Source based questions related to the Romanovs

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History Coursework by Charles Motraghi

a) Although sources A and B give similar accounts, this does not mean that they are reliable. This is because they are both based on Sergeyev’s account, which is biased (because Sergeyev is a member of the Whites, the counter-revolutionaries who were at war with the Reds), and as Sir Charles Eliot is also biased (he was sent by Great Britain, and as they had a monarchy related to the Romanovs, it wasn’t likely that he would say anything bad about the Tsar and his family in a report), it is doubtful that he would object to Sergeyev’s obviously biased account.

Also, because much of Sergeyev’s account is speculation, and not based on fact, Sir Charles Eliot’s is unlikely to be accurate. However, Sir Charles Eliot does say that ‘there is no real evidence as to who or how many victims there were’, which could suggest that he would not be so quick to assume that something is accurate like Sergeyev has.

In source B, Eliot says that Sergeyev showed him ‘where Sergeyev had removed the bullets’. This makes me a little suspicious, as this gives us no evidence about if there really were any bullets. Perhaps the marks on the floor we are told about in B were really just made by Sergeyev in order to ‘frame’ the Reds (make them look guilty for the disappearance of the Romanovs). Perhaps the marks weren’t even made by gunshot in the first place, and were by some other type of weapon, and Sergeyev just said that he removed the bullets.

b) The account in source C does differ in some ways to sources A and B, but is similar in other ways.

One way in which they differ is that sources A and B were published in free countries (countries where the media and the news was not altered by the government), and source C was not a free country. This significance of this is that A and B were not altered or changed when they were published, but in 1924, during the rule of the Soviet Union, parts of the book were not published and what is published could very well be altered, because what Sokolov had in his book could have been incriminating to the Soviet Union, the Reds.

They are similar in that they are both biased reports (we can tell that C is biased because Sokolov is a White). They differ though, because C is far more bloodthirsty, emphasizing the terrible nature of the deaths of the Royals. It does this because it wishes the public to think the deaths were more brutal than perhaps they really were, so that they became somewhat more sympathetic towards the Whites.

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Also, in C Sokolov does not say how he obtained his data, as does Sergeyev in A. However, Sir Charles Eliot does differ somewhat when he says ‘there is no real evidence as to who or how many victims there were’, as the other two clearly state their beliefs about the incident.

The reason that Sergeyev was sacked is for two possible reasons. One could be that he was not a good enough detective. The other one is perhaps because he realised that there was very little to no incriminating data, and perhaps that he was not prepared ...

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