Peter Fleming on the last of the Tsars
A Baconian manque, Mr Richards sets out to prove that the Russian Imperial family, so far from being massacred in a basement in Ekaterinberg on the night of 16-17 July 1918, were rescued by an American agent and conducted, via Turkestan and Tibet, to Chungking where they boarded a British gun- boat and eventually finished up—still incog- nito—in Poland. From that country emerged, in 1960, a defector called Colonel Goleniew- ski who claims to be the Tsarevitch Alexei; he has happily recovered from his haemo- philia and looks remarkably young for his age which is (or ought to be) sixty-seven. All his sisters are still alive, one or two of them in duplicate.
This book can be recommended to con- noisseurs of the preposterous : but not un- ,t reservedly. In his preface Mr Richards, a retired American journalist, admits that he brought to the task of writing it 'a unique array of disqualifications. My ignorance of the known facts was vast. My lack of inter- est was almost unlimited.' The second of these handicaps has gone, so to speak, into reverse; the first remains, in so far as Mr Richards can be said to know what a fact is.
It is easy to see what he thinks a fact is: it is something he wants to believe. He has, for instance, dug out a letter in which his principal witness, William Rutledge Mc- Garry, describes a meeting with the ex-Tsar and his wife in Marseilles in 1923 (Then pressing my hand tightly once more, he saluted and strode silently down the walk until he entered the funicular and vanished like a wraith'). The improbable encounter is implausibly recorded—both His late Imperial Majesty and the American tutoyent each other; but the detail that has to be swept under the carpet is McGarry's description of the Tsar, who was a very short man, as 'tall'.
Our author rises effortlessly to the occasion. McGarry was himself of 'diminu- tive size' (his surviving children put it, with surprising inexactitude, at between 5ft 3in and 5ft 7in); moreover the Tsar was coming downhill and McGarry was going uphill, so the Tsar would have looked tall. And any- how, 'Nicholas may have found a shoemaker in Marseilles who had learnt how to boost him up a few inches'. 'Should history now be rewritten?' the book's publishers anxiously inquire. To this question it is difficult to frame an un-ribald reply.
Mr Richards has identified McGarry as the author of a book called Rescuing the Czar, published in 1919 or 1920 ('At last the fabulous book had come out of the crepus- cle to roost on a visible perch !'). His ex- cerpts from it suggest that it was a work of fiction, and a very bad one at that : a con- tingency which he chooses to overlook. The hero, 'Fox' (arbitrarily identified with McGarry), is briefed by Buckingham Palace to go and concert with the Kaiser arrange- ments for the rescue of the Imperial family. He does this: assumes, disguised as a Red Army captain, command of their jailers; and, to cut a long story short, leads them through an underground passage into the British Consulate in Ekaterinberg. He then conducts them to Chungking via—as far as one can make out—Kashmir, whence, as any school atlas shows, they could have reached Europe by a shorter and more convenient route than one involving the transit of Tibet and Western China.
The fact that Sir Thomas Preston, who was British Consul in Ekaterinberg at the time and is still alive, denies all knowedge of his part in these events and that it is no- where mentioned in his official dispatches, which I happen to have read, in no way deters Mr Richards. Preston was, after all, a servant of the Crown and, since the House of Windsor are privy to the conspiracy to keep the survival of the Romanovs' secret, he was doing no more than his duty in dis- missing Mr Richards's theories as bunkum.
That, I am afraid, is what they are. His publishers are right in describing this book as 'extraordinary'. It is an epithet which could be applied, with equal if not greater force, to their decision to publish it.
Peter Fleming first wrote for the SPECTATOR in the 1930s and contributed for many years under the pseudonym 'Strix'.
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