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.