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Minneapolis Star Tribune -- March
9, 2003 -- The Kitchen Boy by
Robert Alexander -- Kira Obolensky, Special to the Star
Tribune --The facts surrounding the last days of Russia's imperial Romanov
family, just before their assassination in Siberia in 1918, combine
elements of fairy tale and Greek tragedy, even without the spin of a fine
storyteller.
Those same facts are compelling for those who like a good mystery: Until
1991, there was no public knowledge of where the bodies were buried, and
then when DNA testing confirmed the identities of the remains in the mass
grave, two of the Romanov children appeared to be missing. And for tastes
bordering on the philosophical, this episode of history has inspired
countless ruminations on the nature of both the 20th century and the
Russian soul...
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Minneapolis Star Tribune -- February 16, 2003 -- Minnesota novelist revisits Russian tsar's execution
-- By John Habich --On the night of July 17, 1918, Nicholas II, Tsar of All the Russias, richest man in the world, ruler of one-sixth of all its land, was shot to death with his family by Communist revolutionaries in a Siberian cellar. Bullets ricocheted off the 19 pounds of hidden jewels the tsaritsa and her four daughters had stitched into their corsets, drawing out the butchery. The servants were killed, even the little dog.
R.D. Zimmerman has been transfixed by that story of the Romanov Dynasty's downfall since he was a boy. Enough to learn Russian, to study and work in the Soviet Union, to write several Cold War thrillers, to start a few businesses in the risk-fraught new Russia. The tsar's undoing reminded Zimmerman of his father, a wealthy Chicago businessman who squandered his fortune, divorced and died of drinking when R.D. was 14...
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Atlantis Magazine -- February 1, 2003 --
The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
--
229 pages $23.95 --
The most frequently asked question in the mystery of the Romanovs is: Was it possible for anyone to have survived? Well, we know that someone did the fourteen-year-old kitchen boy, Leonid Sednev. Young Sednev was an eyewitness to everything that happened in the Ipatiev House up until the evening of 16 July. He was spared death in the cellar because of his youth, yet his youth was not so extreme that he would not have known a wealth of information about the Imperial Familyıs last weeks. He was considered a child, but the Bolsheviks did not know that children are often more observant, more aware than most adults believe. Investigator Sokolov
certainly did not think that the boy was worth more than a cursory
interview; and so young Leonid the protagonist of this book was
permitted to walk away...
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Library Journal - January 2003 --
Alexander, Robert. The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar --
Viking, Feb. 2003 c231 p,
ISBN 0-670-03178-X $23.95
-- Drawing on 30 years of research and archival source documents, first novelist Alexander transforms a now-familiar and bloody era of history-the Bolshevik Revolution and the Romanov massacre-into a suspenseful and richly layered account of a family in deadly peril. The story is told from the viewpoint of a surviving witness, the kitchen boy who worked in the house the Romanovs were imprisoned in 1918. Now an ailing grandfather, Misha records his experiences on tape so that his granddaughter will know his real history. Tsar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, are portrayed as loving but achingly flawed people whose poor judgments lead inexorably to the familys
destruction. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand...
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BookPage -- January 2003
-- The view from the Tsar's kitchen -- BY GREGORY HARRIS -- In the turbulent early days of revolutionary Russia, Bolshevik agents herded the deposed Tsar Nicholai II, his family and aides into the basement of a Siberian house and executed them all in a blaze of gunfire. Details of what happened that fateful night have taken decades to emerge, reaching a terrible climax with the 1991 excavation of a mass grave believed to be the one in which some of the members of the Romanov family were buried.
Writer Robert Alexander, a fluent Russian speaker who studied in Leningrad, became fascinated with an obscure reference in the Empress Alexandra's personal journal shortly before her death, noting that their kitchen boy had been sent away. This brief reference from a forgotten 1918 diary took root in Alexander's imagination and, after much research, blossomed as...
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