The Romanov Legacy Read Online Free PDF

Ekaterinburg
from April to July of 1918: Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, his son Alexei and
four daughters named Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia.  As the
politicians in Moscow tried to decide what to do with the inconvenient family,
a counter-revolutionary force—the White Army—advanced on Ekaterinburg. 
    The Ural Soviet decided it couldn’t risk the former Tsar
falling into enemy hands.  They telegraphed Moscow, informing Lenin of
their decision to kill the captives; no response came back.  The men of
the Ural Soviet interpreted silence as acquiescence and killed the entire
family, with their servants, on the night of July 16/17.  They
dismembered, disfigured, burned, and buried the corpses in the Koptyaki
Forest. 
    For months after the murder, Lenin’s government fed conflicting
stories to the press, some stating the whole family had been killed, some that
only Nicholas and Alexei had been killed.  Lenin used the dead family’s
survival as a bargaining chip to keep channels of communication open with other
interested parties, namely Germany and England.  Because no one found the
bodies until decades later, Lenin’s ruse worked.  Escape rumors abounded
and for the first year or two after the murder, very few people had any idea
what really happened.
    Constantine saved the most interesting part of the dossier
for last—the old Soviet file, begun in 1931 by an agent named Rumkowski. 
Stalin had tasked Rumkowski with finding Tsarist funds in foreign banks and
securing them for Soviet coffers.  When Rumkowski asked how Stalin knew
the money was there to be found, the dictator answered, “Lenin.”  He never
revealed to Rumkowski how Lenin knew the money existed. 
    Rumkowski’s preliminary inquiries to major banks—Barclays,
Crédit Lyonnais, Mendelsohn’s—all came back negative, so he decided to play
dirty.  He sent agents into Europe posed as bankers, notaries, and even a
Polish nobleman to get close to various relatives of the Tsar and the pretender
Anna Anderson.  What they reported confirmed the suspicion that the money
was out there, most likely in an open and unclaimed account in the Bank of
England.
    Later, Rumkowski hit on the idea of questioning the men who
had guarded and murdered the Tsar, hoping one of them might have heard
something in the family’s last days.  But by the time he got around to it,
just before World War II, many of the men were dead and buried
themselves. 
    However, one guard named Ivan Skorokhodov left a
granddaughter who confessed to a local priest that her grandfather had been in
love with Marie Romanov.  The pair planned to escape together, she said,
and claim the Tsar’s fortune, which was held in the Bank of England.  Her
grandfather, who died in 1921 of influenza, said Marie spoke of a
password.  Anyone with the password could access the Tsar’s money. Marie had
promised to relay the password to him in writing, so that if anything happened
to her during her escape attempt, at least her beloved could live a financially
secure life.  That password never came, and eventually the guard learned
that Marie and her family had been murdered. 
    The guard told his daughter this story while he lay dying,
and that daughter told her daughter, who later confessed the sin of
greed to her priest.  The priest published his memoirs in the late 1940s,
including this story.  Only fifty volumes were printed, and the file noted
that 34 of them had been destroyed by the KGB to keep the story from spreading.
    For whatever reason, Rumkowski believed this tale to be
true.  He searched the Ipatiev house timber by timber, looking for the password
Marie might have left for Skorokhodov.  He found nothing.  In the
early 1970s, when he was ready to retire, he passed his information on to Boris
Yeltsin, who managed to get the necessary permits to raze the Ipatiev House in
1977.  Still, no password was found.
    Over the years, other sources pointed to England as a
potential source of