John M.L. Kendrick,
First Drafted Sept. 3 1995.
First Internet posting July 17 1997.
Latest revision January 2, 2002.
Copyright ©

VANCOUVER: - Without doubt, it remains the single most dramatic event in Russia's history, a brief moment during the eighteenth year of our twentieth century that is frozen in our collective memory for all time.  While we struggle to deal with its brutality, not one of us knows the precise truth of what happened.  Stories told by those who did the deed are full of contradictions and the perpetrators have all since met that inevitable fate which none of us can escape.  We are left with only scattered pieces of evidence, some as yet undiscovered, which we must analyze with a cold and objective eye.

 
During the earliest hours of a Siberian summer morning, twelve armed men entered the cellar room of a mansion house named for its owner to face down six women, four men and a boy.  Some speculate that the little family group and their retainers had been given the impression that they were going to have their picture taken.  What followed a brief statement delivered by the leader of the twelve can only be described as bloody carnage.

It has always been assumed that the murder of Nicholas II and his family was the final chapter in the story of Russian monarchy... but was it?  DNA identification of remains unearthed at the end of the Cold War proved once and for all that Nicholas, his Empress, and three of his four daughters were murdered in 1918 as had always been suspected.  However, it also revealed something else which has fuelled the long-standing rumours of survivors: one of the daughters and the Tsar's only son and heir are still missing!

So where is the Crown Prince who may have been the legal tsar at the time of the murders in 1918?  One may find the answer in 1977 when Boris Yeltsin carried out the orders of Leonid Brezhnev and then KGB boss Yuri Andropov to tear down the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg where the Bolshevik murders took place.  Russia's president has long been criticized for completing the demolition order back when he was the First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Region.

Why was there a sudden need to eliminate the last known physical evidence of the murders when its existence had been first glorified and then ignored during the previous fifty-nine years?  It was the KGB that had called for the demolition and it had been the KGB's Cheka predecessors who had committed the murders.  Did the destruction of the last remaining evidence coincide with the death of a survivor known only to the KGB?       
© J. Kendrick 2002                                                                                                          (Continued on page 3)