Introduction

The time: July 1918. The place: The town of Yekaterinburg, just on the Siberian side of the Ural Mountains. In the Ipatiev House, the former Tsar of Russia and his family live imprisoned by Bolshevik soldiers. As a loyalist army presses toward the town and the Romanovs pray for a rescue that will never come, their captors receive a stark authorization from Moscow: Nikolai, his wife, and their five children are all to be shot to death. This is the story, recounted in all its vivid and terrible drama, of Robert Alexander's novel The Kitchen Boy.

Although the general facts surrounding the captivity and murder of the Russian royal family have long been known, some key gaps in our knowledge have continued to raise curiosity and fuel speculation. When, in 1991, the secret mass grave of the Romanovs and four of their attendants was discovered, two bodies—those of the Tsarevich Alexei and his sister Grand Duchess Maria—were not found. Remaining unrecovered is a family suitcase packed with thirty-six pounds of priceless jewels. There was yet one other remarkable disappearance. Mere hours before the Romanovs and their servants were led to their deaths, the family's kitchen boy, fourteen-year-old Leonka Sednyov, was ordered away from the Ipatiev House. He was never heard from again.

Combining these mysteries with a meticulously researched body of facts, Robert Alexander has crafted a tale of intrigue, tragedy, and betrayal in which all appearances are utterly believable yet nothing is quite what it seems. The story is recounted by Misha Semyonov, a recent widower now in his nineties who fled to America during the tumult of the Russian Civil War. With death approaching, Misha wants to set the record straight for his granddaughter and for the world at large: he is none other than Leonka, the vanished kitchen boy. Eighty summers ago, he carried a series of secret messages between the ex-Tsar and a band of potential rescuers, and, on the night of July 16-17, 1918, he bore witness to the royal massacre. But Misha must face his own issues of guilt, truth, and deception. Although he has resolved to convey "a thousand truths" to his granddaughter, will he dare to disclose the ultimate, shattering facts of his own existence?

Seen through the youthful, astonished eyes of Leonka but told by the cynical, misanthropic voice of Misha, the novel allows the reader to know a family that discovered greater nobility in its squalid exile than it had ever known in the gilded palaces of St. Petersburg. But The Kitchen Boy is about more than history—it is also a deep and moving meditation on the nature of evil and the power of forgiveness.