(Continued from page 19)

Yurovsky was the son of a seamstress and had apprenticed as a watchmaker, which would have given him some knowledge of jewellery.  When he arrived at Ekaterinburg in 1912 he opened a photographic studio and when he was drafted during World War One the army trained him as a medical assistant.  The similarity between the family's needs and the background of the man charged with their fate gives the impression Yurovsky was hand picked for the job.  If that was the case then who did he picking?

We are now left with new possibilities.  Yurovsky was acting on orders from Moscow.  Many of his stories, from the conflicting details about the guns to his highly questionable claim that the bodies of the two missing Royals were burned and buried separately, have a strong air of misdirection.  If he had faked the death of the Tsarevich Alexei then someone further up the chain of command knew about it and probably made the decision.  No matter who was giving the orders, the contradictions in Yurovsky's testimony leave us with one definite conclusion: the man who led the executioners was hiding something!

Consider Lenin's position in the summer of that year.  The revolution was not yet going his way and defeating the provisional government nine months earlier had left him with the problem of what to do with the seven members of the Royal family and their four retainers who were still under guard.

The Royals might have served as useful pawns in the Bolshevik battle against their enemies, but keeping eleven hostages was a burden that attracted too much attention.  Might Lenin have considered finding a way to cut the number of his prisoners down to the bare minimum and draw attention away from the one hostage he felt could serve his purpose?  With more than two years to go before the end of the revolutionary wars, one of the eleven may still have proven to be useful but the others would have been excess baggage.

If Lenin had decided to cut the number of Royal prisoners down and still maintain their usefulness then which of their number would have been the ones to go?  The four members of the ex-Tsar's staff... the doctor, the valet, the lady-in-waiting, and the cook had no political value.  The four Princesses were popular but Russia's rules of succession meant they had no claim to the throne.  The Empress was the subject of much hatred, which sealed her fate, so if any single member of the group were to be saved it would have been either Nicholas or his son.

The accepted version of history says that sixteen months earlier Nicholas had abdicated the throne for both himself and his son.  However, there is some question about the validity of the Ex-Tsar's actions in March of 1917.  Nicholas abdicated not once, but twice.  The first time he had abdicated for himself but on the second occasion, some six or more hours later, he wrote a second abdication document that passed the throne to his brother Michael in order to protect his ailing son.  Although it has always been assumed that that document took the throne away from the Tsarevich Alexei, there are two problems with that assumption.

The second abdication document says, "Not wishing to part with our dear son, we transfer our legacy to our brother".  That wording does not actually say that Nicholas was abdicating on his son's behalf.  It neatly sidesteps the question of Alexei's claim to the throne and places it in Michael's lap.  That could well have left Alexei open to make a renewed claim at a later date.                           
©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                              (continued on page 21)