Customer Reviews

The Fate of the Romanovs

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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.

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.

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.

King and Wilson do a fabulous job of researching a topic that remains to this day, politically charged. It is a great bonus to see the evolution of Greg King as a writer. The Fate of the Romanovs is very readable and it is doubtless an important book in the area of Romanov scholarship. While there have been many books written about the Imperial Family and their murder, the strength of this book lies in the depth of the authors' research and their logical analysis of that material.

Doubtless some may quibble at their use of Bolshevik sources. However, their approach to this seems fair and reasonable, in that they seek corroboration for them wherever possible. They make an excellent case, for example, for the murders being authorized by the Ural Regional Soviet rather than by Moscow and Lenin.

For anyone interested in this topic, Fate of the Romanovs is a "must have" for your collection.

(By the way, it appears that several Amazon "reviewers" have issues with sources rather than with the book itself. For this reason, I think their "reviews" are completely biased against this book and represent everything that can be wrong with Romanov scholarship - that facts are sacrificed in the name of pushing a particular agenda. It is a shame Amazon has no means of eliminating these "non reviews".)

Overall, I really think that this book is a good read. It is mostly interesting and presents new evidence with notes to the sources. As far as I am aware, this is the most recent book published about the Romanovs, which makes it up to date, even with the 1998 burial of the Romanov remains. I have read other Romanov books, and I really think that this is the most detailed book on EVRYTHING from their lives (althought more detail is known and could have been presented) to the investigations, which ALOT of detail is written about. The book doesn't focus to much on the Anna Anderson case (which I think is nice), but it includes things here and there. The book starts with "The Ruin of an Empire" (which is the lives of the family while in control of Russia, and the family life..ex:when all the children are born) and ends with the investigations and burial. SO much information that isn't even new (I just haven't read it before and I have read LOTS of Romanov books) is also presented. If you have any intrest in the Imperial family of Russia then I would recommend this book for you.

Other GREAT Romanov books: Anastsia's Album, The Last Tsar, Nicholas & Alexandra, and The Romanovs: The Final Chapter

Long at odds with what I assumed to be the authors' approach to the Romanovs, and not 100% convinced of some assumptions made in "The Fate of the Romanovs," I would be completely remiss not to stand up and salute them for the remarkable level research and thoughtfulness that went into their work. King and Wilson have striven to take a fresh hard look beneath the overwhelming layers of well-established myth, erroneous assumptions and outright misinformation surrounding the end of the Romanovs. And it ain't pretty. There is nothing to admire about Nicholas, and Alexandra was not a wonderful mother, especially to her daughters. Their imprisonment was not in some important respects what we've always been told it was. The personal repercussions of the Romanov's downfall on several of the family members and their retainers turns out to be surprisingly different from what we had assumed previously, whereas the murder is revealed to have been every bit as gut-wrenching as most of us imagined. Indeed, all through the book, previously unknown or overlooked details are brought to light and introduced into the context, often masterfully disabusing one of long-held erroneous notions.

Whether I agree or not with every path they took along the way to the book's completion, I applaud Mr. King and Ms. Wilson for telling the truth, as they see it, to the best of their remarkable abilities. They have indisputably raised the benchmark on scholarly treatment of this subject, and those of us who disagree with this or that point of theirs will have to do an enormous amount of research in order to properly challenge the authors' painstakingly-earned credibility.

Perhaps I set too high of a standard for this book after reading Robert Massie's "Nicholas and Alexandra" and "The Romanovs: The Final Chapter". I picked up "Fate of the Romanovs" because it seemed to be, at least in its own words, "more updated" with "new information" that had not previously been released.

This book is highly detailed, but that seems to be one is its greatest downfalls. It becomes so boring because of the fact that the authors were bent on giving the background history on EVERY SINGLE guard who watched over the family while they were under arrest. This would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that most of the guards did not spend much time with the family and are therefore very minor characters of the book. It actually leaves you wondering why the authors spent so much time devoted to their lives, when they were not the ones who made the decisions controlling the Romanov's fate.

Another disappointment was the style in which the book is written. It is very repetitive, and therefore, you will see the same material in several different chapters. It seems there was no outline for this manuscript. You will literally feel as if you are reading the same stuff over and over, because you are. It does not make for the most enjoyable of reads.

Finally, it appears that much of the "new" information is actually speculation that the authors themselves have come up with in hopes of their myths actually being true. They are hell-bent on the idea that the two missing corpses mean that those two members of the family actually survived. Yet, nowhere in their commentary do they provide a reasonable theory for where the bodies are. Another idea they want to misprove is the idea that the two bodies were burned. The authors speak of many unauthorized accounts of why there is no evidence of a fire in the Koptyaki forest; it apparently never occurs to the authors that 70+ years of rain, heavy snow, and ice would make the fire harder to uncover.

Other unreasonable suggestions (against the face of known historical facts or first-hand, eye-witness accounts) include: The idea that the Grand Duchesses were raped on board the Rus; the idea that Grand Duchess Marie had a fling with one of her guards; the idea that not only could anyone have actually survived the massacre in the Impatiev house, but that the guards helped some of them escape; and the idea that the Romanov's grave was completely fake in terms of authenticity.

The authors, try as they might, appear to have an agenda: to makeover the Imperial Family from one of a loving family (which is well-known) into one that basically deserved what they got. Their bias is clear, which wouldn't be so bad except for the other problems I've mentioned above. Sadly, I can't recommend this book. It is not on the same wavelength as Massie's work.

Very well but selectively researched. I was disappointed by the obvious sympathies to a group of people that comitted the most henous act of genocide in history.

Over bloated and irrelevant in places. Don't bother.

It appears that the latest tendency in books concerned about Tsar Nicholas II and his family (apart from Robert Alexander's outstanding 5 star novel 'The Kitchen Boy') is to take advantage of the retrograde -- in this case, the rumors, speculations and memoirs written not too long after their horrific murders - and put a modern spin on it. Since a whole generation of Romanov buffs has not been able to get a hold of certain out of print books (much less read anything that had been written in Russian), it seems everything old is new again in 'The Fate of the Romanovs'.

Two agendas side by side form the book's raison d'etre. One, as the authors assert, is to 'shatter long held beliefs' about the Imperial Family. The other is to plant or water any seeds of doubt about what happened on the night of their murder, thus whetting readers' appetite for the planned sequel about those that have claimed to be one of the Grand Duchesses or the Heir. When faced with readers possessed of a good enough memory and enough powers of discrimination, King and Wilson fail on both counts.

Two cases in point. First: It is claimed that the executioners did not discover any undergarments that concealed jewels on Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna because of her having been disgraced in her mother's eyes. This is only the sort of supposition typical of this book. It is easy to recall that at the time her sisters were sewing those fortified clothes, she was with her mother and father, separated from them. Therefore, a far more logical reason exists for no such thing being found on Maria. Secondly: How could the ailing Tsarevich Alexei ever have propped himself up in his bed at the Ipatiev house and shot arrows with his toy weapon through a window that had been sealed by the guards days before he arrived with his sisters?

King and Wilson, it seems, have been exceptionally uncritical in their acceptance of any sources that support their agenda to make the Imperial Family appear to be less than close and less than saintly, while excluding other sources that attest to their character. Absolutely nothing in their book but a spurious report of bullying and bad language that smacks of Princess Catherine Radziwill supports an off-the-wall assessment of the frail, patient Tsarevich as an unpleasant young man. Such things are said about the family because the authors seem especially zealous to decry the glorification of Tsar Nicholas and his family as saints. They dredge up many of the arguments once made in opposition to this. For example: the weak argument that the youngest children had not written anything spiritually profound. (But does one expect a martyr or a passion-bearer to be a hagiographer or a theologian?) Yet even King and Wilson, not having much to go on about Alexei Nikolaevich, cited some anecdotes about the Heir that witness to the kind of patience, longsuffering and simple forthrightness typical of a very good boy indeed.

About any fodder for supporters of various false Alexeis and spurious Grand Duchesses: nothing new, nothing convincing. Everything written here only sounds like Yurovsky persevered in the gruesome task of hiding the strongest evidence of two of the murders.

Is it really anything 'new' that the Imperial Family tended to charm their captors? Hasn't it been stated in some books prior to this that not Lenin but the locals may have been the ones to pass the death sentences in a fit of panic as the Whites approached the city? And while there is a reasonable suspicion that Baroness Buxhoevden was not particularly honest, were there any real grounds to 'out' an honorable member of the Orthodox clergy who throughout his life remained extremely loyal to the memory of the family he'd once served? The one positive thing to say is that King and Wilson have done a lot of legwork to find the sources on which many of the early published books are based and add other intriguing tidbits. In dealing with far too much material in the first place, they were bound to have made at least some assumptions without thinking things out carefully enough.

A certain contempt for a segment of their potential audience shows in their remarks about what they would call 'the Romanov internet cult'. Perhaps this stems from the experiences they had when making announcements about their upcoming book to that potential audience. Yet for all those announcements about 'stunning new revelations' and 'original sources', there are no bombshells, and no real shocks in store in spite of all the attempts to do so. Only a damp squib, plenty of smokescreen, and an agenda or two.

Book based on "Ifs", "Could have happened", "Must have happened", "Can't be trusted", an so on, but no definite facts. Really, based on no facts at all. I've got the impression that the authors want to show a "loving" Lenin, stating that he wasn't involved in the massacre of the whole family, failing to explain from which documents they arrive to such conclusion. I highly regret having bought the book. It is not serious at all.