Russia's Last Royal Clan

...Always right.'" Suspense is an important antidote to this daily tedium, and the poignant awareness that the routine is about to come to a sharp disastrous end often does the trick...

...Bayonets and close-range shots finally bring the execution to a grisly end, but Leonka's story is not over...

...Adopting Leonka's perspective, Alexander is able to temporarily overlook the now common knowledge that these notes were a ploy by the local secret police to goad the family into trying to escape...

...He may not have known how to rule a country, but he certainly could play husband and father...

...One of a handful of servants who followed the Emperor, the Empress, their son, and four daughters into exile in August 1917, the kitchen boy, Leonka Sednyov, was abruptly dismissed on the afternoon of the execution and never heard from again...

...What with the lack of privacy, the collective atmosphere, and the ever-present nosy neighbor, Ipatiev House, as Alexander depicts it, smacks more of a Soviet communal apartment than a Civil War prison, and Nikolai, for one, does not seem to mind...

...And thanks to his subsequent research in America, our aged narrator is able to describe to his granddaughter how the corpses were dug up and reburied the very next day...

...It was all too obvious during his reign that Nikolai's favorite hours of the day were those he spent with his family...

...contributor, Washington "Post," "Forward" In July 1991, just after Boris N. Yeltsin was elected president of Russia, a team of specialists descended on a stretch of railroad track near Sverdlovsk, the once and future Yekaterinburg...

...If it was simply a question of myself, I would happily get rid of all this...

...To resolve these mysteries the author seizes on yet another missing link, the Romanovs' 14-year-old kitchen boy, and fashions him as an eyewitness...

...If the 150 pages that precede the execution make for slow reading, one can only imagine what it must have been like to experience the period they cover day after day...

...Stripped of his empire in The Kitchen Boy, Nikolai indeed appears to blossom in his new role as full-time family man...

...In order to play both novelist and historian, Alexander turns his aged narrator into a reborn academic...

...Alexander evocatively imagines how the executioners, only recently severed from peasant upbringings that associated the royal family with the divine, reacted when the bullets bounced, sparking, off the young girls' chests: "Rather it appeared as if God Himself were shielding them, and a great cry arose, not from the horrified victims, but their executioners, so sure were they of the divineness of those White princesses...

...As they sweat, fullyclothed, through the hot summer nights in anticipation of their sudden release, their days drag on in regimented order—lunch at 1 p.m., tea at 4:30, dinner at 8, and, when the guards are so disposed, a walk in the yard from time to time...

...I am cold toward them, and this too is wrong of me.' '"All that matters is that we seven are together and safe.' '"Yes, yes, of course, my love...

...The shelves in his office are weighed down by 3 00 books on the Romanovs, and he has a world-class collection of Fabergé eggs on his desk...

...As the empire slid into its final free-fall, he aggravated its collapse by provoking and losing a war of pride with Japan...

...In different circumstances, he might not have done so badly under Communism...

...Encased in these effectively bulletproof vests, they ran around frantically for 10 minutes before the firing squad finally killed them...

...Having lived the history once, Misha has been researching it ever since...

...But with conditions rapidly deteriorating in Ipatiev House, their makeshift prison, the Romanovs latched onto the officer's promise at once and, in the novel, entrust the delivery of their responses to Leonka...

...There have been some absurd speculations, but to serious historians I am still to this day nothing more than the 'little kitchen boy.'" Leonka's story begins a month before the family's execution, with the arrival of the first of four secret rescue notes signed by a loyal Tsarist officer...

...You're right...

...One of the girls would pause in her reading, jump off her bed, check the measuring device...

...At the end of the novel, in a clever and surprising, albeit accelerated, twist of events and identities, Alexander has Misha narrate a wildly improbable scenario of what really happened to the missing bodies of Aleksei and Maria and the suitcase of family jewels...

...Plaintively following the loaded truck to the outskirts of the city, he watches as the bodies are mutilated and dumped into an open mine...

...Convinced that they were being led to their rescue, the grand duchesses had strapped on their corsets, each loaded with 10,000 carats of diamonds...

...Sent away that afternoon, Leonka sneaks back into the Ipatiev House yard and watches as the family is conducted down the 23 steps to the basement and shot...

...They came to dig up the tangled remains of the last Romanov emperor, Nikolai II, his empress, Aleksandra, their children, and servants...

...His historian's tone is hard to ignore when he puts forth pedantic theses or indulges his urge to footnote the archive where he got his information—Harvard, Yale, or Russian State—in case his granddaughter wants to checkhis facts...

...More than 1,000 bones were eventually unearthed and identified...

...Or rather, all were interred there except two—the Tsar's hemophiliac heir, Aleksei, and one of the Tsar's daughters, the Grand Duchess Maria—whose bodies, mysteriously, were never found...

...Then, in July 1998, exactly 80 years after they were unceremoniously shot and buried on the Communist Party's orders, the Romanovs were laid to rest in the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in St...

...Alexander draws most of Leonka's anecdotes from the family's actual diary entries, which themselves often open with sentences like "Spent the day as usual" or "Very hot day again.' Completely cut off from the outside world, the Romanovs' only source of information is the mercury thermometerthathangs outside the window...

...Petersburg with their ancestors...

...Yet meticulous as this historical re-creation may be, it is not until the Romanovs' diaries break off on the night of the execution that the novel enters its element and the author is free to imagine what took place...

...by granting demands for constitutional reform and then dissolving the Parliament upon its election...

...As it turns out, Misha has a serious chip on his shoulder: "In any history book, I, Leonid Sednyov, am nothing but the smallest footnote in the remarkable story of the murder of the Romanovs...

...Nikolai's aides often wrote that if anything impeded his reign, it was his being too much of a gentleman, too committed to preserving the honor and truth of his divine ordination...

...You know, I don't hold to autocracy for my own pleasure," he told his Minister of Internal Affairs in 1904, "I act in this sense only because I am convinced that it is necessary for Russia...

...As Misha bitterly remarks, these diamond breastplates ultimately did little good for the grand duchesses, who wore them unwittingly to their execution...

...Scoffing at the myth that the Grand Duchess Anastasia survived (her body was found with the others in 1991), Alexander nevertheless turns with gusto to the riddle of what might have happened to her brother and sister, Aleksei and Maria—not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars of jewels that the Romanovs took with them into exile, the anonymous rescue notes that were smuggled into the house, and the telltale royal birthmark of hemophilia that just might resurface, like the Hapsburg chin, to identify a lost descendant...

...Perhaps no royal downfall has sparked as much speculation as that of the Romanovs, and Robert Alexander takes full advantage of its irresistible allure in The Kitchen Boy, a novel that tends toward the thriller despite its often stilted historical tone...

...Ninety-four-year-old Misha, an Illinois magnate with a dubious Russian past, is determined to confess his true identity on tape to his granddaughter before he dies...

...When the windows are sealed shut with lime and even that diversion is forbidden, Alexander's Romanovs resort to sewing, reading, playing cards, and engaging in unnatural dialogue: "? long to warm and comfort others— you know I do—'" the Empress tells her husband, '"but I don't feel drawn to those around me here...

...Cut to the summer of 1998 in Alexander's novel...

...The Emperor would slow in his pacing of the rooms, bend over, see what God had decided for the day...

...Alexander is at his best, for instance, when he describes the desperate attempts of the Empress and her daughters to sew some 40,000 carats of diamonds into their corsets, pillows and hats in time for the anticipated escape...

...If this scene seems unnecessarily gory, Alexander is not to blame...

...and by inflicting himself on the Russian Army during World War I as commander in chief, because he was sure that only the Tsar could rally his troops to fight...