Russian Roulette

THE FILE ON THE TSAR by ANTHONY SUMMERS and TOM MANGOLD 416 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50.

At midnight on July 16, 1918, in the Ural mining town of Ekaterinburg, Bolshevik jailers gunned down the Russian royal family. Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their 14-year-old hemophiliac son Alexei and his four sisters were all shot. A dubious postscript holds that one of the girls, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, escaped and is still alive.

So runs the accepted version of the Romanov regicide. Now two reporters from BBC Television, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold, assert a dramatically new version: the Reds faked the original massacre scene in order to convince White Russians--who soon captured Ekaterinburg--that their goal of a royal restoration was hopeless because the Tsar and his family were dead. The two journalists conclude that there were not enough bullet holes or bloodstains in the murder room to accord with the gunshot deaths of seven people. In their opinion, the women were spared for a time. Alexandra was a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and King George V, and there is evidence that the German Emperor was bargaining with the Bolsheviks to gain her freedom. The book buttresses the theory that the "Anna Anderson" now living in Charlottesville, Va., may indeed be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, who would now be 75 years old. The authors interviewed her, but she was uncooperative--even though for decades she has stubbornly claimed to be Anastasia.

File has caused both favorable reviews and a wave of wrath and scorn. As a self-appointed defender of the British royal family. Lord Mountbatten has denounced the authors' conclusions about an aborted British rescue plot. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has stonewalled on the question of whether U.S. archives also contain documents regarding American complicity in a rescue plot. The authors do not claim that their conclusions are complete. But they are continuing to dig--and the new findings, especially in the U.S. archives, may be even more sensational than the intriguing material they have already unearthed. David Tinnin

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