No More Tsar, No More Radzinsky!

(Part One of this book review is even longer!)

The Last of The Last Tsar

Well, that book about the murder of Tsar Nicholas and his family got through with the murder, finally, and then went on and on some more! What a long book! The Russian, Radzinsky, who wrote it admitted that he was obsessed with the topic and I suppose I’m lucky it wasn’t two volumes long—maybe in the original Russian, it was! The book completed itself by following some of the murderers through the following decades of official Russian Shut-Mouth about the deaths. The men talked, but not officially, several of them taking turns claiming to be the one who fired the first shot and killed the Tsar. Though they had all participated, it’s clear that not all of them were telling the truth!

So many different versions emerge that I nearly began to doubt that the Tsar’s family was dead at all. In the end, he even trotted out some reports that Nicholas’ hemophiliac son, Alexei, had survived the shooting and had lived to be an elderly and not very stable man who did not want to be discovered as the lost Heir! Some mention was made of the romantic woman who for decades was reputed to be one of the four daughters, Anastasia; some believed in her and some didn’t through her long history, but I know from watching TV documentaries that in the end DNA technology finally disproved that she had any relation to the Romanovs! As for the boy surviving, I’ll believe that when he comes in the barroom door with his arm wrapped around Harvey the six-foot rabbit!

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