THE END OF THE ROMANOVS

Victor Alexandrov was born in Czarist Russia, in St. Petersburg. Today he is an American citizen situated in Paris, writing in French for periodicals here and abroad. His reading of the Ekaterinburg tragedy rests in part on hitherto ""unpublished"" and ""neglected"" material. In a fast-paced narrative, he presents the plight of the Romanovs in the context of Rasputia's then Revolutionary Russia (Rasputin predicted, ""If Russia goes to war, it will be the end of the monarchy, of the Romanovs, and of Russian institutions.""). First there was the influence of the staretz on the Tsarina and hence the Tsar; then after his death and Nicholas' abdication, that of Kerensky who wanted to bring the Tsar and Tsarina to trial for purposes of clarifying an epoch (this according to an interview with the eighty-two-year-old principal himself); finally the coup de grace dealt by Lenia and his court. The author quotes from the Gutek file, which contains the executioner Voikov's story, to prove that Anastasia indeed perished with the rest of the family. In a final thrust he implies that if a Dr. Stanislav Lazover, the ""third man"" at Rasputin's assassination, would talk, our opinions of certain pre-World War I events might radically change. Mr. Alexandrov manipulates his material with a certain journalistic flair that reads with a deceptive ease which may belie its historical validity.