The many deaths of Tsar Nicholas II: Relics, remains and the Romanovs, by Wendy Slater

London and New York: Routledge, 2007

194 pages, black and white illustrations

A review by Janet Ashton

At first glance, the unsuspecting book-buyer may wonder why the world needs yet another account of the murder 

of Nicholas II. In English alone, there have been innumerable books published since the discovery of the Romanov 

grave at Koptiaki. These range from straight journalistic accounts of finding and identifying the bodies - such as 

Robert Massie’s “The Romanovs, the final chapter” - to the thoughtful “Fate of the Romanovs,” by Greg King and

Penny Wilson, which sets the events of imprisonment and murder into their real context, from the events of 

Nicholas’s reign that led to his being imprisoned in the first place to the in-fighting and politicking that bedevilled

the investigation, the canonisation and the funeral. “Fate of the Romanovs” actually touched in reasonable depth 

on a number of the themes that are central to “Many deaths…,” including the posthumous romanticisation of 

Nicholas’s image, and the various historiographical manipulations of the facts of  his murder by individuals with

particular axes to grind. This manipulation was also examined in greater depth in the evaluative bibliography of the

murder that formed part of the “Fate of the Romanovs Special issue” of Atlantis.

But “The many deaths of Tsar Nicholas II,” is quite different in scope and intention to either “Fate of the 

Romanovs” or any of the other works. The purpose of this book is a dual one. It aims, like its forebears, to

recount what actually happened to Nicholas and his family; but it also seeks primarily to examine the various 

differing narratives that have grown up around those events, and to assess their meaning and significance.

The author, Dr Wendy Slater, has taught history at University College London and at Cambridge, and the focus 

of her earlier published work has been on modern Russia as the nation emerges from Communism. She 

approaches Nicholas from this same perspective: not just as a historical character per se, but also and more

significantly as the ever-present ghost haunting post-Soviet politics and religious affairs. As the author notes, 

“the actual remains of the last Tsar…as well as the ubiquitous physical representations of Nicholas, were at the

centre of the cultural turmoil that followed the demise of the Soviet Union."

The book opens with an apparently fictionalised account of the murder itself, written from the viewpoint of an
                    “everyman soldier” in the Ipatiev House guard, who recounts his impressions of the Romanovs and his
                    experience of the killing itself. He recalls a “laughable” Nicholas and Grand Duchesses who “tried it on all the
                    time” with the guards in a way he hopes his own sister wouldn’t. He remembers the drawn-out horror of the
                    murder, his own relief that he has not been told to kill any of the daughters, and the exasperation of the bungled
                    disposal of the bodies with a drunken Ermakov in charge.

The author has chosen to use this novelistic style as a thematic introduction to this book about narratives. 

She notes that despite its style, the account is entirely grounded in guard statements and forensic evidence, and is 

“as accurate as any written in conventional form, in the sense that it is based on the same sources, tested with the 

same rigour. Yet it questions the false certainties of traditional narrative history, which can never produce a 

perfectly objective version replicating the events of the past.”

Chapter two focuses on the discovery of the bodies, and the self-conscious, filmic awareness of the participants 

that they were making history. She then summarises as others have done how the identification of the bones was

bedevilled by bickering and jealousy between scientific or political institutions in Moscow, Ekaterinburg and 

abroad. Most in keeping with the book’s theme, however, she also notes the suspicion engendered by the 

departure of events from the traditional “narrative” of the death of the Tsar, which had all bodies destroyed in 

acid. The Orthodox Church’s attitude in particular was motivated partly by conviction that the bones were a

Soviet decoy planted to mislead those who would worship the “true” (and few) relics of the family discovered

by Sokolov. The author also notes other paranoid theories that the grave was not authentic, mainly issuing from

the nationalist community in Russia and abroad, which resulted in deliberate campaigns to discredit the

investigation. Briefly, she mentions the scientists who have challenged the DNA identification of the remains since

2000, finding their efforts disingenuous and marked by legalistic or statistical trickery. “Taken in isolation, the 

DNA evidence could be open to challenge: certainly a good defence lawyer would argue that the chain of 

evidence was so corrupted in the botched exhumation and identification process that the results were inadmissable

in court. On the other hand, common sense would argue that the bones must be those of the Romanovs. Repeated

tests have produced identical results; the DNA results tally with the historical and anthropological evidence.” 

Describing the campaigns against the grave as “absurd” or “virulent,” Wendy Slater also feels it necessary to state

her own position unequivocally for the record: she does not believe the grave to be a fake, nor does she believe

anyone survived. This is probably a wise thing to do, since as this book itself reveals, people with an obsessive

interest in the topic of Tsarist remains are adept at taking historians’ statements or even facts out of context and

misrepresenting them for their own ends.

She takes no real position on the issue of which daughter’s body is missing from the grave, simply stating that the
                    eventual “official” identification of the girl as Maria might be a jurisdictional as much as scientific decision –
                    that is to say, the Russian Government’s Commission agreed with the Russian scientists’ opinion.

The absence of two of the bodies however is highly significant to the book, since one of the chapters will examine 

survivor narratives. Wendy Slater treats the tale that the missing bodies were burned with caution, and notes that

we may never know what happened to them.

The death of Nicholas II and his family, as presented on a Church website. Note the prominence given to the symbols scratched on the wall - believed by the extreme right to be evidence of a ritual murder

                    Chapters three to seven move on from looking at discernible facts to examining the narratives of the death
                    themselves, from the verifiable to the patently false, which emerged after 1918 in the absence of solid
information about the Romanovs’ fate. Each one of these tales is interesting not for what it tells about the
                    Romanovs but for what it tells about the circumstances in which it emerged, and the people who elected to
                    believe it. A whole chapter is given to what the author calls the “Gothic horror” narrative, which includes
                    nationalist or monarchist tales of  Nicholas as the victim of ritual murder by Jews. This story includes the
                    legend that his severed head was held in the Kremlin, where the Bolshevik butchers duly gloated over it.
                    She traces the origin of this tale to the unbalanced (and unfrocked) monk Iliodor,and notes that even
                    scholarly attempts to refute the story have been appropriated and mis-cited by latter-day nationalists as
                    proof of the veracity of the tale! Dr Slater thinks that the resurgence of these tales in Russia post-1991

are indicative of fears of a resurgence of Soviet power, and of the insecurities of people  – be they émigrés

who believed these tales in the 1920s or home-grown nationalists today – who face an uncertain world shorn

of the traditional values they believed in. The tales also of course echo the decapitation of both French and

English kings in those countries’ respective revolutions – a public dénouement denied to Nicholas II, whose

own murder was a secretive, botched and insignificant footnote to his abdication, its clandestine nature in

itself giving rise to so many myths and legends. In this sense, Slater thinks that the story might also have had

its uses to the Bolsheviks, as a symbol of the definite disappearance of the old Tsarist world.

In looking at survivor narratives, Wendy Slater concentrates upon Alexei claimants and pays no attention to the 

multiple putative Grand Duchesses. This is partly because Alexei claimants have actually been the most numerous, 

and also because the Heir is the one politically significant child. The stories of Michael Gray, Vasilii Filatov, 

Heino Tammet and Michal Goleniewski get most attention, but the author also mentions some early, Russian 

Alexeis, who emerged in the early years of the Bolshevik regime. In each case, she thinks the stories arise less 

from a desire on the part of the claimants to make money than a desire for attention and for self-reinvention,

and considers that none of these claims can withstand even cursory scrutiny. Yet people, driven by a need for

meaning and narrative completion (the restoration of an unjustly killed or dispossessed prince) continue to buy

the books written by these claimants or their supporters.

The third and fourth narratives examined by Wendy Slater are the most interesting to me: those of the “Tsar 

Martyr” and the “Secular saint”. The author notes the connection between these two depictions of Nicholas

(and implicitly the connection between the anti-Semitic Gothic horror narrative and that of the Tsar-martyr, a

connection unashamedly made by extremists within the Church both in Russia and abroad.) Just as the

prevailing modern perception of Nicholas as “a good man” helped dispel concerns in Russia about the 

dubious ideological foundation of the canonisation, so too the image of the canonised saint has affected

historical depictions of Nicholas the Tsar and man. Wendy Slater cites the example of Aleksandr Bokhanov

as an historian who has allowed the Tsar-as-saint to “infect” his writing, quoting melodramatic text in which

Bokhanov depicts the imperial family suffering “every imaginable disappointment on earth”, and redeeming

all their mistakes with their uncomplaining lives and death. This narrative, she notes, proceeds to an extent

from Nicholas’s own propaganda within his lifetime, and his depiction of himself in his official biography as

a man of ascetic habits and deep faith. She recounts the nationalistic political impetus for Nicholas’s 

canonisation and the desire within the Russian Church to appease this, as well as the events surrounding 

his funeral and the series of purported miracles and sightings of him or his family by ordinary Russians. One

dissenting voice is noted, pithily: the émigré historian Dmitry Pospielsky protested the decision loudly, and

observed that an icon of Nicholas should most correctly depict a man holding a gun and a glass of vodka, 

with a cigarette hanging from his lips and a dead animal shot in sport at his side!

Icon of the imperial family from the Church of St Nicholas, Bialowieza. 

If Nicholas’s depiction of himself in works published during his reign has contributed to his latter-day image

as a saint, so more than anything have his family portraits and photographs shaped the prevailing, sentimental

vision of his perfect family – the “secular saints” - which is Wendy Slater’s final chosen narrative. The photographs

are of course doubly effective because of their deaths: the more horrible someone’s death, the more poignant the

memorials of them as a sailor-suited baby. Wendy Slater notes, as do King and Wilson and Richard Wortman

(whose books are cited several times in this chapter), that Nicholas put such pictures into circulation deliberately

in order to bolster his own image as perfect paterfamilias to Russia as well. Yet even historians continue to take

them at face value, and this causes the author some irritation. In addition to Aleksandr Bokhanov she names several

western writers she thinks guilty of deliberately sentimentalising the Romanovs, and of denying the dysfunctional 

abnormality of life lived in a palace with no real friends, back-stabbing relatives and hundreds of servants in order

to depict the last Tsar’s as an “ordinary” family all can identify with. She finds this a “mendacious and corrosive” 

way of looking at history: it denies the political reality of Nicholas’s actions by taking refuge in the manufactured

romantic image of the father playing with his children. And that romantic image is reflected not just in professionally

published works, but in multiple websites and newsgroup posts and in films as well. (An internet phenomenon not 

specifically noted by Wendy Slater since it may post-date her finishing the manuscript, consists of individuals on

the social networking "Myspace" site assuming the identities of Romanovs in order to send greetings to one another.

Thus the "children of Nicholas II" cheerfully wave to "Aunt Miechen" and other figures who in life they had little

contact with and with whom they enjoyed anything but the cosy, familial relationships apparently imagined.)

The “meaning” of all this is obvious. In the west but in Russia more particularly, the uncertainty of the future

leads people to take refuge in an imagined past when things were gentler.  There is a sense of mourning too

at lost opportunities for a different twentieth century for Russia.  

This over-used 1913 image of the family is identified by Wendy Slater as the archetypal depiction of them 

as romanticised "secular saints" 

“The many deaths…” is just the sort of book I like, and the only sort of book on.the last Tsar I would now buy. 

I have no interest these days in reading yet another straight-forward run-through of the events of his life or death; 

but this book adopts a different perspective. In doing this, it combines forceful historical analysis with literary and

psychological observation; it examines and untangles the historiography of the murder case and its afterlife as

much as it reveals its actual history, working in the gap between image and reality. In short, it encompasses all the

elements I’ve most like in books about the Romanovs. I honestly can’t find anything negative to say about it. How

the "uncritical admirers" of Nicholas will greet it is another matter – can anyone emerge from reading that he was

canonised to heal schisms and as a result of nationalist pressure and still believe him a genuine saint? But, then, the

book is not only about Nicholas himself; it is about modern Russia and humanity and why and how we interpret

history the way we do, whatever we about might happen to conclude about him personally.

The “Many deaths” of the title are an allusion to a quotation by Simon Schama about the “many deaths” of 

General Wolfe. Without that allusion, this book might equally be called “The many lives of  Tsar Nicholas II” – for

in the end, the main reason why it exists at all is that the last Tsar is a living figure who influences events even

nearly a century after his death, and who has far more significance in modern Russia than he had in 1918. 

Nicholas II is more than a historical character: he is a cultural phenomenon - and what admirer can reasonably

complain about that?

copyright Janet Ashton, 2007

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