My Father the Czar Copyright 1998 Library of Congress number: 98-96138 by AUTHOR22@aol.com All rights reserved Chapter Twenty + + + + + Vancouver Canada June 26, 1977 + + + + + A small announcement appeared in the obituary column of the Sunday edition of a Vancouver newspaper which read simply: "Died. Alexei Heino Tammet-Romanov. Succumbed to Leukemia at the age of 73. Survived by his wife and two sons. A note in the tickler file of the city's newspaper was removed, and a clipping of the obit was mailed to an obscure reporter in Idaho. Before closing the file, the part time secretary, part time reporter dugout the backup document and passed it on to her city editor. The single sheet told little to anyone unfamiliar with the deceased: 1904: Alexi N. Romanov born in Russia. 1905: Ernst Benckendorf born in Russia. Died of typhoid about 1916. 1912: Spala A.N.R. bout with hemophilia. 1913: Imperial Black Eagle medal seen worn by Czar at royal wedding. 1917 March: Czar abdicates. 1918 July: Assassination at Impatiev House in Ekaterinburg. 1918 December: Benckendorf family records show Ernst Benkendorf. 1920: Alexi's foster family migrates to Estonia. 1921 January: Paul Benckendorff dies in Estonian border town. 1934: Official account of Alexi being executed. 1935: Imperial Court disagrees with hemophilia diagnosis. 1935: Journalist interviewed executioner. 1937: Alexi acquires publishing house in Estonia. 1939: Alexi made funeral arrangements for foster mother. 1939 September: Estonia under Soviet Control. 1943: Alexi marriage of convenience and migrates to Finland. 1945: Marriage ended in Sweden. Remarried. Had two sons. 1952: Migrated to Canada. 1954: Alexi opens a dance studio in White Rock. 1956: Alexi meets girl who will become his third wife. 1960: Alexi Marries for third time. 1967: Alexi seen wearing the Imperial Black Eagle medal. 1971: Alexi begins using name of Romanov. 1972: Alexi reveals his identity to his sons. The city editor glanced quickly at the sheet, and wondered why there had been a tickler made for it. It was late afternoon, and the man wanted to go home so he tossed the paper into his waste paper basket. The envelope, containing the obit arrived in Pocatelo, Idaho on Friday, July first, and was delivered to a rural mail box on Saturday. A tall elderly man, thin to the point of being gaunt, made his way through the hot afternoon sun and retrieved an arm full of mail. Under his breath he cursed the American way of doing business which filled his box with unwanted advertising. After leafing through a half dozen smaller envelopes, and filing them between his fingers in order of importance, he came across the one from Canada. By the time he had reached his house his fingers were shaking in anticipation. Nevertheless, he filed the junk mail in the trash barrel and placed all but the Canadian letter on his desk. He sat down in his upholstered rocker, fumbled with the envelope, and finally opened it. It's content was the obituary clipping. Sean wept as he read of Alexi's passing. It was not unexpected. He had known since 1971 of the existence of a man calling himself Alexi Romanov. Even before that he had heard rumors that the Tsarevich was alive, and living in Toronto. He couldn't remember exactly when he had first heard. Despite the passing years he had never been convinced that the heir to the Russian dynasty was dead, so those hopes had continually promoted his wishful thinking. He had made his first trip to Toronto in the fall of 1971 after a letter written to the Canadian Prime Minister had been published. A man, reporting to be Alexei Romanov, had complained that a Polish impostor named Michael Goleniewski was claiming to be the Russian heir and England was on the verge of offering him official recognition. As a reporter Sean was able to gain the co-operation of both the newspaper and the Canadian government. He had written a letter requesting an appointment with the Canadian Alexei Romanov, but the letter had not produced the anticipated invitation. Sean repeated the request, but at the end of the note he asked the question: "Did you complete your Gdov movie." A telephone call to Sean's farm asked him to meet at the Romanov home. The caller was female, and identified herself as Alexei's wife. A flurry of activity preceded the trip north. The farmer had become a recluse, so little packing was required and he carried his single suitcase on board the aircraft. The man that Sean visited, was bed ridden and emaciated. They spoke for several hours. It seemed odd to them both, that Alex-T had married three times, produced two sons, and a number of grand children while Alex-P had never married. They took turns telling the other about their lives since they had last seen one another in 1917. The Tsarevich had been subjected to a mock execution and spirited away to be raised as the son of a Ekaterinburg farmer. Later they migrated to Estonia, then to Finland, Sweden, and finally to Canada. Sean told of his escape through Finland, Sweden, and France. His voice changed to a throaty emotion as he told of his love affair with Charles, then his escape to America. In 1945 he learned that Charles McGee had been killed in France while a member of the underground. From then on his life had been concerned only with his survival. The July afternoon was hot and dry yet Sean felt a nostalgic comfort settle over him. It was as though an adventure had come to an end. He reached for a thick loose leaf notebook, flipped it open and began to re-read the notes he had accumulated during the past six years. A historian had been quoted in an article in Life Magazine: "Without doubt it remains the single most dramatic event in Russia's history, a brief moment during the eighteenth year of our twentieth century that is frozen in the worlds memory for all time. While we strain to deal with its brutality, not one of us knows the exact truth of what happened. Stories told by those who did the deed are full of contradictions and the perpetrators have all since met that inevitable fate which none of us can escape. Thus, the world is left with only scattered pieces of evidence, some as yet undiscovered, which we must analyze under the cold lens of logic. "During the earliest hours of a Siberian summer morning, twelve armed men entered the cellar room of Impatiev House in Ekaterinburg where they faced six women, four men and a boy. Some speculate that the family group, with their retainers, had been told that they were being photographed as proof of their well being. What followed a brief statement, delivered by the leader of the twelve, can only be described as bloody carnage." Sean leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes, yet the tears continued to flow as he thought back over the years since he had been chosen by Gregori Rasputin and taken to live with the Imperial family. + + + + + Las Vegas Nevada 1998 + + + + + The writing of "My Father the Czar" has been a unique experience for the author. The original concept was to capture the experience of a young royal, brought into focus by the death of Princes Diana. And what better world stage to set it on then that of the Romanov dynasty of 1914 Russia? The naivete of the author precluded any prediction of the dramatic events of past history, nor the radical, almost fictional, aspects of real life. What began as pure fiction, soon became dramatizations of historical fact. It has always been assumed that the murder of Nicholas II and his family was the final act in the drama of the Russian monarchy... but one must ask: "Is that accurate?" DNA identification of remains unearthed at the end of the Cold War proved once and for all that Nicholas, the Czarina, and three of his four daughters were murdered in 1918 as had been reported. However, it also revealed something else which has fueled the long-standing rumors of survivors: the bodies of one of the daughters and the Czar's only son and heir are still missing! So what happened to the Crown Prince who may have been the legal Czar at the time of the murders in 1918? The answers to that question are as radical, and unbelievable as was the beginning of the Great War, the influence of Gregori Rasputin, or the murder of the Imperial family. While the story appears to have drawn to a conclusion in Canada, the trail begans in Siberia. A clue to the answer may be found when Boris Yeltsin, in 1977, carried out the orders of Leonid Brezhnev and KGB boss Yuri Andropov to tear down the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg; the site where the Bolshevik murders took place. Why was there a sudden need to eliminate the last known physical evidence of the murders when its existence had been first glorified and then ignored during the previous fifty-nine years? After all, it had been the KGB who had called for the demolition and it had been the KGB's Cheka predecessors who had committed the murders. So again one must ask: Why did the destruction of the last remaining evidence coincide with the death of a survivor known only to the KGB? Moscow insiders were fully aware that the man who died in a Vancouver area hospital on the 26th of June 1977 was believed by Vancouverites of Russian and Estonian descent to be the Crown Prince Alexei. The man's death certificate gives his name as Alexei Heino Tammet-Romanov. The historic building where Russia's Imperial murders took place was razed to the ground on 27th of July 1977, exactly one month... thirty- one days after his death! In April of 1992 the man's widow sent two of Alexei's teeth to England's Home Office forensic scientists in Aldermaston, and is presumed to still be there. On the tenth day of May 1993 Russian researcher Dr. Ivanov sent a memo to Molecular Research Centre director Dr. Peter Gill stating that he considered an analysis of those teeth to be worthwhile. As a result of the progress being made in recognizing the Canadian Romanov family, one of the children moved to Russia in 1991 to aide the Russian government in its quest for the truth. Much of the evidence supporting the story of Alexei Tammet-Romanov was received in Moscow by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in October of 1995. A few weeks later Boris Yeltsin, the Patriarch Alexei II, and St. Petersburg's former mayor Anatoly Sobchak canceled plans for the formal burial of the remains of Czar Nicholas II for the fourth time. In the preface of his book "The Romanov Conspiracies", Dr. Michael Occleshaw stated that before Dr. Ivanov had left England he had complained about political interference. A research paper on the mitochondrial DNA work was sent by Dr. Gill to the scientific journal "Nature Genetics" in August of 1993 (published in the February 1994 edition). That paper has since been offered as the standard against which any DNA comparisons of those who claim to be survivors of the Romanov murders should be made. Despite the positive activity, the political atmosphere in Moscow created such a fear of danger that N. Romanov brought his family back to Canada, vowing never to again set foot on Russian soil. The only way that scientists and the politicians behind them could maintain jurisdiction over this explosive situation was to exert control over what was published in scientific journals. One might speculate that if a match was already known then it would have been a simple matter to take measures to block a third party attempt to produce a DNA match and its resultant valid claim to Russia's dormant throne. Just how did the world's most famous hemophiliac survive a hail of assassins' bullets in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918? The two-part answer to that question is amazingly simple. First, the execution squad commander aimed his revolver at the right ear of the Tsarevich and squeezed the trigger twice... but he was NEVER shot! The impression that he had been killed was purposely created as part of Lenin's revolutionary campaign of disinformation. Even Alexei never understood how and why it happened. He was only weeks short of his fourteenth birthday at the time of the execution and there was no need for the perpetrators to tell him their purpose. As teenage heir to Russia's throne, Alexei was a useful pawn to keep hidden away just in case he was needed before the final outcome of the Revolution was secured two years later. The Russians have always been good at the game of chess and they know only too well that a pawn on the seventh rank is only a pawn... but as soon as it reaches the eighth rank it can be elevated to become the most dangerous piece on the board. The second answer to the question of Alexei's survival is the one that will be dealt with first. It has escaped the experts for more than three-quarters of a century because, until now, there was no need to question or explain it. Historians have always assumed that the son of Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra was a hemophiliac. However, no absolute proof of that diagnosis exists and the medical records of the Tsarevich Alexei have yet to be found. The only formal statement ever to come from the palace was issued by the physicians of the Imperial court on the 21st of October 1912 in which the doctors described the boy's symptoms as a "significant anemia". Alexei's blood disorder has always been given as the reason for the Czarina's dependence on Rasputin's healing abilities. However if Alexi was not a hemophiliac and the Russian doctors at the turn of the century were wrong in their diagnosis then the next 15 years must be looked at in a different light. The official cause of the Prince's illness, in 1912, was never publicly explained by Russia's Imperial court. In fact, it was a state secret. In 1913 there was a speculative piece in the newspapers and the story was expanded from there, but it was never actually confirmed. Today we know more about the science of hematology than we did in 1912. There is no doubt that the boy was suffering from a potentially deadly blood disorder, but it was not hemophilia. The curse that hung over the head of the young Tsarevich was even more terrible than that. Reviewing all of the available material in the story of the Russian Royals reveals two problems with that original diagnosis. Alexei would often go for months at a time without any problems and then be struck down without warning by a new attack. This should have been one of the first alarm bells to ring with medical professionals telling them there is something wrong with the historic record. The boy's symptoms were episodic but hemophilia is not; it is always there. The second alarm bell sounds even louder than the first. The worst episode Alexei experienced was at the Czar's hunting lodge in Spala, Poland during October of 1912. The boy screamed in agony, doubled up from the pain of internal hemorrhaging with his face exhibiting a sickly colorless pallor marked with black circles under his eyes. The key to the true nature of Alexei's disease can be found in a letter that Czar Nicholas wrote to his mother. In it he said, "The days from the 6th to the 10th were the worst... His high temperature made him delirious night and day". Whenever one of these episodes struck the doctors said they could not explain the fevers that were a part of his symptoms. Today, physicians know that the symptoms of fever and delirium are not consistent with a diagnosis of hemophilia. People suffering from the disease do bruise easily and bleed when they are cut, but they do not suffer fevers as a result. All of the historic accounts state that during his most serious episode Alexei suffered from internal hemorrhaging, bleeding in the joints, abdominal swelling, pallor with a fever as high as 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The description in the Czar's letter of the boy's symptoms of delirium suggests the involvement of the central nervous system. The symptoms which the boy experienced during his worst episodes more accurately portray what the medical profession now call Thrombocytopenia. Thrombocytopenia can either appear on its own or associated with Aplastic Anemia or Leukemia. These two diseases are similar in appearance and which one the patient has can only be determined by performing a number of specific tests. Aplastic anemia can also cross that fine line between the two and become Leukemia later in life. Alexei's doctors surmised that his hemorrhaging caused a loss of blood flow to the head, thereby producing his delirium and pale appearance. This hypothesis may have been a little too simplistic. As well as causing hemorrhaging, pallor, and fever, Leukemia produces delirium by affecting the central nervous system. It was also assumed that a swelling high in the abdomen was due to a hemorrhaging stomach. One of the things that the boy did to relieve the pain was to elevate his left leg. This suggests an enlarged spleen... one of the characteristics of Thrombocytopenia. In 1935 the head of the Imperial Court Secretariat, Alexander Mossolov, wrote that court physician Serge Fedorov had disagreed with his colleagues. Mossolov quoted Dr. Fedorov as having said, "It is urgently necessary to apply far more drastic measures, even if they pose a greater risk". Sometime later the doctor threw up his hands in frustration and said, "You can see what is going on here". Such a statement tends to suggest that decisions were being made about the boy's health over which Fedorov had no control. No reliable methods of blood testing for such diseases existed in 1912. The medical community had discovered blood typing the year before Alexei's birth in 1904. All that his doctors had as a basis for their diagnosis were the stories about the Royal family's medical history. There were few published case histories to aid them in their understanding of the boy's symptoms. The central argument in support of the hemophilia theory is the claim that the daughters and granddaughters of Queen Victoria were carriers of the disease and passed it on to their sons. But, once again there is no solid medical proof. The bleeding disease is carried down the maternal family line and passed on from mothers to their sons by a faulty X-chromosome. Hemophilia being in the Royal bloodline begins with the explanation that Queen Victoria became a carrier through a spontaneous mutation from her father. This presents the first of a number of problems which suggest that the disease was carried in the family line. The first Royal said to have died from the disease was Victoria's grandson Frederick of Hesse... Alexei's uncle. Known to the family as "Frittie", the boy was only three years old when he died in 1873. Alexei's mother was less than a year old when her brother fell out of the window of his mother's bedroom at the New Palace in Darmstadt. The toddler fell twenty feet and landed head first on the paving stones in the garden below. Today X-rays and CT scans are taken for granted but the doctors of 1873 could only make a visual examination. They saw no signs of external damage and mistakenly reported that the boy looked to be without injury. When he died later that same evening his "bleeding on the brain" was attributed to the recently discovered disease of hemophilia. In the 1990's we now know that anyone can die as the result of a severe cerebral hemorrhage caused by a skull fracture... not just hemophiliacs. The second Royal on the list was Victoria's third son and Frittie's uncle Leopold who died eleven years later in 1884. His health was described as frail and once again the death was attributed to hemophilia. The thirty-one year old Prince had died in his sleep and, just like his nephew before him, the physicians said that "bleeding of the brain" was the cause of his death. Today this is called an aneurysm and we know that it is not exclusive to hemophiliacs. Third in the line of faulty case histories are the two Spanish princes who both lost their lives in an automobile accident. You do not have to have hemophilia to die from severe internal injuries suffered in a car crash. Hemophilia, to the people of the nineteenth century, was a bit like AIDS is for todays world ... a newly discovered disease that frightens everyone; one which few understand. In the world of the early 1900's, if someone bruised or bled easily then hemophilia was the popular diagnosis. Doctors knew very little about what blood was made of and what caused the disease. Returning to the matter of DNA: While the medical detectives did not use chromosomal DNA to identify the remains unearthed in Koptyaki they did use it to determine the gender of the bones. To do this the scientists must see if the DNA contains two X-chromosomes indicating a female or one X and one Y-chromosome indicating a male. One can assume that since the gene that causes hemophilia is part of the X-chromosome that was used to identify the gender of the remains the scientists would be able to recognize it. If that is the case, one can also assume that they already knew for certain if the Empress and her daughters were carriers of the disease. No evidence, which could prove the existence of hemophilia in the Royal line, has ever been published. If the chromosomal DNA examination did reveal such evidence then the scientists are withholding that critical information. Logically one could conclude that the test results failed to show that the hemophilia gene was present in the remains of the Romanov women. In turn, that would mean that the blood disease suffered by the Tsarevich was something other than hemophilia. Considering todays political climate the only reason to withhold such information would be if there was a concern regarding an Alexei claimant who fit that description. When the end appeared to be near at the lowest point of Alexei's 1912 Spala episode four doctors circled the boy's bed. A priest gave the Tsarevich the Last Rites and death notices were prepared. It was at this point that the most mysterious figure of the drama, Grigory Rasputin, made his grandest entrance and he did so without actually being present. He sent the Empress a telegram that counseled, "Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much". Within a day or two the boy began to show miraculous signs of recovery. Thrombocytopenia has the peculiar ability to fade away almost as quickly as it appears. This trait of spontaneous remission suggests that Rasputin was nothing more than a creature of good timing. Another possibility may be that the holy man may have seen the same symptoms before. Members of Rasputin's own family had suffered and died from serious illness and he had learned a good deal about life while he traveled about Russia and the Middle East on foot before finally settling in St. Petersburg. It has often been speculated that Rasputin may have used hypnosis to cure the Russian heir's symptoms. While this seems very unlikely, Alexei Tammet-Romanov insisted that he liked the man who was described as a "starets" and said that his eyes did have a calming effect. A patient might have many episodes of Thrombocytopenia over the years but, then again, a patient might only have one. The disease has another trait which figures into our hypothesis; twenty to forty percent of adult patients experience long terms of remission. After the 1918 execution of the Imperial family Canadian Alexei experienced two more episodes before the age of seventeen, which his foster family attributed to typhoid fever. What ever the cause of those episodes, the condition went into remission until the man's physical condition began to decline after his seventieth birthday. For two years before he died in 1977, Canadian Alexi exhibited exactly the same episodes that he had as a youngster. As he lay dying in a Vancouver hospital his doctors performed test after test finally settling on a diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Alexei asked them to try again because he was positive that they had reached an erroneous conclusion. More tests were done while he survived on transfusions of whole blood for the next six weeks. Again his doctors conferred, but this time concluded that the disease was a form of Leukemia. Again returning to the scientists for a moment... Since Canadian Alexei was being treated with transfusions up until his final passing that means he had the DNA of other people flowing through his veins at the time of his death. That fact could further complicate any testing which might attempt to link his remains to those of the Czar's family. Consider, now, evidence regarding the actual murder. Photographs, and interviews show that as one faced the Ipatiev House from the street, the room where the execution took place was halfway along the left side of the building. The ground sloped gradually to a canopied and arched side entrance and people entering the building through that doorway would find themselves facing four more sets of doors at the back of the bottom floor. The double doors, opening into the execution room would have been to their right. The accepted version of the story states that the commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, entered the room with eleven revolutionary soldiers behind him. Probably the most well known piece of evidence is an old photograph which shows the back of the room and the damage that is presumed to have been done to it by the murderous assault of the Bolshevik guards. Light shines in from the small window that is high and to the right of the edge of the picture and causes the damage on the wall and rubble on the floor to cast short shadows to the left. Given the room's position in the building, this suggests that the building faces north or north-east and the photo was taken in the morning. It also means that the Imperial family had been lined up facing the rear of the building with their backs to the street in front. A double door takes up a little less than half of the width of the wall between two pillars that jut out about eighteen inches into the corners of the room and which support a heavy arched ceiling. A similar set of pillars supported two arches on either side of the photographer. The man holding the camera stood in the doorway through which Yurovsky and his armed squad passed. Plaster and decorative paper have been ripped away low and to the left of the door, exposing the inner structure of the wall. The resulting rubble lies in a heap on the floor along the baseboard. This damage is situated precisely where the historic record suggests that the lady-in-waiting, Anna Demidova, had struggled to avoid the thirty or more bayonet thrusts that took her life. After firing their revolvers until they were empty, the twelve men picked up bayonets and proceeded to stab their victims. With even the simplest knowledge of arithmetic and handguns one must conclude that there is no way to account for a minimum of seventy-two shots. In "Dead Men Do Tell Tales" the head of the American forensic team investigating the case, Dr. William Maples, stated that only fourteen bullets had been found in the grave. Even considering the plaster damage evident in the photograph, it is not possible to account for another fifty-eight bullets. All existing evidence describes Yakov Yurovsky as having stepped forward and then fired three shots at the right ear of the young Crown Prince. Every reconstruction to date has placed Yurovsky in the middle of the room, in front of his squad of armed men and facing the ex- Czar. What thinking man stands directly in front of eleven guns with his back to them? In some accounts Yurovsky claimed to have shot the young Alexei in the right ear as he lay on the floor, but in 1934 he told a meeting of old Bolsheviks that he finished the boy off as he sat in the chair. If the boy had been shot in the right ear either he was lying on the floor on his left side or, if he was sitting in the chair with Yurovsky in front of him, Yurovsky was left-handed. A photo of Yurovsky published in John Klier's "The Quest of Anastasia, Solving the Mystery of the Lost Romanovs" shows the commandant holding what looks to be a cup of tea in his right hand and a saucer in his left. Unless the picture has been printed backwards, Yurovsky is right handed and we have to look for another explanation if the boy was sitting in the chair. Officially, Alexei's remains have not yet been found and only one man who claimed to have been the missing Tsarevich gave any description of having been in that room at the time. The Canadian Alexei said that after he heard Yurovsky give the command to fire everything went black. Assuming that he was the boy in that room on the morning of the 17th of July, 1918, his statement tells us two things: If, as he said, everything went black right after the order to fire then he was the first to be fired upon. His is also the only account that claims an order was given to fire. That would suggest Yurovsky's group was an organized firing squad and not the disorganized mob that history describes. No executioner stands in front of his own firing squad to give the order. He stands to one side. Returning to the description of that half-cellar room, in "The Romanovs: The Final Chapter" Robert Massie gave the dimensions as eleven by thirteen feet. It must now be remembered that a supporting pillar jutted about a foot and a half into each of the room's four corners. Viewed from above, the room was shaped like a cross. This might have allowed Yurovsky enough room to step out of the line of fire between the pillars by the left wall and opposite the single barred window on the right. Existing evidence suggests that Yurovsky may have stepped to the left to give the order to fire. Bullet paths in the discovered remains shown in a diagram published in John Klier's 1995 book indicate that two and possibly three of the victims may have been looking to that side of the room when the bullets struck them in the head. The most convincing point is that the right handed Yurovsky would have to be in this position in order to fire at the right ear of the young Tsarevich if the boy was still sitting in the chair and one of the first to be shot. There is no reason to question the story that Yurovsky fired a gun at the right ear of the Tsarevich because that fits perfectly with the tale of Canadian Alexei's survival. His Vancouver doctors confirm that his inner ear on the right side had been completely destroyed by some sort of concussion injury in his youth. They also confirm that he had a number of scars on his right side that might have been caused by boots or bayonets. However, while Alexei was completely deaf in his right ear, those same doctors could see no sign of damage to his skull. Putting all those facts together brings us face to face with another new and crucial question. What type of gun was Yurovsky using and how was it loaded? The destroyed inner ear, with no evidence of bone damage, suggests that the gun must have been loaded with blanks. The Vancouver coroner, most familiar with this case, concurs with that hypothesis. The problem comes in trying to determine what type of gun was used. In his book "The Last Czar" Edvard Radzinsky quoted Yurovsky as having claimed that he had two guns: "Colt no. 71905 with a cartridge clip and seven bullets, and Mauser no. 167177 with a wooden gunstock and a clip with ten bullets". Both guns are clip-loaded pistols but only a few sentences earlier on the same page Radzinsky quotes the Cheka guard Andrei Strekotin as saying: "At his (Yurovsky's) last word he instantly pulled a revolver out of his pocket and shot the Czar". So exactly what kind of weapon did Yurovsky have in his hand? Was it a clip-loaded pistol or a revolver? The answer to that question is crucial to the question of Alexei's survival. In 1935 journalist Richard Halliburton interviewed another of the assassins, Peter Ermakov, who stated, "Yurovsky had a Nagant repeater. Vaganov and I had Mausers". A Nagant is a Russian made revolver of questionable reliability similar to the Smith and Wesson sidearm used by British troops of the era but with two differences: The cylinder springs forward to seal the chamber just before the bullet is fired and it holds seven rounds instead of six. The Colt that Yurovsky had described was a seven shot .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol designed by John Browning and known as the 1911. The serial number is from a group of weapons made in the United States in 1914 and last reported to have been in the American state of Kentucky in 1915. How could such a weapon find its way from the U.S. into the hands of a Bolshevik assassin in the Russian Ural mountains during the last half of the First World War. There is another reason to rule out the Colt that Radzinsky refers to in his book and that is provided by the lead American forensic investigator in the recent discovery of the Czar's remains. In his book "Dead Men Do Tell Tales" Dr. William Maples states that fourteen bullets were recovered from the grave where five of the seven Romanovs are said to have been found. He explains that all of the bullets are 7.62, 7.63, or 7.65 millimeter rounds or about the same size as a .32 caliber. The Colt is a .45 caliber weapon. Dr. Maples also points out that the Russian investigators think nine of the bullets came from Nagant revolvers, four from a Browning (according to Radzinsky, Pavel Medvedev was armed with a ten shot Browning pistol), and one from a Mauser. Not one came from a Colt. The Colt is a big bore hand held cannon-like weapon with a big kick but little accuracy over long distances. The Mauser was designed in 1895 and its holster can be clipped to the back of the handle to turn it from a handgun into a small rifle. With a muzzle velocity of nearly 1500 feet per second, it is dangerous up to a thousand yards. Both weapons need to be modified to fire blanks and even when firing blank rounds they can be deadly within six feet. There is another piece to this puzzle in the testimony from the son of the Chekist Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin who had said that Yurovsky had burned his finger. As Colts and Mausers are both pistols with sealed chambers and loaded with clips it is practically impossible to burn a finger firing one. On the other hand, an old revolver with its spinning cylinder can easily cause injury to its user if the cylinder is worn from heavy use. The hot gases produced by the igniting gunpowder can escape around the sides of the cylinder and burn the trigger finger. Such a gun can also fire blank rounds without modification... which could deafen ears at close range without doing major internal physical damage to the victim. It was, and still is traditional procedure for firing squads to be supplied with guns loaded with both blanks and full rounds. The reason being so that no one knows for certain who fired the fatal shot. All of the accounts state that on the evening before the murders Yurovsky called on the captain of the guard, Pavel Medvedev, collected all of the revolvers which he then took to his office on the upper floor of the Ipatiev House. If Yurovsky was alone in that room with the guns, then he was the only one who knew how the guns were loaded. If the intention was to eradicate the Imperial party as quickly as possible, then why all of this trouble to organize a twelve man firing squad? Chekist guard Andrei Strekotin was manning a machine gun in the corridor, and with the double doors open, he could have sprayed the entire party with a single sweep of his weapon. Short of the invention of a time machine, the complete story of this last chapter of Czarist Russia probably will never be known. And in that regard the author wishes to stress the fact that "My Father the Czar", is a work of pure fiction. There should be no attempt on the part of any reader to correlate this story with history. However, the author wishes to thank two Russian newspaper men who live in Moscow, as well as members of the Canadian Romanov family for their factual contributions which strengthened the historical skeleton upon which this story was woven. THE END All author22 books are available in paperback from Amazon.com, and are also available as with colorful illustration in html format for viewing on your own PC, or in Franklin Rocket-eBook format. Contact author22@aol.com for further information.