THE LAST GAYS OF THE ROMANOVS.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 January 1921, Page 3

THE LAST GAYS OF THE ROMANOVS.

For long a great deal of uncertainty existed with regard to the fate of the ex-Czar of Russia and his family. According to one report, they were held in captivity in Siberia, and 'were being treated with consideration by their Bolshevist gaolers. According to another they had escaped, and bad taken refuge in a biding place known only to a few faithful adherents. There was even a rumour that one of the Gw’s daughters had reached America, though this had but a short-lived currency. At last the Bolshevist Government announced that In a duly-constituted trial Nic .o!as bad lieen proved guilty of conspiring with the enemies of the Soviet, and had been executed, while the exEmpress and the children had lieen conveyed to a place of safety, where they were still in custody. The latter statement was intended to prevent inquiry, and for a time it succeeded. But little by little ugly stories began to leak out of wholesale murders committed in circumstances of peculiar atrocity. The Bolsheviks could easily have refuted these by producing the ex-Em-press and children had they been alive. Their failure to do so furnished strong presumptive evidence of guilt. Gradually the pretence was dropped, and there was no longer any doubt that the Romanov family bad .been killed. But as long as the Bolsheviks occupied Ekaterinburg, the scene of the execution, first-hand testimony could not he obtained. Early in 1010 Mr Robert Wilton, correspondent of the. London “Times,” was in Siberia, and when the advance of the White armies drove the Reds from Ekaterinburg, he associated himself with General Ditericlis in the investigation of what was known as the Czar case. They had access to documents, the authenticity could not be questioned; they examined various witnesses, whose stories corroborated each other in all essentials; they were assisted by Nicholas Sokolov, a distinguished criminal lawyer. The results of the inquiry have been embodied by Mr Wilton in “The Last Days of the Romanovs,” which proves incontestably that the unfortunate family was the victim of as revolting a crime as ever shocked the conscience of civilisation.

On the night of July 16, 1918, the Imperial family, with .their faithful attendants—eleven persons in all—were tajven into a small room in the house where they were imprisoned, and shot to death with revolvers. They "’ere not even accorded the mercy of a quick despatch. Their murderers blazed away in a promiscuous fusilade until the last poor writhing body ceased to move. The corpses were riddled with wounds. They were then stripped of their jewellery, taken into the woods, and burned with the aid of petrol. The remains were thrown into h disused iron pit. There was no trial of any sort, although after the massacre there was a mock : i !, in which the complicity of the Czar in an anti-Bolshevik plot was alleged, and "proved” to the satisfaction of the Jewish Komisars. But not only was the Czar no party to such, a plot, but no plot existed, as the Bolsheviks must have been aware. The trial was merely a tragic farce, staged for popular consumption. The murder had been decided upon in and dictated from Moscow long before, and the proceedings before the Komisars were as genu ine as the mock funeral given to the ex-Czar days after his ashes had b. en thrown into the Ganina shaft.

However, the massacre was hut the culminating point in a story of oit-ter tribulation. When the Roman ivs were first taken to Siberia? they were reasonably well treated. They had freedom of movement within assigned limits, and Kerensky made them an allowance. This ceased after his fall; they were reduced to poverty, and endured positive privations. However their physical sufferings were the least part of their misery. Their guards were rough and brutal, and took a continual delight in insulting and humiliating their helpless captives. Worst of all was the complete lack of privacy; nowhere were they safe from prying eyes. Callousness end cruelty are equally reprehensible whether their victims be of high or low estate, and. the foul murder of a potentate is morally no worse than that of a pauper. But there is something profoundly moving about the end of the Romanovs. How had the mighty fallen! Not long before they had been the proudest dynasty itrt Europe. The Czar of all the Russians was the most absolute of autocrats; a vast Empire was ruled by his whim ; his family lived sheltered in the luxury of the most exclusive of courts. And then —the wretched exiles, the butt of any drunken scoundrel who chose to jibe and jeer at them. And then at the last si nameless grave in a Siberian forest.

Mr Wilton devotes some space to an examination of various tin? ox-Emperor and Empress, and clears them of many aspersions. He does not attempt to deny that they had faults, hut treachery to the Allies was not among them. Nicholas was deploiably weak, and was completely under the domination of Alexandra, a masterful, ambitious 'woman, who did not always use her influence wisely. But ho acquits them equally of any suspicion of pro-Germanism ; they were loyal to the Allies even unto death. It lias been established beyond doubt that the Czai rejected overtures proposing that he should endorse the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Mr Wilton also throws fresh light on the Rasputin affair, of which, he declares, the public ha-s quite an erroneous impression. “Rasputin the monster, is a fiction bred in the, busy brains of politicians, and elaborated by the teeming imagination, of sensational novelists.” He ,was a typical Russian peasant, uneducated, gluttonous, but with n vein of shrewdness. The stories that he was the power behind ' thethrone -at whose__ nod Ministers were appointed or dismissed are without foundation; “lie was too ignorant, too petty to understand political questions.’ ’ He was rustic even in the measure of his iperquisites. In his native village it was not considered dishonourable to cheat one’s neighbour in a small way. In Petrograd lie might have,,made a colossal fortune, but contented himself with dabbling in small coups which Sought in a few hundred roubles. There was .nothing improper m his relations with the Empress ; he won. her i favour simply a« the faith-healer who I

seemed to understand the health of her son; and here again his peasant cunning was revealed. The Czarevitch suffered from violent hemorrhages, in which after severe pains a crisis would be reached and recovery follow. A certain lady-in-waiting, who was Rasputin’s accomplice, knew the symptoms of the attacks and the course which they took. When /the crisis had passed Rasputin was summoned, and it seemed to the superstitious Czarina, whose love for her son clouded her judgment, that Rasputin’s intercession lrnd brought relief. She never realised that his prayers did not affect the disense. But Rasputin owed his position at the coifrt solely to his supposed beneficent powers over the invalid, and Mr Wilton insists that the stories that he had gained a malignant moral ascendancy over the Empress ore utterly basefless.