Even after it became clear that the Czar would abdicate, the situation in Russia remained fluid and unclear. Among the (figurative) gems Mr. Clarke has unearthed is this report to the home office from a field representative of National City Bank, New York's leading overseas bank, sent in early 1917: "We are working hard and I think the position of our Petrograd branch at the end of this year will be a most pleasant surprise, even to you."

Mr. Clarke spends a bit too much time setting a scene that is perhaps familiar to the general intelligent reader. All the same, he does this solidly and well except for the occasional off note; for example, to describe Rasputin as "somewhat mystical" is to take the art of British understatement further than it can really go. Where he is particularly acute and convincing is in portraying the power of money even, or especially, in a time of upheaval and social chaos. Suddenly, the Czar and his family were put on short rations and learned the meaning of hunger and cold, so familiar to his subjects. The family still had a fortune in diamonds sewn into the underclothes of the Grand Duchesses, but that only added irony to horror: during their executions, bullets ricocheted off the diamonds and the poor girls had to be finished off with rifle butts and bayonets.

IT is in the second part of his story, "Search," that Mr. Clarke's narrative picks up steam. Now the plunder and confusion begin. Lenin and company, who had been in power for eight months, passed a decree nationalizing the Czar's properties three days before the executions; either they considered that a decent interval or it was simply how long it took for instructions to move through the pipeline. It wasn't long, however, before severe financial difficulties drove the Bolsheviks to peddle whatever they could abroad: Rembrandts, Faberge eggs (ultimately Malcolm Forbes ended up with more of them than Moscow), crown jewels and the more than 550 tons of silver confiscated from the church. The Bolsheviks also claimed whatever wealth the royal family had abroad, while at the same time refusing any responsibility for Czarist debt -- a tack Western governments and banks did not find exactly endearing.

But there were rival claimants, bizarre characters who were demented, cunning or both. Anna Anderson, who, the author concludes, was a Polish factory worker, convinced many people that she was indeed the "real Anastasia." Among the more enigmatic people posing as the Czarevitch Alexis was one Michel Goleniewski, a lieutenant colonel in Polish intelligence, who defected to the United States after providing Washington with services the Central Intelligence Agency termed "truly significant." Mr. Clarke ably reduces these claims to nothing, while at the same time noting that the recent DNA tests performed on the remains of the royal family still leave Alexis and one of his sisters unaccounted for.

But as Mr. Clarke recounts in "Fortune," the third and most fascinating section of his book, the real missing wealth was not in art, jewels or cash in foreign banks but in a billion dollars' worth of gold, some of which was en route to the Remington Arms Company to buy weapons for the White Army battling the Reds during the civil war that began in 1918. Bullion and billions have a way of disappearing in Russia. In 1914 Russia held the world's largest gold stock, but it had essentially run out of gold by late 1921. Something similar occurred at the end of the Soviet era "when the total gold and currency reserves dropped from $11 billion to zero in less than 18 months," Mr. Clarke writes. "Only $7 billion of this recent drain could be accounted for by normal trade transactions. The whereabouts of the remaining $4 billion remains a mystery."