Interview with Vladimir Sychev on the Romanov case

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Vladimir Sychev

In June 1987, I was in Venice with the French press accompanying François Mitterrand at the G7 summit. During the breaks between the pools, an Italian journalist approached me and asked me something in French. Realizing from my accent that I was not French, he glanced at my French accreditation and asked where I was from. “Russian,” I replied. - How is it? - my interlocutor was surprised. He held an Italian newspaper under his arm, from which he translated a huge, half-page, article.

I convinced my Italian colleague that this is a gift from Destiny and that it is useless to resist it. Having learned that he was from Milan, I told him that I would not fly back to Paris on the plane of the presidential press, and we would go to this village for half a day. We went there after the summit.

It turned out that this was not Italy, but Switzerland, but we quickly found a village, a cemetery and a cemetery watchman who led us to the grave. On the gravestone there is a photograph of an elderly woman and an inscription in German: Olga Nikolaevna (no surname), the eldest daughter of Nikolai Romanov, Tsar of Russia, and the dates of life are 1985-1976 !!!

The Italian journalist was an excellent translator for me, but he clearly did not want to stay there for the whole day. I had to ask questions.

- When did she settle here? - In 1948.

- She said that she is the daughter of the Russian tsar? - Of course, the whole village knew about it.

- Did it get into the press? - Yes.

- How did the other Romanovs react to this? Did they sue? - Served.

- And she lost? - Yes, I did.

- In this case, she had to pay the legal costs of the opposing party. - She paid.

- She worked? - Not.

- Where did she get the money? - Yes, the whole village knew that it was supported by the Vatican !!

The ring is closed. I went to Paris and began to look for what is known on this issue … And I quickly came across a book by two English journalists.

II

Tom Mangold and Anthony Summers published The Dossier on the Tsar in 1979. They started by saying that if the secrecy label is removed from the state archives after 60 years, then in 1978 60 years will expire from the date of the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and you can "dig" something there by looking into the declassified archives. That is, at first there was an idea to just look … And they very quickly got on the telegrams of the British ambassador to their Foreign Ministry that the royal family had been taken from Yekaterinburg to Perm. There is no need to explain to the BBC professionals that this is a sensation. They rushed to Berlin.

It quickly became clear that the Whites, having entered Yekaterinburg on July 25, immediately appointed an investigator to investigate the execution of the royal family. Nikolai Sokolov, whose book everyone still refers to, is the third investigator who received the case only at the end of February 1919! Then a simple question arises: who were the first two and what did they report to their superiors? So, the first investigator named Nametkin, appointed by Kolchak, after working for three months and declaring that he is a professional, is a simple matter, and he does not need additional time (and White attacked and did not doubt their victory at that time - i.e. all your time, do not rush, work!), puts on the table a report that there was no execution, but a faked execution. Kolchak, this report is on the shelf and appoints a second investigator by the name of Sergeev. He also works for three months and at the end of February presents Kolchak with the same report with the same words (“I am a professional, this is a simple matter, no additional time is needed - there was no execution - there was a staged execution).

Here it is necessary to clarify and recall that it was the Whites who overthrew the Tsar, not the Reds, and they also sent him into exile in Siberia! Lenin was in Zurich during those February days. No matter what ordinary soldiers say, the white elite are not monarchists, but republicans. And Kolchak did not need a living tsar. I advise those in doubt to read Trotsky's diaries, where he writes that "if the whites had put up any tsar - even a peasant one - we would not have lasted even two weeks"! These are the words of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army and the ideologue of the Red Terror !! Please believe.

Therefore, Kolchak is already putting "his" investigator Nikolai Sokolov and gives him an assignment. And Nikolai Sokolov also works for only three months - but for a different reason. The Reds entered Yekaterinburg in May, and he retreated along with the Whites. He took away the archives, but what did he write?

1. He did not find corpses, but for the police of any country in any system "no bodies - no murder" - this is disappearance! After all, when serial killers are arrested, the police demand to show where the corpses are hidden !! You can say anything, even to yourself, and the investigator needs material evidence!

And Nikolai Sokolov "hangs the first noodles on the ears" - "thrown into the mine, doused with acid." Now they prefer to forget this phrase, but we heard it until 1998! And for some reason no one ever doubted. Is it possible to fill the mine with acid? But there won't be enough acid! In the local history museum of Yekaterinburg, where the director Avdonin (the same one, one of the three who "accidentally" found bones on the Starokotlyakovskaya road, cleaned up to them by three investigators in 1918-19), there is a certificate of those soldiers on the truck that they had 78 liters of gasoline (not acid). In July, in the Siberian taiga, having 78 liters of gasoline, you can burn the entire Moscow zoo! No, they drove back and forth, at first they threw it into the mine, poured it with acid, and then took it out and hid it under the sleepers …

By the way, on the night of the “shooting” from July 16 to July 17, 1918, a huge staff with the entire local Red Army, the local Central Committee and the local Cheka left Yekaterinburg for Perm. White entered on the eighth day, and Yurovsky, Beloborodov and his comrades shifted the responsibility to two soldiers? A discrepancy - tea, they were not dealing with a peasant revolt. And if they were shot at their own discretion, they could have done it a month earlier.

2. The second "noodles" by Nikolai Sokolov - he describes the basement of the Ipatievsky house, publishes photographs where it can be seen that the bullets are in the walls and in the ceiling (they apparently do this when staging an execution). Conclusion - the women's corsets were stuffed with diamonds, and the bullets ricocheted! So, so: the tsar from the throne and into exile in Siberia. Money in England and Switzerland, and they sew diamonds into corsets to sell to peasants in the market? Well well!

3. In the same book by Nikolai Sokolov, the same basement in the same Ipatiev house is described, where clothes from each member of the imperial family and hair from each head are in the fireplace. Did they cut and change their clothes (undressed ??) before being shot? Not at all - take them out by the same train on that very “night of the shooting,” but they cut their hair and changed their clothes so that no one would recognize them there.

III

Tom Magold and Anthony Summers intuitively understood that the solution to this intriguing detective must be sought in the Treaty of Brest Peace. And they started looking for the original text. And what?? With all the removal of secrets after 60 years, there is no such official document anywhere! It is not in the declassified archives of London or Berlin. They looked everywhere - and everywhere they found only quotes, but nowhere they could find the full text! And they came to the conclusion that the Kaiser demanded the extradition of the women from Lenin. The king's wife is a relative of the Kaiser, his daughters are German citizens and did not have the right to the throne, and besides, the Kaiser at that moment could crush Lenin like a bug! And here Lenin's words that "the peace is humiliating and obscene, but it must be signed," and the July attempt at a coup d'etat by the Socialist-Revolutionaries with Dzerzhinsky, who joined them in the Bolshoi Theater, take on a completely different look. Officially, we were taught that the Trotsky Treaty was signed only on the second attempt and only after the start of the offensive of the German army, when it became clear to everyone that the Republic of Soviets could not resist. If there is simply no army, what is “humiliating and obscene” here? Nothing. But if it is necessary to hand over all the women of the royal family, and even to the Germans, and even during the First World War, then ideologically everything is in place, and the words are read correctly. That Lenin did, and the entire ladies' section was transferred to the Germans in Kiev. And immediately the murder of the German ambassador Mirbach in Moscow and the German consul in Kiev make sense.

"The Dossier on the Tsar" is a fascinating investigation of one cunningly tangled intrigue of world history. The book was published in 1979, so the words of Sister Pascalina of 1983 about Olga's grave could not get into it. And if there were no new facts, there would be no point in simply retelling someone else's book here.

10 years have passed. In November 1997, in Moscow, I met the former political prisoner Geliy Donskoy from St. Petersburg. The conversation over tea in the kitchen touched upon the king and his family. When I said that there was no execution, he calmly answered me: - I know there was no execution. - Well, you are the first in 10 years, - I answered him, almost falling off my chair. Then I asked him to tell me his sequence of events, wanting to find out to what point our versions coincide and from where they begin to diverge. He did not know about the extradition of women, believing that they died somewhere in different places. There was no doubt that they were all taken out of Yekaterinburg. I told him about the "Dossier on the Tsar", and he told me about one seemingly insignificant find, which he and his friends drew attention to in the 80s.

They came across the memoirs of the participants in the "execution", published in the 30s. In them, in addition to the well-known facts that a new guard had arrived two weeks before the "execution", it was said that a high fence had been built around the Ipatievsky house. There would be nothing to shoot in the basement, but if the family needs to be taken out unnoticed, then he just comes in handy. The most important thing - to which no one had ever paid attention to them - the chief of the new guard spoke with Yurovsky in a foreign language! They checked the lists - Lisitsyn was the head of the new guard (all the participants in the "execution" are known). It seems nothing special. And then they were really lucky: at the beginning of perestroika, Gorbachev opened the hitherto closed archives (my acquaintances Sovietologists confirmed that this had taken place for two years), and then they started searching in declassified documents. And they found it! It turned out that Lisitsyn was not Lisitsyn at all, but the American Fox !!! For this I was ready for a long time. I already knew from books and from life that Trotsky had come to make the revolution from New York on a steamer packed with Americans (everyone knows about Lenin and two carriages with Germans and Austrians). The Kremlin was full of foreigners who did not speak Russian (there was even Petin, but an Austrian!) Therefore, the guards were from Latvian riflemen, so that the people would not even think that foreigners seized power.

And then my new friend Helium Donskoy completely conquered me. He asked himself one very important question. Fox-Lisitsyn arrived as the head of the new guard (in fact, the head of the royal family's security) on July 2. On the night of the "shooting" on July 16-17, 1918, he left by the same train. And where did he get the new appointment? He became the first head of the new secret facility number 17 near Serpukhov (on the estate of the former merchant Konshin), which Stalin visited twice! (why ?! More on that below.)

I have been telling this whole story with a new sequel to all my friends since 1997.

On one of my visits to Moscow, my friend Yura Feklistov asked me to visit his school friend, now a candidate of historical sciences, so that I myself would tell him everything. That historian named Sergei was the press secretary of the Kremlin commandant's office (scientists were not paid salaries at that time). At the appointed hour, Yura and I climbed the wide Kremlin staircase and entered the office. I, as now in this article, began with Pascalina's sister, and when I got to her phrase that “the woman buried in the village of Morkote is indeed the daughter of the Russian Tsar Olga,” Sergei almost jumped up: “Now it’s clear why The Patriarch did not go to the funeral! He exclaimed.

This was also obvious to me - after all, despite the strained relations between different confessions, when it comes to individuals of this rank, information is exchanged. I just did not understand and still is the position of the "working people" who, from faithful Marxist-Leninists, suddenly became orthodox Christians, do not put a penny into a few statements of His Holiness. After all, even I, being in Moscow only on short visits, and then twice heard the Patriarch say on central television that the examination of the tsar's bones cannot be trusted! I heard twice, and what, no one else ?? Well, he could not say more and announce publicly that there was no execution. This is the prerogative of the highest government officials, not the church.

Then, when I told at the very end that the tsar and the tsarevich were settled near Serpukhov in the estate of Konshin, Sergei shouted: - Vasya! You have all of Stalin's movements on your computer. Tell me, was he in the Serpukhov area? - Vasya turned on the computer and answered: - I was there twice. Once at the dacha of a foreign writer, and another time at the dacha of Ordzhonikidze.

I was prepared for this turn of events. The fact is that not only John Reed (journalist-writer of one book) is buried in the Kremlin wall, but 117 foreigners are buried there! And this is from November 1917 to January 1919 !! These are the same German, Austrian and American communists from the Kremlin offices. The likes of Fox-Lisitsyn, John Reid, and other Americans who left their mark on Soviet history after Trotsky's fall were legalized by official Soviet historians as journalists. (An interesting parallel: the expedition of the artist Roerich to Tibet from Moscow was paid for in 1920 by the Americans! This means that there were many of them there). Others fled - they were not children and knew what awaited them. By the way, apparently, this Fox was the founder of the XX Century Fox cinema empire in 1934 after Trotsky was exiled.

But back to Stalin. I think few people will believe that Stalin traveled 100 km from Moscow to meet with a "foreign writer" or even Sergo Ordzhonikidze! He received them in the Kremlin.

He met the Tsar there !! With a man in an iron mask !!!

And that was in the 30s. This is where the fantasies of writers can unfold!

These two meetings are very intriguing to me. I'm sure they seriously discussed at least one topic. And Stalin did not discuss this topic with anyone. He believed the king, not his marshals! This is the Finnish war - the Finnish campaign, as it is shyly called in Soviet history. Why was there a campaign - after all, there was a war? Because there was no preparation - the campaign! And only the tsar could give such advice to Stalin. He had been in captivity for 20 years. The tsar knew the past - Finland was never a state. It was Lenin who gave them independence on the first day of the revolution (you can check - the Independence Day of Finland on November 7, 1917). That is, Finland for the tsar is a part of Russia, and if a “friendly army” is sent there, then there will be no war. This is what Stalin believed in !! But the tsar did not know the real, and Stalin paid for it - the Finns really defended themselves to the last drop of their blood. When the order for an armistice came, several thousand soldiers left the Soviet trenches, and only four from the Finnish ones.

Instead of an afterword

About 10 years ago I was telling this story to my Moscow colleague Sergei. When I reached the Konshin estate, where the tsar and the tsarevich were settled, he became agitated, stopped the car and said: - Let my wife tell you. - I dialed the number on my mobile and asked: - Honey, do you remember how we were students in 1972 in Serpukhov in the Konshina estate, where is the local history museum? Tell me, why were we shocked then? - And my dear wife answered me on the phone: - We were in complete horror. All the graves were opened. We were told they were robbed by bandits.

I think that not the bandits, but that already then they decided to do the bones at the right moment. By the way, in the estate Konshin was the grave of Colonel Romanov. The tsar was a colonel.

June 2012, Paris - Berlin

Video recording of the interview