Family. 3. RussiaHistoryNicholas II,

18941917. I. Wilson, Penny, date. II. Title.

DK258.6.K56 2003

947.0841dc21 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 worldand never will.

-MARK TWAIN

When Greg King and Penny Wilson asked me to write a short foreword for this book, I said that Id 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. Andersons remains had seemed to prove conclusively that she was a fraud. I still think otherwise, and am known in the trenches either as Anna Andersons tireless champion ormore oftenas some kind of nut on this story.

In saying this, I salute Greg and Pennys courage in asking me aboard, but imply nothing about the independence of their work. They know that theyve 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 knowsof 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 womens corsets accounting exactly for the number of female victimsand Jemmy, Anastasias 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 wasnt 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 armys 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, patriotismand intrigue. In 1992, Edvard Radzinskys 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 tsars 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 Ekaterinburgall but two of them, that is, Alexei and one of his sistersthough whether its 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 citys nose was still out of joint. Many were convinced that the skeletons couldnt possibly be authentic; others resented the decision of the Center Moscowto 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