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A Reconsideration of Richard Halliburton's Interview with P DONALD OSTROWSKI (Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.) A RECONSIDERATION OF RICHARD HALLIBURTON'S INTERVIEW WITH P. Z. ERMAKOV AS EVIDENCE FOR THE MURDER OF THE ROMANOVS Early in the morning of July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alek- sandra, their son Aleksei, their four daughters, Tat'iana, Ol'ga, Mariia, and . Anastasia, plus four others, their physician, Dr. Botkin, the footman Trupp, the cook Kharitonov, and the maid Anna Demidova (a total of eleven people), were murdered by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg in the Ural Oblast'. At the . time, the Bolshevik government acknowledged only the death of Nicholas and indicated that the rest of the family was alive and in a safe place. I By the end of July, White Guards took over the town and surrounding area, but it was - not until the winter that a formal investigation into the murders was begun. Ivan Sergeev, the district commissioner, took depositions that he turned over to his successor Nikolai Sokolov. After a thorough investigation, Sokolov .. concluded that the entire family had been killed and explained his inability to find the bodies by the fact that they had been burned with gasoline and com- pletely destroyed through the use of sulphuric acid at the mine shaft where the personal effects of the family had been found.2 The absence of bodies led to speculation that one or more members of the family had escaped. Recently, 1. Izvestiia,July 19, 1918,as cited in WilliamHenry Chamberlin,The Russian Revolution 1917 1921, vol. 2,1918-1921: From the CivilWar to the Consolidationof Power(New York: Macmillan,1935), 92. See also the Times (London),July 22. 1918,as cited in RobertWilton, . TheLast Days of the Romanovs from]5th March, 1917 (London:Thornton Butterworth, 1920), 98-99; cf. GeorgeGustav Telberg and Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs(New York: George H. Doran, 1920),322-23. It was not until 1921 that a Soviet source acknowl- edged the killing of the entire family. See P. M. Bykov, "Posledniedni poslednogotsaria," in Rabochaia revoliutsiia na Urale, ed. N. I. Nikolaev (Ekaterinburg:Gosudarstvennoe iz- datel'stvo, 1921), 21. 2. N. Sokolov,Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem'i (Berlin:Slovo, 1925), 218.Sokolov' conclusionshad been previouslypublished by RobertWilton, a Timescorrespondent who was with the Sokolov Commission,and by General Diterikhs, who oversaw Sokolov's investigations.Wilton, Last . Days, 101-02, 114-15;Telberg and Wilton,Last Days, 326-27, Mikhail Konstanti- novich Diterikhs, Ubiistvotsarskoi sem'i i chler.ov Doma na Urale, 2 vols. ' Romanovykh Voennoi akademii, 1922; with different Moscow: (Vladivostok:Tip. ' reprinted pagination: Skify, 1991). 302 the claim that the skulls and bones found at another location along the Ekater- inburg-Koptiaki road are those of five members of the family, their doctor, and three servants has been generally accepted.3 As a result, a wealth of evi- dence has appeared about the killings, but inconsistencies in the various sto- ries have not been adequately resolved. In 1935, Richard Halliburton, an American travel writer, published a dra- matic interview with Petr Zakharovich Ermakov, one of the assassins of the Romanov family.4 Since its publication, Halliburton's account of the three- . and-one-half-hour interview with Ermakov has been either overlooked or ig- nored or just dismissed out of hand. Among the doubts raised by those who dismiss his account are whether Halliburton actually interviewed Ermakov or obtained the information in some other way, and, if the interview did take place, whether Ermakdv gave Halliburton accurate information. The result has been that the Halliburton interview is not well known, and those writing about the events of July 1918 in Ekaterinburg have tended not to use it.s In 3. Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, trans. Marian Schwartz(New York: Doubleday,1992), 435-38; "Czar's RemainsBelieved Found," Facts on File, May 28, 1992, 393-94 "Bones; Are Identifiedas the Czar's," New YorkTimes, June 23, 1992,A5(N), A9(L), cot. 4; "Remainsof RussianCzar, Czarina PositivelyIdentified," Boston Globe, June 23, 1992, 2;"Royal DNA Matchedwith Russian Bones,"Boston Globe, Dec. 1'1, 1992;John Damton, "ScientistsConfirm Identification of Bones as Czar's," New YorkTimes, July 10, 1993, 3;John Damton,"July 4-10: Royal Blood,Royal Bones: The RomanovRemains Are FinallyConBrmed," New YorkTimes, July 11, 1993, 2 Interview; with Peter Gill of the Na- tionalForensic Institute, Birningham, England, National Public Radio, Feb. 1, 1994;Nicholas & Alexandra,dir. MichaelBeckham, Granada Television, 1994; and Mysteryof the Last Tsar, dir. VictoriaLewis, Cymru Films, 1998. 4. RichardHalliburton, Seven League Boots (Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), 100-55; reprintedby GardenCity Publishingin 1937.A third editionappeared in 1941.Halliburton does not state when his interviewwith Ermakovoccurred, but evidencein his letters to his parents indicatesit was sometimein mid to late November1934. He wrote a letter from Moscowdated Nov. 7, 1934, in which he states that he plans to go to Sverdlovsk"in a few days." Richard Halliburton, His Story of His Life's Adventureas Told in Letters to His Mother and Father (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940), 358-59. In his next letter, dated Dec. 2, 1934, from Moscow,he states that his "Sverdlovskexpedition was a grand and glorious success, beyond my wildest hopes." He goes on to describe how he had interviewed"the actual assassin" and writes: "I'm still a little weakover the melodramaticsof the thing." Ibid., 359-60. He wrote up the story during the last two weeks of February1935 in Athens,Greece. Ibid., 364. 5. For example,none of the followingtreatments makes mentionof the interviewor of any evidence from that interview: Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 490-93 (514-16 in the Dell Publishing reprint); John F. O'Conor, "Translafor'sCommentary," in The SokolovInvestigation of the AllegedMurder of the Russian Imperial Family(New York: RobertSpeller and Sons, 1971 ),1-101; MarinaGrey, Enquete .sur le massacre des Romanov(Paris: LibrairieAcadémique Perrin, 1987); Gibel' tsarskoi sem'i. Materialy sledstviiapo delu ob ubiistvetsarskoi sem'i (avgust 1918-fevral' 1920), ed. Nikolai Ross (Frankfurtam Main: Possev-Verlag,1987); W. Bruce Lincoln,Red Victory:A Histpry of the RussianCivil War (New York: Simonand Schuster,1989), 149-55;Dmitrii Borovikov and .
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