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                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 72

BOOKS

The End of The Romanovs


By BRIGID O'HARA-FORSTER

    TITLE: THE LAST TSAR: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NICHOLAS II
    AUTHOR: Edvard Radzinsky; translated by Marian Schwartz
    PUBLISHER: Doubleday; 462 pages; $25

    THE BOTTOM LINE: This riveting tale is filled with fresh
details of a chilling regicide.


    On the night of July 17, 1918, the Romanov dynasty that
had ruled Russia for more than three centuries ended in a
barrage of gunfire that filled the small basement of a villa in
the foothills of the Urals. The truth of what happened there
was meant to remain forever hidden. For more than 70 years the
Soviet Big Lie never wavered: overzealous provincials had
slaughtered Nicholas II and six members of his family without
orders from Lenin and the Bolshevik high command.

    In 1966 a young Russian student at the Historical Archive
Institute in Moscow decided to unravel the mystery of what
really happened to the Czar. Edvard Radzinsky later became a
successful playwright, but he never abandoned his quest. He has
now produced an unforgettable book in which the evocative power
of the dramatist is enriched by scholarship.

    Despite the official secrecy that cloaked the deed, an
archive of accounts by both participants and eyewitnesses
survived. Nicholas and his wife Alexandra had from adolescence
to the last hours of their lives kept diaries. The intimate
story of their marriage, its intense emotional pitch and
devastating political consequences, is told largely in their own
voices. The regime that took their lives also believed in
recording the minutia of its terror. Glasnost gave Radzinsky
access to information that had long been locked away. Radzinsky
discovered a folder headed "File on the Family of Former Tsar
Nicholas the Second 1918-1919." The file included the written
statement of Yakov Yurovsky, a longtime revolutionary who had
commanded the execution squad, in which he set out a precise
chronology of the massacre.

    In a chapter of surpassing sadness and chilling detail,
Radzinsky uses the commander's testimony for a moment by moment
re-enactment of the July night. At 2 a.m. Yurovsky roused the
sleeping family and led them downstairs. Nicholas carried his
ailing, hemophiliac son, Alexei; Alexandra and her four
daughters followed, accompanied by the four family retainers who
were all that remained of a retinue of hundreds.

    The 11 people trooped across a courtyard and through a
door into the dimly lit room. Under Yurovsky's direction the
group arranged itself around the head of the family as if for
a family snapshot. A few words were spoken, and suddenly the
doorway filled with men, 12 of them, bunched in rows of three,
a tangle of outstretched arms all holding revolvers. As they
opened fire, recalled one executioner, "they were so close to
each other that whoever was standing in front got a burn on his
wrist from the shots of his neighbor behind." Smoke, screams and
blood engulfed the tiny space as bullets flew around, some
ricocheting weirdly off the women, who were later found to be
wearing jewels sewn into their corsets. And still some lived.
They were bludgeoned with rifle butts and bayoneted until the
moaning ceased.

    The publication of some of this material in a Soviet
magazine three years ago prompted a flood of recollections from
other witnesses and led Radzinsky to distant provincial
archives. He discovered a telegram that the local Bolshevik
leaders had sent to Lenin the day before the killings. "The
trial agreed upon . . . cannot bear delay, we cannot wait," it
read, referring to earlier discussions in Moscow. "If your
opinion is contrary inform immediately."

    The Soviet denials of Lenin's complicity had long been
discredited in the West, but a statement from Alexei Akimov, who
in 1918 had served in the Kremlin as a guard to Lenin, completed
the case against the Bolshevik leaders. "When the Ural Regional
Party Committee decided to shoot Nicholas' family, the Central
Executive Committee wrote a telegram confirming this decision."

    When the revolution erupted in 1917, Nicholas reacted with
bizarre passivity. He abdicated and went quietly into exile in
Tobolsk, relieved to have exchanged his gilded prison for a more
tranquil confinement. But this soft-spoken autocrat, whose
exquisite manners and flickering will had once led a courtier
to describe him as "nodding tirelessly in opposite directions,"
was no match for the hard men of Bolshevism. Their fledgling
regime, already embroiled in intramural disputes, was threatened
by enemies on all sides, and they saw the Romanovs as both a
potential threat and a trump card. From the relative comfort of
their initial captivity, the family was handed over to the
determined Bolshevik leaders of the Red Urals in Ekaterinburg
to spend their last weeks in the villa that their new masters
named the House of Special Designation.

    While trying to piece together exactly what happened to
the bodies, Radzinsky detected some intriguing discrepancies.
Then a mysterious visitor, whom he identifies only as an old
man who worked in the state security organs, claimed that two
victims had survived, one of them Alexei Nikolaevich, the
Csarevich.

    Radzinsky was skeptical. "It was all too entertaining," he
says. "As a rule, the truth is very boring." But after learning
about a labor camp prisoner called Filipp Semyonov who had
shared some characteristics with Alexei, Radzinsky began to
consider the possibility. On the evidence offered, though, he
is a long way from proving it. Yet as Radzinsky was finishing
his book last year, the story took a new turn. The grave site
had been dug up and found to contain human remains -- but of
only nine bodies.