The Romanovs: The Final Chapter Read Online Free

“moving the whole Imperial family to the Crimea.”
    The British government, meanwhile, was receiving more ominous information. On August 31, British Military Intelligence received a report, passed to the War Cabinet and to King George V at Windsor Castle, that the Empress Alexandra and all five of her children probably had been murdered at the same time as the tsar. The king accepted the authenticity of this report and sat down to write to his cousin, Alexandra’s sister, Princess Victoria of Battenberg:
    My dear Victoria:
    May and I feel most deeply for you in the tragic end of your dear sister and her innocent children. But perhaps for her, who knows, it is better so; as after dear Nicky’s death she could not have wished to live. And the beautiful girls may have been saved from worse than death at the hands of those horrible fiends. My heart goes out to you.
    Despite the king’s dispatch of condolences, the Foreign Office decided to investigate the matter further. Sir Charles Eliot, the British high commissioner for Siberia, was sent from Vladivostok to Ekaterinburg, and on October 15, his confidential report, addressed directly to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, arrived in London. Eliot’s dispatch seemed to offer hope. “On July 17,” he wrote, “a train with the blinds down left Ekaterinburg for an unknown destination and it is believed that the surviving members of the Imperial family were init.… It is the general opinion in Ekaterinburg that the empress, her son and daughters were not murdered.”
    Thereafter, the survivors—if there were survivors—seemed to disappear. Four years later, at an international conference in Genoa, a foreign journalist asked Chicherin whether the Bolshevik government had killed the tsar’s four daughters. Chicherin replied, “The fate of the four young daughters is unknown to me. I have read in the press that they are now in America.”
    In 1924, the mystery appeared solved when the White investigator Nicholas Sokolov, then living in Paris, presented his findings and conclusions in a book published first in French and then in Russian. The book,
Judicial Enquiry into the Assassination of the Russian Imperial Family
, provided the world with an eyewitness description of eleven bodies lying in pools of blood on the floor of the Ipatiev House cellar. Sokolov also printed photographs of the bones, severed finger, jewelry, corset stays, false teeth, and other articles and objects he had gathered from the Four Brothers mine shaft. He gave not only a brutal description of the actual massacre but a detailed, seemingly plausible account of the destruction of the bodies by acid and fire: “The bodies were chopped in pieces with cutting instruments … the bodies were destroyed with sulfuric acid and by burning on the bonfires with the aid of gasoline.… The fatty matter in the corpses melted and spread over the ground where it became mixed with the earth.” Evidence that the entire family was dead appeared overwhelming.
    Sokolov’s path had not been smooth. He had been forced to give up his work in Ekaterinburg when the Red Army approached and recaptured the city in July 1919. Traveling east on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, he took with him, along with his box of charred bones and other physical evidence, seven fat folios of written material. In the West, Sokolov continually added to these volumes, endlessly interviewing emigres who had escaped the revolution and who might know something—anything—about the death and disappearance of the Imperial family. He received little assistance. His appearance and manner were not in his favor. Small with dark, thinning hair, he possessed a cracked glass eye that gazed disconcertingly from an intensely nervous face. While talking, he swayed from side to side, continually rubbinghis hands or tugging at his stringy mustache. But his appearance and tics had nothing to do with the rebuff he received from the most important of all Russian