Just a bit of insight from the "inside"...
The last months of the Romanovs cannot ever be definitively described. The classicist Daniel Mendelsohn suggests historians frequently can only tell “the story of the story.” Mendelsohn was writing of the Holocaust, but his theory applies equally to the Romanovs, I think. The main players were murdered. They are dead. They cannot tell their own story. Only those who committed the murder, who witnessed the murder, or who survived the murder can tell about it – and all of them can only tell their story. In real life, each person is his own “main player” and can at best only peripherally describe what happened to others.
Greg and I agree with Mendelsohn’s theory, and we knew that in certain parts of The Fate of the Romanovs, we could only tell “the story of the story.” And in telling “the story of the story,” we realized that if we were to competently and inclusively cover all the possibilities and probabilities (and impossibilities and improbabilities) of this story, we would have to include a number of accounts and sources that we knew would kick up controversy.
In coming to the decision to include these (sometimes previously unacknowledged and unused) sources, we knew we would have to rely on our readership being somewhat sophisticated and discerning in that they would have to be able to sift through all the information we found and decide for themselves what the most likely scenario could have been. We did not want to tell people what to think. We did not want to do the sifting for our readers (though we did exclude for the sake of word-count a couple of accounts that were only of the slenderest of interest). We knew that we would be flying in the face of the decorum and “mist of holiness” that sometimes surrounds the Romanovs if we raised the subjects of sexual violence and rape which were an undertone in many of the accounts we accessed. But ultimately, we felt that 21st-Century readers would be markedly less sheltered than previous generations, and more open to the idea that an “idealized” prison experience probably – or possibly – didn’t happen for the Romanovs.
