The Plots to Rescue the Tsar: The Truth Behind the Disappearance of the Romanovs

By Shay McNeal

A review by Penny Wilson

I've never finished a book before and had no idea exactly what I'd read. 

My first, middle and last impression is that Ms. McNeal’s effort to introduce “new” and “exciting” revelations into the mystery surrounding the last Imperial Family is labored and confusing in the extreme. Any pieces of information that she adds to the overall picture of the Romanovs’ disappearance are marred by her imperfect general knowledge of the subject, which, in turn, renders her conclusions suspect. Her understanding of the situation appears to be entirely based on reading The File on the Tsar and Rescuing the Czar, the latter of which is her “Bible,” and to which she clings fiercely, despite having been told several times the true story of that little piece of fiction. Therefore, the reader will find that logic played no part in the composition of The Plots to Rescue the Tsar. 

The reader will doubtless notice that simple factual errors run riot throughout this book. Enumerating them here would be shipping coals to Newcastle, so let this one example stand as evidence of the general lack of attention to detail. In Chapter 9, fittingly entitled “Contradictions, Absurdities and Implausibility,” Ms. McNeal retells the story of Ivan Susanin, including the detail that “…descendants of Susanin … attended Nicholas’ and Alexandra’s wedding.” This piece of information was previously unsuspected as Nicholas’ and Alexandra’s wedding was a small and somewhat sudden event, following quickly on the heels of the death of Alexander III. It was a family occasion rather than a large public celebration requiring guests to be invited from the ends of the Empire. My curiosity piqued, I investigated the cited footnote, which revealed that this piece of information came from the chapter called “The Coronation” in Baroness Buxhoeveden’s book The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna Empress of Russia. The Susanin descendants had attended the Imperial Coronation and not the Imperial Wedding. Like so many others, this was a mistake easily remedied with basic proofreading, and cannot be laid at the door of the publisher’s editor. 

It cannot be denied that Ms. McNeal undertook a hugely difficult task when she set out to track down vestigial threads of evidence from failed attempts to rescue the Imperial Family. It is therefore frustrating that the first thing she does is shoot herself in the foot: she admitted freely in an interview with Greg King that she decided to attempt no research at all in Russian archives. So the author's primary information regarding rescue attempts comes from Western archival sources, some of which are not altogether reliable.  

Ms. McNeal draws time and again on the diary of Sidney Reilly the spy who died in 1924 in Lubyanka Prison. She is completely willing to accept the premise that the diary written in prison by Reilly went unsullied by the Bolsheviks, while being at the same time completely unwilling to accept the testimony of those involved that Rescuing the Czar was entirely a fabrication. This point is important, because every piece of information uncovered by Ms McNeal is either accepted or rejected based on its compatibility with the rescue plot laid out in this book. 

Rescuing the Czar, and therefore Ms McNeal’s book, states that the family was saved from the Ipatiev House through a tunnel that is supposed to have run from the murder room itself, under several houses along Vosnessensky Avenue until it reached a cistern underneath the British Consulate. The story appears to be that the family was taken directly from the basement into the tunnel while Yurovsky was out of the room – perhaps getting the chairs for Alexandra and Alexei – and then they remained in the cistern for several days until the way was cleared for them to be hustled out of the country via a southern route. There is no explanation attempted for the Bolsheviks’ apparent inability to notice a hole in the wall of the basement room, or for the unlikely construction of such a long tunnel through such wet and unstable hillside soil. 

Ms. McNeal does examine what she believes to be the likely route out of Russia that ends with the Imperial Family taking up residence on a tea plantation in Ceylon. She cites no sources for this assertion, but bases her conclusion on a 1918 listing of tea-planters in Ceylon. Two of these tea planters are called Webster and Keyes – names that appear in Rescuing the Czar, the book made up by George Romanovsky and William Rutledge McGarry in 1920. By the time the reader follows Ms McNeal’s convoluted trail to Ceylon, he will wonder why she made such a production in Chapter Three of presenting evidence concerning a house built for the Imperial Family in Romanov-on-the-Murman. 

Ms. McNeal’s discussion of the house in question is an excellent example demonstrating how her theories turn to fact as the book evolves. When she begins to discuss this house on page 21, it is as a building possibly intended for the Imperial Family’s residence. The progress of construction is followed in conjunction with the development of Ms. McNeal’s “two-track” plan. By the time she returns to this subject on page 67, the speculation of page 21 has gelled into accepted fact: “Since the house was built for the Tsar…” 

There is little evidence that this house was built specifically for the Imperial Family beyond Murmansk being a reasonable port of departure. In fact, it rather stretches credibility that a whole house would be specially constructed for what would at most be a stay of a few days or a week. Surely had the Imperial Family been rescued from their captivity, either by monarchist or Allied conspirators, the family would have moved out of the country as quickly as possible, drawing as little attention on themselves as was feasible. And nowhere – nowhere – else have I ever heard that Nicholas requested that his family be allowed to live in Murmansk, where they had “always wanted” to be. Ms McNeal gives no supporting documentation to bolster this assertion, which seems to be based on a request made by Nicholas at the time of his abdication. His request was quite clearly stated: he wished to be permitted to proceed to Murmansk with his family, and to be allowed to leave the country through the port there.  

At times, Ms. McNeal frustratingly misunderstands her evidence. Just as the above issue of the house at Murmansk could have been easily resolved with a reading of Nicholas’ correspondence and diaries, so could the testimony of Parfen Domnin have been discarded. Ms. McNeal not only relies heavily on the Domnin “testimony,” but she believes it completely, her belief being predicated on its presentation in The File on the Tsar. Yet at the time The File on the Tsar was written, there was no access to Russian archives, and therefore it was not beyond understanding that Summers and Mangold would examine this account of the Emperor’s murder. But now, twenty-five years later, the archives are open and many other books have been written on this subject. A few days’ worth of research would have revealed that Domnin’s story erred in almost every detail, and she would have known that serious historians had discredited reporter Carl Ackerman, in whose articles Domnin’s story first appeared. Domnin cannot even be reliably identified, yet Ms. McNeal has approved his testimony without expending any energy in examining the contradictions it contains or the problems it raises. 

The foundations for Ms. McNeal’s conclusions are equally flimsy and tenuous as the multifarious threads entwined throughout the pages. In the chapter called “In the Shadow of the Great War,” she details an Allied scheme to purchase Russian banking interests through a man called Karol Yaroshinsky. Yaroshinsky had been active in the Russian financial world for many years, and indeed had himself been a benefactor of the Tsarskoye Selo hospital patronized by the Grand Duchesses Marie and Anastasia. Yaroshinsky established relations with Lenin regarding the buy-out of these banking interests. Ms. McNeal supposes that this relationship was not promulgated for the advancement of the banking scheme, but was instead the cover under which Lenin demanded one million pounds for the release of the Imperial Family. And so the grand proletarian ideals of the Revolution were to be sold out in a sordid little kidnap-for-ransom plot in which Lenin alone personally profits.  

And finally, while it is irritating that a book that sets out to examine the many plots and plans to rescue the Imperial Family has tied itself into knots in a desperately fraught attempt to conform with the conclusions of an admitted work of fiction, it is disturbing to see that the author is willing – doubtless out of this same desperation -- to buy into portions of a Jewish world-wide conspiracy of which the infamous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an example. Ms. McNeal resurrects the idea that a Jewish consortium was behind the defeat of Russia at the hands of the Japanese in 1905, and that an all-powerful Jewish New York banker called Jacob Schiff had bankrolled and supported Trotsky and had changed his mind and was planning on sending “…agents to Russia to overthrow the Bolsheviks.” 

Like Rescuing the Czar, The Protocols is a work of fiction produced by Serge Nilus, the husband of a lady-in-waiting to Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, who, in turn, sponsored this work. The Okhrana published the book as an instrument of support for the Emperor by exposing his opponents as allies of the Jews. The Jews of Europe have long been scapegoats for their Christian compatriots, but in The Protocols, they are also part of a world-wide conspiracy to achieve Jewish hegemony through the destruction of Christian civilization. The effect of The Protocols was far-reaching, extending through the period of time surrounding the murder of the Romanovs and even into the World War II era. It has long been rumored that the Bolshevik decision to execute the Imperial Family was the result of a Jewish conspiracy, and Hitler himself was moved by The Protocols during the writing of Mein Kampf. Henry Ford believed in The Protocols enough to fund out of his own pocket a large printing to be disseminated throughout the United States. Fortunately, in 1927, a New York State judge ordered the printing destroyed, believing that the United States did not need to be subject to such incendiary propaganda. 

What many people do not realize is that The Protocols is the result of a wholesale plagiarism from a novel that was itself stolen from an earlier source. Nilus’ book was a collection of conversations supposedly taking place among a council of Jewish “elders.” These conversations were lifted wholesale from a novel called Biarritz, written by Hermann Goedsche and published in 1868. Goedsche himself stole the conversations from an 1864 work by a man called Maurice Joly, Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Goedsche’s only contribution was the substitution of he “Jewish elders” as the speakers. Nilus’ contribution in bringing this book to the world stage was the addition of an Imperial patron and the use of the Okhrana organ. 

Once again, had Ms. McNeal done some very basic research and reading, she would surely have turned up the above information, which is all to be found on the Internet. Also, an expose of the Jacob Schiff charges is plainly set out in Walter Lequeux’s 1966 book Russia and Germany. This book is readily available in public libraries, and appears in many, many bibliographies and books concerning the events of late Imperial Russia. This information has been easily available for at least forty years, yet it has somehow escaped the notice of Ms. McNeal. 

It is sad to see that a book such as The Plots to Rescue the Tsar, that sets out such a worthwhile and ambitious endeavor in tracing the plans to liberate the Imperial Family, falls far short of its goal, and even does disservice to the eighty years of solid and scholarly research following the massacre of Ekaterinburg. The Plots to Rescue the Tsar could have been so much more than it is, but what it is in the end is an almost laughable attempt to justify as fact a slender piece of fiction