The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II.

ON JULY 16, 1918, a picked murder squad shot down in cold blood Tsar Nicholas 11 and the Tsaritsa, their 14-year-old son and four daughters, as well as the family doctor and three retainers faithful to the end. Eleven in all. The scene of this crime was a cellar in a house belonging to the merchant Ipatiev in Ekaterinburg, a large town in the Urals where the imperial family had been imprisoned. The corpses were then disposed of in a nearby forest. Two seem to have been incinerated and buried in a pit, and the remainder tipped down a shallow mineshaft.

Common sense always suggested that Lenin must have given approval. The incoming Communists intended to make so complete a break with history and morality that the Russians' perception of themselves would be altered forever. If the highest in the land were wiped out without formalities, what could ordinary people expect?

Always the conspirator, Lenin succeeded in exculpating himself from the murder. According to Soviet history, his colleague Sverdlov made the decision to kill the Romanovs. Local Ural Party leaders, in particular Goloshchekin and Beloborodov, were further depicted as hot-heads so thirsting for revolutionary justice that they had taken matters into their own hands. There had been a reason for swift action. That July, the White Army was closing in on Ekaterinburg, and indeed captured it a few days after the killing.

Confusion did not stop there. Several of the leaders involved in the murder squad, for instance Commissars Yakov Yurovsky and Peter Ermakov, left boastful but conflicting accounts of their roles. Once the Whites occupied Ekaterinburg, Nikolai Sokolov, formerly a Tsarist legal official, began a famous investigation. Collecting evidence from eyewitnesses, he established the facts, though he failed to locate the bodies. His report has been the foundation of the historical record.

Finally gaining the upper hand, the Soviets changed the name of the town to Sverdlovsk, in a move which typically glorified the man selected to assume responsibility for the crime, but without clarifying a thing. The Soviet public was simply left to feel proud of a murder which nonetheless was left shrouded in mystery and obfuscation. The poet Mayakovsky, somewhat deranged in his Communism, once found a guide knowledgeable enough to lead him out to the mine in the forest. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, even if he was alone in daring to make it. Subsequent Communist crimes were of course upon a wide scale, but this callous murder of the Romanovs had stamped the emblem of Communism with sickening power into the imagination of people everywhere.

All such crimes have been described as "blank spots" in Russian history, in one of the flattest euphemisms ofglasnost. If Russians are to return to truthful self-perception, it will be by means of books like this one. Edvard Radzinsky is a successful playwright, but he started his career as a historian in the Central State Archives. So began a determination to discover the truth in all its gruesomeness and pathos.

In 1989 he first published his findings in the Soviet Union, and was then approached by helpers willing to fill in the background with written or oral memories, including unpublished diaries or letters. All this new material has been sifted and absorbed. Last year, as a consequence of Radzinsky's work, the remains of the nine corpses were recovered from the forest, and at present are being submitted to DNA testing in Britain. It is a virtual certainty that these will be identified as the Tsar and his family and retainers, and then decently laid to rest. The two thought to be missing are the Tsarevich and a lady-in-waiting, or perhaps his sister Anastasia.

The entire course of events has been carefully and convincingly reconstructed. Radzinsky knows that nothing done by Communists can be taken at face value. Rightly suspicious, he also loves complex speculation. Here is a vibrant real-life thriller, though as so often with the genre it is sometimes difficult to follow. A rather disjointed switch-back style is little help.

Elegiac lament is the tone of the first half of the book. It is still thrilling that a Russian can hold such an attitude in public and not be carted off to Gulag. Radzinsky conventionally believes that the Tsar lacked the character to deal with Russia's problems. As late as 1916, in a letter to his wife he referred to himself without sarcasm as her "poor weak-willed little hubby." Wrong decisions had the cumulative effect of leaving him responsible for the failure of others. Concealment of the Tsarevich's hemophilia made much of the family's behavior incomprehensible, and the subject of sinister rumor. Beyond the human turmoil was God's hand. "Would you please finally get angry, Your Excellency!" an exasperated councilor exclaimed when anger might still have saved the day.

A simple decree by a parliamentary assembly without the requisite constitutional power was enough to push the Tsar off the throne. "The essence is that, to save Russia and keep the army at the front quiet, this is a necessary step," the Tsar confided in his diary. "I agreed."

The second part of the book describes the descent from the splendors of the palace of Tsarskoe Selo to squalid death in the Ipatiev House. This involves an extraordinary cast of commissars, tricksters, agents, and double-agents, whose deceptions and provocations put Radzinsky's forensic skills to the test. A master of suspense, he shows how the jailers must have been reading the Tsar's and Tsaritsa's diaries, and adjusting their strategy accordingly. The commander of the Ipatiev House, one Avdeyev, faked an elaborate plot, whereby nuns delivered milk to the imperial family with forged messages inside the bottles about imaginary White officers who would liberate them. Here were handy pretexts to murder.

It was in the Archive of the October Revolution that Radzinsky came across the evidence he was hoping for, and he writes in triumph, "I found it! Even though they were supposed to destroy it. The blood cries out!" On the eve of the murder, telegrams had been exchanged between Goloshchekin in Ekaterinburg and Sverdlov in Moscow--marked "copy to Lenin"-- authorizing the murder. In addition, Goloshchekin had hurried in person to Moscow for fear of objections. There were none.

"Nothing of importance," Louis XVI had noted in his diary on the day the Bastille fell. Nicholas II was hardly more expressive. It was unbearable on a hot day "not to be in a position to go out into the garden when you wanted and spend a fine evening outside. The prison regime!" In the final stage, they seem to have realized what was about to happen. The family doctor's last letter has the sentence, "I am dead but not yet buried." When they were shot, the girls were wearing bodices sewn with diamonds, off which the bullets were to ricochet. Another grim touch: one of the killers had a literary bent and wrote in the original German a line from Heine on the cellar wall, "This night Balthazar was murdered by his fellows."

Some panic or upset must have created the circumstances whereby the corpses were disposed of in different places. Among Radzinsky's helpers was an elderly visitor (whose name is not given), by all evidence a trusty Communist with inside information. This man's account of muddle and alcohol, and of the division of labor between the murderers, seems credible.

Anastasia did not survive, but the Tsarevich may have. First a psychiatrist and then a consultant contacted Radzinsky, and both stated that shortly after the last war they had a patient who passed under the name of F.G. Semyonov. His life had been spent in Gulag. Claiming to be the Tsarevich, he had persistent hematuria consistent with his hereditary disease, and answered accurately and without hesitation all questions about the Romanov family and the court. These witnesses were struck by the fact that Semyonov kept cursing a man called Beloborodov. Radzinsky remains open-minded.

Beloborodov, Goloshchekin, and almost all the others involved in the murder (though not Yurovsky or Ermakov) were themselves shortly murdered. That is not the only thing to show a pattern. Like Tsarism, Communism was brought to an end after a strange putsch, by a decree issued in a parliament of doubtful constitutional powers. In spite of an immense military and security apparatus, Gorbachev too had failed to get angry.

One final twist has escaped Radzinsky. In the old days Boris Yeltsin had been Party first secretary in Sverdlovsk. Gorbachev, then his superior as Communist Party General Secretary, out of the blue ordered him to raze the Ipatiev House to the ground, leaving no trace. This was done. But why? Out of perception of the enduring power of the past, or premonition that Communism itself was already spectral?