71 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Comprehensive Summation and Refutation, September 28, 2003
The Fate of the Romanovs is a highly detailed, heavily footnoted book which thoroughly investigates the final months of the last Russian Imperial Family. This is a subject which has been covered many times, but never so thoroughly as have Greg King and Penny Wilson, who document almost every step Nicholas, Alexandra, their children and faithful servants took from Tsarskoe Seloe to Ekaterinburg. In the process, many romantic and political cobwebs have been swept away from the story of the last Tsar, his family and associates, and their fates.
There is no doubt that Nicholas II was a good and loving husband and father, but King and Wilson also depict his frustrating fatalism and passivity (and anti-Semitism which was extraordinary even by the standards of his time). Similarly, Alexandra was a devoted mother but possessive to the point of neurosis with her husband and children. The five children were normal adolescents, not angels. Most interestingly, the loyal servants who died with the family are here given biographies and personalities for the first time, as are the Ekaterinburg guards, who were not brutes but young men and boys who developed warm (sometimes romantic) feelings for their captives and wept over their bodies. (Some even committed suicide in remorse.) King and Wilson describe how the legend of the saintly family and their brutal imprisonment developed out of political and religious considerations well after the events took place, and document the real story for the first time. They do a particularly good job of exposing the anti-Semitic intentions of many of the first investigations of the murders, which were apparently undertaken not so much as to solve the mystery as to blame the whole thing on the Communists and Jews.
The period leading up to the massacre is carefully reconstructed. King and Wilson absolve Lenin of directly ordering the murders and maintain the decision was made by a panicky Ural Soviet as an army which would have rescued the Tsar closed in on Ekaterinburg. The massacre itself is described in every gory detail, as is the long drawn out and bumbling process through which the bodies were removed and buried.
Here King and Wilson would like to find a way to revive the Anastasia controversy, but even though Anastasia and Alexis are undeniably missing from their family's grave, they can find no evidence that anyone was able to escape. The mystery of the two missing bodies will have to remain a mystery until someone finally finds their burial site in that forest outside Ekaterinburg.
In the final chapters King and Wilson provide some updated information about the rediscovery of the bodies in the 1970s and early 1990s, with some indications that the Soviet and later Russian governments were heavily involved in making sure the investigations came out without too many embarrassing details being revealed. More recent material on the DNA analysis of the bones is also included, but there's nothing that alters the certain identification of the imperial family and their servants.
The investigation and the DNA research lead into the controversies over the funeral held in St. Petersburg in 1998 and the differing positions of several branches of the Russian Orthodox Church on whether the family should have been beatified or given lesser honors. King and Wilson also touch upon the split within the present day Romanov family itself, but are clearly supportive of the Vladimirovichi side and dismissive of the rights of the other Romanov branches. (For more information on the Romanov split, read Robert Massie's The Romanovs: The Final Chapter.)
The Fate of the Romanovs is the clearest and most detailed summary of everything that is known about the deaths of the Romanovs now available. For that reason, and also because it clears away a lot of myths and legends that have grown up in the 85 years since Ekaterinburg, it belongs in the collection of every Russian and Romanov history student.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
21 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid research, and a good read, November 3, 2003
By A Customer
I am admittedly a Romanov fan, one of those the authors of this book would describe as people who, under the spell of faded photographs of four beautiful girls in white dresses and a handsome boy in sailorsuits, romanticize an era and sanctify a family. I have noticed quite a few reviewers wanting to stone these revisionist historians for sacrilege, but I would not. Differing points of view never hurt anybody. I really appreciated their well documented research (there are about a zillion footnotes) and candid observations. I do agree with them that most people are neither black nor white, but somewhere in the middle (though I still believe some communists to be the bloodiest butchers this century produced, as testified by the millions tortured and murdered by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other assorted red despots and their cohorts ). We Romanov devotees ARE guilty of deliberately seeing Nicholas only as the devoted husband and father, and ignoring the fact that he was also an inept ruler who did next to nothing to alleviate the suffering of his millions of poverty stricken subjects. Reading the original material critically (including letters written by the family itself) would reveal Alexandra as a loving wife and mother, but also possesive and paranoid. I enjoyed reading about the children's personalities, I think the authors' is one of the most balanced and realistic analyses I ever read, showing them to be more human than most would allow them to be. And I was relieved to read that the guards were not the drunken beasts of monarchist lore, but average young men, guys with whom the girls openly flirted (though this did nothing to relieve any of the horror I felt reading all the gory details of the executions).
I would also have to disagree with the reviewer that claims the authors are trying to revive the Anastasia controversy. What they are trying to say is that evidence from the bodies show that it is Maria that was found, and not Anastasia. And that thus far (despite numerous searches in the Ekaterineburg forrest) her and Alexei's bodies have not been found.
All in all, a huge book, tedious at times, and though I don't always agree with the authors' assumptions and conclusions (the revised Yurovsky was an especially hard pill to swallow), I still think it's good reading for those interested in the subject (or in a good mystery), and a must have for us, zealots who can keep an open mind.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
30 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
far from "groundbreaking", September 19, 2006
At first glance, this book comes off as being the innovative and thorough work it claims to be. It is fairly well written and appears to be well researched, and is heavily sourced. If taken at face value one may accept that the authors had truly uncovered information that proves that some of the long held beliefs about Romanov history are wrong, as they offer new information and new perspective on things.
But all this starts to fall apart as soon as one bothers to check the references and sources for the "ground-breaking" information the book claims to offer.
There are at a least three points in this book that are the keystones of the authors' most controversial insinuations:
1. Implications that the Grand Duchesses got raped on the trip from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg
2. Claims that the Grand Duchess Maria had a relationship with a guard and so fell out of favor with her family
3. And last, but most certainly not least, insinuations that the DNA results are suspect.
The above three points the FOTR authors raise fly in the face of accepted historical facts, but are claimed to be based on "new sources". This of course would be all well and good, except that upon closer scrutiny it becomes painfully obvious that the authors' assertions are based on misquotes and referrals to sources that make no mention of what the authors claim they say (or even state the opposite!).
Let me give a couple of specific examples below, for the DNA insinuations:
P 445: "To obtain a complete sequence, or mtDNA fingerprint, Gill and Ivanov were forced to look for overlapping, repetitive strands, which were then spliced together to form the missing links in the genetic chain. Although standard practice, this scientific necessity did not provide an unaltered genetic code for the remains, but rather one achieved through manipulation of the available data based on estimation. (*35)" ( * reference 35 is Bryan Sykes' book "The Seven daughters of Eve" p 66-68).
These words the authors use: "forced to look for overlapping", "missing links", "did not provide an unaltered genetic code", "achieved through manipulation", "based on estimation" - all sound very ominous. If the reader doesn't know basic science, this may give him/her the impression that the scientists did something manipulative, speculative, and that the end result didn't produce a clear-cut answer, but instead they ended up with an uncertain and questionable conclusion.
In fact, this is absolutely not true. The entire point of mitochondrial DNA sequencing is that it produces an exact sequence - 100% correct sequence over say 600 letters. This is a very important point. If you get one single "altered genetic code" out of 600 letters, this means you got only 99.9% right, and 0.1% wrong answer, which will then ruin the whole theory/conclusion. The 0.1% difference would confirm that these remains were NOT the Romanov family. But this did not happen at all and the result was a 100% match.
Greg King and Penny Wilson state that they based these facts on the Bryan Sykes' book. However, if you read pp 66-68 of the said book, Sykes never said such a thing, in fact he said the complete opposite.
Sykes: "...eventually the sequences of the presumed Tsarina and her three children were typed. They all had exactly the same sequence as 111, 357. They were all an exact match with the Duke of Edinburgh."
Sykes used the word "exact" twice. Not a single reference to the "altered genetic code" or "manipulation" or "estimation".
So, paraphrasing, why do the authors use terms to imply that there were some sort of dodgy dealings going on, and why do they quote a page from a book that says the exact opposite of what they state? The answer is unclear, but it could be to create sensationalism of announcing "new findings" in order to sell more books...
There are many other examples like this peppered throughout the book, as well as more obvious mistakes, like "mtDNA is found in the nucleus of each cell".
The authors clearly mixed up their facts, and either exaggerated or changed things around, using various sources to demonstrate why they are right, and these sources do not check out upon scrutiny. Sadly, this was done in a way that seems to be deliberately deceptive.
All in all, this makes the book seem heavily "agendized" and leaves a bad taste in the readers' mouth. I would not recommend this book to those who want to get real historical (and other) facts.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
