Rescuing the Czar. James P. Smythe
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James P. Smythe
Rescuing the Czar
Two authentic diaries arranged and translated
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066164607
Table of Contents
I. PETROGRAD
FOREWORD
by
W.E. Aughinbaugh, M.D., LL.B., LL.M.
Is the former Czar and his Imperial family still alive? There are millions of people in Europe and America who are asking this question.
European governments have considered the question of sufficient interest to justify the investigation by official bodies of the alleged extinction of this ancient Royal Line. Millions have been expended for that purpose. Commissions have pretended to investigate the subject after the event. Volumes have been returned of a speculative nature to authenticate a mysterious disappearance that has never been explained.
April 5; the Universal Service carried a cable from Paris reading: "Czar Nicholas and all members of the Imperial family of Russia are still alive, according to M. Lassies, former member of the Chamber of Deputies, who has just returned from a mission to Russia." This was several weeks after the manuscript of the following account of the Czar's Escape was in my possession.[A] Yet this confirmation of the manuscript has not sufficiently overcome the universally persistent doubt that has grown out of many previous imposing reports.
In certain Royal quarters the anxiety to disseminate the "reports" of their Commissions is too apparent to authorize a judicial mind to accept their speculative guesswork as convincing evidence of a legal corpus delicti when no identified bodies have ever been produced. This eagerness to convince the world by substituting a mere disappearance, or the lack of evidence, for positive proof of the Royal assassination raises very naturally the presumption that certain circles are more interested in misleading than in satisfying the public mind.
To those schooled in the methods and objects of international propaganda during the Great War it is evident that, in a period of revolution, when thrones and dynasties become unpopular within the area of hostility and discontent, the adherents of Royalty may not be unwilling to appease the demand for vengeance by some theatrical display of meeting it with a pretense or an artifice until the passions of the populace have subsided and sober toleration resumes its sway over the sated revolutionary mind.
That such may be the fact will seem convincing from a careful study of the incidents narrated in the following rudimentary story of "Rescuing the Czar." In a technical sense it is not a story. Nevertheless, while partaking of the nature of a simple diary, it reads like a romance of thrilling adventure upon which a skilful novelist may easily erect a story of permanent interest and universal appeal. But it is this very lack of art—this indifference to accomplished technique—that makes "Rescuing the Czar" so interesting and so convincing a rebuttal of the Royal Executioners' Case.
There have been many periods in the progress of society when such an original piece of work as "Rescuing the Czar" would have been welcomed by the historian of serious events. The preservation, discovery and the piecing together of the various scraps of first-hand information by the actual participants in the tragic scenes narrated in these diaries, by the compiler of this book represent a work of so discriminating a judgment that its contribution to the historical wealth of the period involved will assume an increasing, if not a prophetic, value as time goes on, either to explain the mystery or authenticate the evidence revealed. While apparently no connection is evident between the two authors of the First and Second Parts of "Rescuing the Czar," the discriminating reader will be impressed by the independent way each of them, operating unconsciously of the other, sustains the manifest conclusion that both are recording international secrets that never were intended for the public eye.
Imbedded in the national consciousness of many European States the historian finds everywhere the shadowy outlines of "nobility" and "aristocracy" delineated on the surface of traditionary pretense and political desire. It forms the inheritance of distributive power in nations ascending from monarchial institutions to theoretical republics or pseudo-democracies, and it imparts a touch of pathos to the lingering hope of Royalty that humanity may some day welcome its return to reverence and power. It forms the superstructure on which the crumbling column of aristocracy sustains its capital pretensions amid the ruins of privileged exemption from the universal law of change. Consequently the reader will not be surprised nor much alarmed when encountering its subterranean methods depicted in these pages. They will merely fortify the accepted impression among students of events that when Time binds up the wounds of Revolutionary Russia the world will discover an Agrarian Democracy, instead of