Ah, it's not how I understood the scene...I thought he really did give him the egg as a parting gift, since Derevenko had to leave before 4 PM, or something like that...
Oh no, he definitely didn't give it to him in the movie, D stole it, but the point of the scene was to show what a wonderful boy Alexei was, that he saved his friend Derevenko even though he knew he stole from him, he was loyal enough to him to tell white lie and save him... Of course this didn't happen in reality.
Yeah, I agree about the mistake concerning the Kaiser, but no movies are perfect! Still, I love that movie! Even if there's some discrepancies in it...
I think it's a good movie too, but my point is that it is still the director's/producer's/writer's take on what happened, not completely ubiased facts...
But since it is only Virubova who speaks of the treason of Derevenko, can we consider this episode to be unreliable at best?
Was it only Vyrubova who spoke of it? I thought some others mentioned it too, but maybe it was just second hand from Vyrubova's account... If no one else witnessed it and can corroborate, then we have to think of it this way: what motive would Vyrubova have to lie about it? If she didn't have any obvious motive, then perhaps it's true, if she did, then perhaps it's not true. Also, was Vyrubova reliable with other information she gave? If she was consistently reliable (i.e. others corroborated and she was never caught at lies, etc.) then chances are her account is more or less true, if she was consistently "shakey", then probably not... And finally, what kind of a person was she in general, what was she up to after the revolution, what did others say about her later on, etc. This is how you can figure out how reliable the person is... But ultimately, everyone does have the potential to lie or confuse things, so we must take everything with a grain of salt until it is evaluated farther...
