This book was hard to believe when I was a high school freshman when it came out, and now it's outright ridiculous in many ways, knowing what we know now since the fall of Communism.
While I did at one time believe in AA, I never believed the Polish family claimants (my history teacher did though!) and I never believed the Perm stories. Now since I've come to this forum, I found out the reason for the rumors: the Germans, with whom the Russians had just bargained an end to the war, had demanded 'the princesses of German blood' (Alix and OTMA) be delivered safely into their hands. Since they had already been executed, the Bolsheviks had to come up with a story real fast to cover themselves in order not to cause in international incident with the Germans, so they planted all these stories that the girls had escaped and let them spread around. Sadly, these stories are used to this day by those looking for escape theories. So there was word going around that they were alive, seen here or there, but they were all FALSE.
This is not the only time the Bolsheviks did this. When Ella, Prince Paley and the Konstantinovich boys were killed 2 days after the Imperial family, they did not admit it, they went back to the town and rang a bell and spread word that the prisoners had been 'taken away in the night by unknown persons' There is documented evidence of this in the memoirs of the lead assassin, and you can read his testimony in "Nicholas and Alexandra: A Lifelong Passion." So since they did it here, it is very likely they also were capable of making up false stories concerning the other killings. Not only has this caused a lot of wild stories to circulate over the years, it caused at the time a great deal of false hope and grief among the families, especially the mother of the Konstantinovich boys.
