The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue Russia's Imperial Family | Helen Rappaport

the race to save the Romanovs covers a very very specific period in the story of Russia's last imperial family that is from the moment of Nicholas's abdication in March 1917 to their murders the following July in Ekaterinburg in 1918 and it particularly focuses on what happened behind the scenes so it's not so much the story of them although of course they come into the narrative but of what everyone beyond in Europe and Beyond was trying to do to try and help save them or rescue them or find some diplomatic means to get them out so it's a story of the failed Asylum attempts and also the failure to abject failure as several half-baked monarchist attempts to storm wherever they were being held and free them having written already two books about the Romanovs first of all the last two weeks of their lives in Ekaterinburg which is very tight scenario and then a book on their domestic life based around the four sisters the four daughters of the Tsar I hadn't really intended to write another book but something kept niggling away at me constantly and that was everywhere I went talking about the Romanovs even reading blogs and articles on the web constantly repeated the same thing again and again which was it was all the fault of king george v for not saving them he had betrayed them he hadn't galloped into their rescue like some knight on a white charger and it's always struck me first of all that there had to be far more to this story than just that and also if you know Russia and the geography of Russia it doesn't take much to realize how difficult in terms of the geography and the logistics it would be to get them out of Russia so I felt I needed I really passion we wanted to put the microscope on that last part of the story those last few months and I felt that the time had come to challenge a lot of very neat jerk received thinking about what had happened with regard to the British offer Asylum that failed and various other initiatives I thought the time had come to really explore the evidence that had been cited in support of these various aspects of the story because it very quickly struck me as I started digging into the story that there's some very very faulty thinking behind a lot of the you know the arguments of that part of the story and that one really had to try and go back to absolutely the grass roots to actually look at what documentary evidence there was and more importantly I felt it was essential to look for more evidence because there are some very unsubstantiated flimsy claims made about what happened so that was my self-imposed objective was to get somehow try and get to the truth of what went on I think my main objective with the book although I'm by no means set out to exonerate George v and I don't but I think it's very very important and when you read the book and you look at how complex the situation was I think it's very important to apportion blame equally among several players because it wasn't all down to King George's loss of nerve and his worry about you know public outcry if he had the Romanovs here it was an incredibly complicated situation it was partly political there are also clashes within the different european royal families about whether they should or shouldn't help and get out there were then the monarchies in Russia trying to do their own thing to get the room north out there was all the political difficulty for the provisional government in Russia of trying to evacuate the Romanovs constantly coming up against the very hardline Petrograd Soviet who absolutely were adamant that they could not be sent out of Russia and that Nikolas and probably Alexander too must face trial and almost certainly execution so it was a much more complex situation and I felt we had to look at many different aspects of that to see that many many people in their aunt and circumstances in their different ways was to blame for the failure of saving the family I've done my absolute best to search and scale for anything any new material about what went on so many of the books in existence that touch on the end of the Romanov story they all just say oh well it was all George this or end of story and they don't try and look at the bigger picture and it's Tunisia it's too easy to just say oh it was the Kings fault because he changed his mind and I felt that that was very packed and based on very little research and very little a tear to look at the bigger picture so that was my passion about doing this book was to say come on it couldn't you can never blame it all on one person and to a certain extent I think George the faith has been scapegoated and it was time to open that up and see that black blame also belonged at several other people's doors the trouble with the Romanovs story when you look in general us a lot of books on the subject is people get very emotional very passionate very anguished about the terrible tragedy of what happened in in Kaziranga Katherine Berg and particularly the hideous murder of five beautiful innocent children I think that has so struck a nerve with people they get so impassioned about how awful it was that it's very hard for them to be perhaps stand back a bit and be a bit more objective and so that ties in with the ease with which people have jumped to blame someone someone has to be to blame it's got to be someone's fault that they all died and and it is a very emotive subject and one has to treat it carefully and with respects and with compassion because there are people out there particularly the deeply Russian Orthodox believers who revere the Romanovs and they are Saints in the Orthodox calendar so one has to take in into account in their deep sensitivities to this story and the murders but also say come on we have to be objective let's just take a step back and look at the evidence and what I want you to do is be quite dispassionate and really focus on the evidence oh don't tell me about Anastasia that's another reason why I wanted to do the book I can tell you almost without exception every single talk I ever do on the Romanovs I get asked two questions one is why did George betray them or why was it all George's fault and the other one is did Anastasia get away and this is in defiance of all the DNA evidence the scientific tests all the you know attempts over and over again to close down the conspiracy theory angle of this story it's because I think partly it's so awful this murder of the children that people cling to the hope that maybe someone survived it and all the time the Bolsheviks wouldn't properly admit to having killed them all it left a window of opportunity open for false claimants to appear beginning with Hannah Anderson and so and then there was a long long period until 2007 where two sets of remains were missing of Maria and Alexei and all the time those two sets were not found again the conspiracy theories could say are were they escaped there is a terrible need I think for closure on this story now for acceptance for reconciliation for forgiveness and I think it will be a very profound moment for the Russian people in Russia they see a much more so than anywhere else because they have been tormented by this idea of the murder of innocent children well it depends whether you're a monarchist or the Romanov fan there are some in Russia who would like to see a monarchy restored I don't think that will ever happen I think it's significance of Russians is that they need closure now there has been too much oxygen of publicity over the last a hundred years given to all these crazy claimants conspiracy theorists people have popped up all over the world claiming to be one or any of the members of the family Anastacia of course is the one who's had the most claimants but I think it's time please let them rest in peace that you know please let's just put the full stop to the story now well one thing I've noticed in all the years I've been lecturing about my history were writing it's people love knowing how you do it how you work it out how you find your evidence they actually are very interested in the process and because I knew that this was going to be a heavily evidence based book rather than a straight narrative like four sisters was I thought I had to find a different way of writing it and having discussed it with my editor at Hutchinson and with my American editor I decided that what I would do is interpolate in the text small sections where I explained how I think a document was faulty or I found something new that contradicted Prior thinking or explain where things weren't in the place where they shouldn't be and generally show my thought processes as I looked at the evidence and discarded some things and found other things that were new and quite revealing and so I'm hoping the readers will find that seeing a glimpse inside the writer historians process of interest [Music] one of the major elements of the research I felt compelled about was that not enough had effort to be made certainly in English language sources to look at Scandinavian sources to look at the other Royals of Europe not just George v but the Norwegians the Swedes the Danes but most important of all was the Spanish element because I knew and anyone who knows anything about the Romanovs knows that fairly late in the story King Alfonso of Spain made very passionate representations on part behalf of the family sadly was initiating all kinds of pleas and offers to give them asylum actually when they were being murdered and he too had appealed to the Vatican the Vatican came into the frame as well but it was too late this was all happening in August 1918 but what I wanted to do was take a closer look at Alfonso because what I did discover through hard work was that he had been engaged with the problem and with the help trying to help the remnants from the very moment that Tsar abdicated so I've expanded a great deal on Alfonso's role I've looked at all the different political pressures faced by the various Scandinavian relatives about whether they could or couldn't take the Romanovs in I had a lot of research done for me in Canada in the Hudson's Bay archive about rumors that a house was going to be constructed at Murmansk as part of of British evacuation plan I looked in much more detail at Foreign Office records and discussions about the whole process of the asylum issue and the king losing his nerve and all the discussions going back and forth between London and the British ambassador in Petrograd so there were lots of parts of the story where a normal source would say well this happened this memo was sent I think well was that all and then I've dug and dug and dug and I've looked for other things other bits of tangential or additional evidence documentation that give a clearer picture of what went on while I've been gathering material on the roam loss for the last ten years so I had some material already but it was a very intensive research period because I decided quite late that I was going to do this book and I had to I mean the optimum time for publishing it is obviously for the anniversary I had to turn it around very very fast and so I did the research inside a year and I wrote it in let about nine months well I started writing about the Romanovs absolutely totally by accident I had never taken an interest in them particularly because I always had had this fairly knee jerk dismissive response all that Sakharine you know chintzy staff pretty girls and big hearts and you know frocks and all that Imperial grandeur and bling didn't appeal to me and I owe it to a former agent of mine who when I was searching around for a new book idea he said you're a Russian speaker you're a Russian specialist why don't you do the Romanovs I said oh no doesn't appeal to me is too chintzy royal biography is just not my cup of tea he said well go away and look at it and actually once I got into the story and started looking at them not as royal personalities but it's an ordinary family and once I began getting into the dynamic of that family of their love and support for each other of their deeply profoundly Russian Orthodox faith I began to admire them as a family particularly Nicholas as a the most hands-on father any child could wish to have but really I fell in love with the four girls so I felt being completely marginalized and just been the pretty set dressing to the more dramatic story of the parents the haemophiliac brothers so I kinda was sucked into the story and once I got into it there were so many things about it that fascinated me and so here I am ten years on and three books later in terms of certain historical subjects very definitely the one thing I've always felt is that there's been this assumption that men write the big boy subjects like war and violence and revolution and stuff like that and they men writers cover the big historical personalities like Stalin or or even Lenin and one of the first things I did in my earlier book about Lenin in exile was I thought what isn't it about time we had a woman's perspective on a big male historical figure and I did feel at times women historians have tended to gravitate to female subjects you know endless books on Tudor Queens and mistresses and lovers of famous men and the women are always the adjuncts of the much bigger male personalities and so I thought well come on we ought to have more women writing about the male subjects and and actually trying taking it on an offering a woman's point of view so when I did Lennon in exile I wasn't so much interested in the politics I was fascinated in his private domestic life with his wife and his mother-in-law and his mistress and all the women in the party who plotted around and served the cause and I just think that a woman writer can offer a different angle on big male subjects this is my treasured possession and I I bought it to commemorate completing three books on the Romanov it's a piece designed by an American costume jeweler very well known who designed mock Cartier and Faberge jewelry for people like Elizabeth Taylor and I think even Wallis Simpson and I I know the jewelry maker who makes his wonderful one-off necklaces and she had acquired this piece and made the necklace and the earrings to match and as soon as I saw it on her website I said I have got to have a Romanov necklace to remember my long love affair with them by this is the Russian Imperial illegal so it's the great iconic image and for me every time I look at it now I shall remember 10 very happy years going through their story with them you

Channel: Penguin Books UK

Views: 29,406

Rating: 4.7562723 out of 5

Keywords: Penguin Books UK, books, helen rappaport, author, romanov, dr. helen rappaport, russian revolution, helen, interview, rappaport, anastasia, novel, writing, russia, russian history, reading, writer (occupation), queen victoria, ekaterinburg, tsar, maria, tatiana, olga, grand duchesses, moscow, epic, biography, writing (literary genre), book, inspiration, tsaritsa, russian

Id: RGSAWIoaKh8

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018