The Secret Plot to Save the Tsar : The Truth Behind the Romanov Mystery

by Shay Mcneal

Release Date: 22 October, 2002

Edition: Hardcover

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Interesting, But Not Completely Believable

Shay McNeal has attempted to refute what seems to many to be a dead issue: the mystery of what happened to the last Tsar and his family. Some parts of this book have strength and produce some interesting new information, but unfortunately the main premise of the book cannot hold water.

The first section deals with the complicated negotiations and intrigues that went on in 1917 and 1918 between Britain, Germany, the Russian Provisional Government, and later with the Bolsheviks over what was to happen to the deposed Tsar Nicholas II and his family. McNeal has turned up some surprising material, such as that the British were apparently constructing a house for the Tsar in Murmansk where he could await a restoration, and invokes some well known names in the world of espionage like Sidney Reilly, the ace of spies.

Next McNeal covers some familiar ground as she recapitulates the inconsistencies and fabrications of the official Sokolov account of the death of the Imperial Family. Very little of this is new, as numerous investigators over the last thirty years or so have poked holes in Sokolov's official line. McNeal brings in a new twist as she points out a few discrepancies and misstatements that she feels point the way to the true story. She also relies quite a bit on Rescuing the Czar, published in 1920 in the US. Most researchers have dismissed this book as an imaginative but false account, but McNeal does a good job of pointing out that the book does seem to have some information that was apparently pretty close to the truth.

Toward the end of the book McNeal's story trails off a bit. There is really no way to dispute the fact that bodies with mitochondrial DNA corresponding to that of the tsar and his family were discovered in a grave near Ekaterinburg in 1991, pretty much in the same area the accounts of the assassins had pinpointed all along. McNeal tries to dismiss the DNA research as inconclusive and hints it may even have been planted on the bodies. Ths is simply ridiculous since there was no way whoever did the planting could have known the correct DNA haplotypes for both Nicholas and Alexandra.

McNeal has done an enormous amount of research, but unfortunately, knowing the serial codes for Colt revolvers used in the murders and getting the timetables for British gunboats on Chinese rivers doesn't make her hypothesis believable. The biggest problem of all, of couse is if the Tsar and his family did escape, where did they eventually wind up? McNeal trails off here, of course, because there is simply no gainsaying that Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were murdered in July 1918 in Ekaterinburg. The details were probably not exactly like the official story has always had it, but in the end the Romanovs wound up in that common grave in the forest.

That's really the saddest part of this book, that all those machinations and plots couldn't save the lives of a man who was a bad tsar but a good husband and father, his loving wife, their four beautiful daughters, and their ailing son.

If you would like more information on the end of the Romanovs, I'd suggest Robert K. Massie's The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. For more information on mitochondrial DNA and its uses, read The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes.

Nonsense!

This is just another crackpot book about the Romanovs after the manner of Summers and Mangold's File on the Tsar. Nothing in this book should be taken seriously. The worst argument is about the Romanovs escape. Nonsense like this should have stopped being written decades ago. It is sad that some people still think there is something to say on the matter. The only decent thing about this badly written book is that it does not claim to be definitive-which it is not. Among other things the author never satisfactorily explains the existence of the Romanov remains. She never gets into how the Bolsheviks could come up with remains that matched those of the Romanovs so well. She tackles the question of the DNA match in a contrived manner. Everyone can decide for themselves, but I think this book is worth no one's time.