(Continued from page 26)

Is there a reason why the Romanovs are placed on soldiers' rations only two days before the treaty is signed and that within weeks afterward the family is ordered moved to their stop at Ekaterinburg?  Remember that Lenin owes the Kaiser's people a favour and there is a Benckendorff already living on a farm near Ekaterinburg who has Estonian papers for a boy roughly the same age as the Tsarevich Alexei.  The accepted version has it that the family was moved to Ekaterinburg because of the intervention of the Ural Soviet.  Could there be another reason that has to do with the Benckendorffs and that treaty?

The problem with this story is that the questions keep building one upon the other.  The fate of Nicholas II had been sealed from the moment of the abdication in the previous year and so the monarchy's last hope lay with the teenage boy with the blood disease.  Were those who sat across the table from Lenin's negotiators at Brest-Litovsk willing to sacrifice the Tsar to save his heir?  Is it more important to save the crown than the man who wears it?  Was Lenin willing to take a chance with the young Prince because the blood disease made his chances for long term survival slim and meant he was not seen as much of a threat?

Could Tsar Alexei II prove to be a useful hostage if the revolution did not go the way that Lenin had planned?  The Bolsheviks would be fighting the Whites and the Czechs as well as the British, Canadian and American armies for another two years.  Our Alexei and his foster family waited for a full year to pass after the signing of the armistice that ended the revolution in 1920 before they dared to move even an inch from their farm in Koptyaki.  For more than three years the next Tsar was hidden in a place that was only walking distance from the shallow grave of his family that would not be discovered for another seven decades.

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                        (Continued on page 28)