Impact (Jan 1972)

dynasty when the sun rose on July 17 were some fragments of broken jewels, some smashed artifacts, a few tatters of clothing, a severed, manicured little finger of a middle-aged wo man (presumably Alexandra) and the corpse of the dog, Jimmy. ~ Curiously, today, over 53 years later, there is not the same confidence about the “facts” of the massacre, depicted so vividly and persuasively by author Robert Massie in his excellent and sensitive book Nicholas and Alexandra. Massie drew his information about the assassination almost exclusively from the report of Nicholas Sokolov, a White Russian judge who was commissioned to investigate the murders a full seven months after they were alleged to have happened. His report appeared in 1924, six years after the killings — or at least the disappearance of the Imperial Russian family. There is now a growing amount of ea tapts gar auenrueeeen : evidence to indicate that the massacre never happened, that it was a gigantic, cleverly conceived red-herring or hoax, and that the Tsar and his family were, in fact, separated into groups and smuggled out of Russia by several different routes. : If anyone was killed in Ipatiev House that July night, it was the servants, whose violent death unwittingly contributed to saving their beloved Tsar and his family. Or so the theory goes. In fairness to Massie, his unquestioning acceptance of the disputed Sokolov document is exactly what most reputable historians have done without a dissenting murmur. In fact the Sokolov report is a very flawed document indeed, indulging in polemics, antiBolshevik rhetoric and emotionalism. It relies almost completely on circumstantial and hearsay evidence. During his investigations Judge Sokolov was unable to unearth a single reliable by Peter Worthington