Valéntin Spéranski was a Russian émigré to Paris who published a book about the last days of the imperial family, “La Maison à destination spéciale: La tragédie d’Ekaterinenbourg,” ("The House of Special Purpose: The Tragedy of Ekaterinburg") in 1929. This is an exceptionally rare book, probably only now obtainable through the Library of Congress or the rare book collections of a handful of university libraries. The copy I located in my own local university library was a first edition (no doubt the only edition), printed on very cheap paper, yellowed and crumbling, the spine completely broken. It had been autographed by the author himself on May 14, 1936, in Paris. After I brought it back from photocopying, the librarians immediately confiscated it for their rare book collection.
But it’s necessary to give you some background as to why Spéranski’s book is potentially so important in any study of the last days of the imperial family. Valéntin Spéranski was originally a professor of psycho-neurology at the University of St. Petersburg. After the October Revolution, he was dismissed from the faculty, and also later stripped of his position as dean of the Institute of Psycho-Neurology. This was because he was anti-Soviet; he describes himself as a “counter-revolutionary” and an “internal émigré” while he lived under Bolshevik rule. It’s not clear to me when he emigrated to France, but it was obviously after 1924, when he visited Ekaterinburg to give a series of lectures and seized upon the opportunity of being there to conduct his own private inquiries about the last days and murder of the imperial family (remember, this was only six years after the murders, so memories might be said to have been still fresh).
According to Spéranski, while in Ekaterinburg he personally interviewed people of various political parties, including Bolsheviks, who had either witnessed the imperial family arrive in Ekaterinburg or had been in some way involved in their imprisonment and eventual murder. Some of these men unburdened themselves to him because of “pangs of conscience,” others out of loyalty to the Soviet regime spoke in neutral terms about the murders, and still others sought to justify the crime. In his book, Spéranski evinces obvious sympathy for the imperial family, which he does not attempt to hide or dissemble, but equally he is at great pains to stress his attempt to be as objective as possible in dealing with the witnesses. No doubt his scientific training aided him in these efforts.
Here is the excerpt from his book which I believe AP members will find most interesting. It concerns the personalities of the grand duchesses, and their treatment at the hands of the Ipatiev House guards.
Valéntin Spéranski, “La Maison à destination spéciale: La tragédie d’Ekaterinenbourg,” J. Ferenczi & Fils, 1929, pp. 55-58.
[This is my own, very literal translation into English from the original French. The author is asking a former guard questions about the imperial family. The following is the section about OTMA:]
“What impression did the girls make on you?”
“Nothing in particular, I knew them all by name and I could recognize them from far away. Only Tatiana, like her mother, was not without arrogance, she was not disposed to talk to men of the people. However she smiled agreeably when she encountered decent and correct guards. The eldest, Olga Nicolaevna, was, like her brother, pale and sickly, but that did not prevent her from being boisterous. Her eyes, most of the time, appeared sad and tired. During the walk she stood apart from her sisters and looked sadly into the distance. She played the piano more often than her sisters, and when she would play a piece, she would choose something sad and plaintive.”
“Is it true that Marie Nicolaevna more than her sisters pleased the commissars and the guards and that she more than the other members of the family knew how to converse with them?”
“Yes, it’s true, Marie Nicolaevna seemed the most pleasant to me. If she had been well fed and if they had let her stay outside, she would have been a true Russian beauty, even though the blood in her veins was more German, Danish and English than Russian. When Marie Nicolaevna smiled, her eyes shone with such brilliance that it was a pleasure to see. Her face was more often rosy than those of her sisters. Her laughter was so gay and infectious that one derived pleasure from playing and joking with her. One could see that an invincible strength pushed her character to use force: I remember how one day, in the garden, she seized with strength a big tree branch, which she started to swing on until Yurovsky shouted at her in anger, ‘Citizeness Romanov, stop damaging the trees.’”
“And did Anastasia, the youngest of the grand duchesses, please you?”
“That one was a charming little devil. She had such mischief in her that I think you couldn’t get annoyed with her. Lively and boisterous, she continually made comical appearances with her favorite dog, as if putting on a circus. It’s precisely because she was like quicksilver that one of our louts failed to kill her at the window.”
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