How it was
Ronald Hingley
The File on The Tsar Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold (Gollancz £5.50) As every historian or intelligent reader of history knows, there is nothing more elusive than a fact. Russia is pre-eminently the land where such elusiveness is the rule rather than the exception. Her prime historical and literary documents have been impugned again and again by serious scholars. Is the 'Lay of lgor's Raid', that purportedly mediaeval masterpiece, a genuine twelfthcentury effusion or an eighteenth-century parody ? Ivan the Terrible's crucial 'correspondence' with the sixteenth-century dissident Prince Kurbsky—was it perhaps written by someone else in the following century? And what, to leap a little, of Khrushchev's 'secret' speech ? And so on.
In this context it is not surprising to find doubt cast on the celebrated slaughter— half way between an assassination and an execution—of the last, recently abdicated, Romanov Tsar-Emperor Nicholas I, together with his wife and children, on 16 July 1918. As everyone, at least in the Russian field, knows, the Tsar, the Tsarina, their son the Crown Prince, and their four daughters were taken down with certain retainers into the cellar of the Ipatycv House in Yekaterinburg in the Urals and shot on the orders, ultimately emanating from Moscow, of a local Bolshevik boss. The bodies, partly burnt and destroyed with acid, were then thrown down a local disused mineshaft, and that was that.
That all the above and other equally wellestablished details of the Romanov massacre are the proverbial load of old codswallop has been demonstrated, convincingly and at length, by Mr Summers and Mr Mangold. Hot on this by no means cold trail for four years, they have demolished the old story and replaced it with a version far more tentative but far more credible. It makes a fascinating account. Though the Tsar may indeed have been done to death in Yekaterinburg at about the accepted date it was probably not in that 'cellar' (which is not a cellar anyway). And his wife and children may have left, heavily disguised, by sealed train, only to perish some four months later after a period in the environs of Perm. The 'bodies' in the mineshaft were not at all what they seemed.
The vulnerability of the authorised version becomes increasingly clear as details of the various 'investigations' into the event are unrolled. These were largely sponsored by the White Russian authorities who captured Yekaterinburg shortly after the massacre. Progressively replacing their earliest investigators, whose attachment to estab
lishable fact may have been too close, they ended up with the final version Of one Nikolai Sokolov which presented a neat, readily assimilable, solution and a set of convenient martyrs. But Sokolov's conclusions are controverted by the vast unpublished dossier on which he based his findings, and which has now been brought to light by Messrs Summers and Mangold's brilliant detective work.
These ramifications, the claims of the various pretenders and the close involvement of King George V of Britain, as of the Kaiser--all this and much else is here scrupulously scrutinised by two professional sceptics who have scoured the globe and grubbed up many a peck of astonishingly ignored documents and testimonies in addition to the Sokolov archive. They have made their mark on history. No one, surely, will be able to write of the Romanov deaths again without taking their findings into account.
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