The Last Days of the Romanovs. By Robert Wilton. (Thorn'
ton Butterworth. 15s. net.)—The Tsar and his whole family were murdered at Ekaterinburg on July 16th, 1918, by a Bol- shevik Jew named Yurovsky, at the order of the Bolshevik Jew Sverellov, who was the head of the central executive com- mittee at Moscow until he was lynched by some mutinous workmen last year. Mr. Wilton, as special correspondent Of the Times with Admiral Koltchak, went to Ekaterinburg ia the spring of 1919 and learned the details of the tragedy from the Russian lawyer, M. Sokolov, who made a judicial inquiry into the case for Admiral Koltchak. Mr. Wilton's narrative has appeared in the Times and is reprinted in this volume, which also contains a translation of the minutes of evidence taken by M. Sokolov, with photographs and plans. It is well 10 have the painful facts on record. The English reader will wonder why the Bolsheviks, who have gloried in wholesale slaughter, should have taken great pains to conceal all traces of this particular crime by having the bodies of their victims secretly burnt and by announcing that, while the Tsar had been executed " after trial," his family had been removed to " a safe place." Mr. Wilton suggests as an explanation that the murderers, being Jews and not Russians, were uncertain whether the Rus- sian people would not resent the murder of their Tsar at Jewish hands. It is noteworthy that the Ekaterinburg peasants, having caught one of Yurovsky's accomplices, killed him on the spot. More than a year after the crime, the Bolsheviks thought it expedient to announce that the Tsar's murderers had been tried and some of them executed. This, of course, was a falsehood, as Mr. Wilton's narrative shows.
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