TSAR SEARCH

Although Edvard Radzinsky (author of “The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II,” July 26) has impeccable credentials, I found many unanswered questions in his book.

The first red flag to go up (pardon the pun) was Radzinsky’s insistence on interviewing “ancient witnesses or their children.” Most eyewitnesses are extremely unreliable sources of information and ancient ones are the worst. Their memories get cloudy. Interviewing their children amounts to one-upsmanship and a search for fame (or notoriety). Everyone wants to be listed in the bibliography.

The “execution” of the Romanovs was a very dramatic event, and in such cases witnesses tend to embellish the event beyond reason.

There were also eyewitnesses who swore that the people they executed were impostors--and these witnesses were interviewed just weeks after the event. There were also people who tended the family, and soldiers who guarded them. Many revealed that the imperial family disappeared one night and people who resembled them physically took their places. The Tsar’s diary reflects a sudden departure.

One of the sources of this mystery was the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg (later known as Sverdlovsk, and where I lived from 1949 to 1965), where the imperial family was housed prior to their disappearance. This structure was razed a few years ago on the orders of Boris Yeltsin. Oh, what tales it could have told!

My other point of contention lies in the manner in which Radzinsky treats Anastasia, the woman who claimed to be the surviving daughter. This woman remembers conversations that took place among her father, his cousin and herself that only those three people would know. The cousin, a grand duke who escaped and lived in exile in Europe, remembered these conversations and events and acknowledged that no one else would know them but someone like “Anastasia.” Still, he denied her identity, probably because of potential financial entanglements.

ALEXANDRA ANDERS, PASADENA