THE MYSTERY
OF THE ROMANOV BONES
By Peter Kurth
[“Vanity Fair,” January 1993]
The pit where the skeletons lay for decades is not
much more than three feet deep, wider, though, and longer than the murderers first
intended, because in digging the grave of their slaughtered victims they
quickly struck rock, and instead of going deeper, they were obliged to make a
broad, shallow hole. Nine bodies were
dumped here, in the muddy forest outside the Russian city of
"Even for me it was not difficult to identify
them," said Gely Ryabov, the former policeman and crime writer who took
credit for finding the grave. It was
1989 when Ryabov broke the story.
Brezhnev had died, and so had Andropov, and so had Chernenko,
and Gorbachev's policy of "openness" was prying the lid off many a
Soviet secret. It would be two more
years, even so, before the government authorized an excavation, and another
after that before anything like a serious forensic investigation could
begin. Since then, scientists in
Tatiana, Anastasia, Maria, Olga, Nicholas II, Alexandra, Alexei (1916)
Everyone knows the story of the murder of the
Romanovs. On the night of July 16, 1918,
at the height of the Russian civil war, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra,
their daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and their son, Alexei,
were herded together with four of their servants into the cellar of the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg, 850 miles east of Moscow,
where they were being held prisoner, and shot by their Bolshevik captors. The murder was savage, appalling in its
cruelty, and notable for a complete lack of coordination among the
assassins. It was later discovered that
the four grand duchesses were wearing special corsets into which jewelry had
been sewn -- an immense fortune in precious stones, which acted as a shield and
robbed the girls of a quick and painless death.
A number of the victims allegedly had to be stabbed and clubbed to death
when gunfire failed to kill them. A
Soviet memorandum, secret till 1989, refers to "the strange vitality"
of the tsar’s son and the unsteady nerves of at least one of the killers, whose
"long ordeal with the armored daughters" rattled him more than he
cared to admit. Rumors arose and
persisted for years that not all of the family had died in the slaughter, but
historians generally dismissed these tales as romantic wishful thinking, made
more compelling because the bodies of the Romanovs had never been found.
"The world will never know what became of
them," a Bolshevik commissar is supposed to have boasted after the
slayings. The
Anna Anderson
(1965)
By that time, Mrs. Anderson was living in
In an earlier account, The File on the Tsar (1976), two British journalists, Anthony
Summers and Tom Mangold, had examined the Anastasia story in the light of their
theory that the massacre at Ekaterinburg was an elaborate fabrication: only the tsar and his son had been shot in
the Ipatiev house, Summers and Mangold believed, while Empress Alexandra and
her four daughters had been kept alive (no one knew how long) as bargaining
chips in the Bolsheviks’ diplomacy with imperial Germany. Few were convinced by that, either. But no one was ready for Gely Ryabov and the
saga of the bones.
"It all began in 1976," Ryabov told
reporters. Ekaterinburg was Sverdlovsk
then, named for the man who had allegedly given the order for the tsar’s
execution, and Ryabov was a well known crime writer, an ex policeman, and
"official researcher" at the Soviet Interior Ministry. He had gone to Ekaterinburg to work on the
script for a film about the Soviet militia.
"I still don't know what inspired me to ask the people meeting me
at the station to take me to the Ipatiev house," Ryabov explained. "But my request didn't cause
surprise. All visitors, 'V.I.P.'s'
included, asked to be taken to this place.”
For a time after the revolution, the Ipatiev house had been kept as a
museum of "the people's vengeance.”
Later, it was closed to the general public and used for administrative
offices. But Ryabov quickly gained
access. He spent one whole night walking
around the "darkish mansion" and its grounds, meditating on the fall
of tsarism and battling "strange, astonishing thoughts."
The Ipatiev
house in Ekaterinburg in 1918, at the time of the Romanovs’ captivity
"I felt that I too, was responsible for all the
cruelty which cannot be erased in my country's history," Ryabov said,
"for everything that came with the
great cataclysms which shook
And so the hunt for the bones began, along with the
vagueness, the half truths, the claims and counterclaims. When the story hit the Western papers in
April 1989, Ryabov was pictured like a road company Hamlet, scowling and
holding a skull which he claimed was a plaster cast of Alexei's. It was a sign of the general credulity of
reporters that they simply wrote this down, without asking questions, without
checking facts, without even wondering, apparently, how it came about that a
"crime writer" in the Soviet Union, poking into archives and combing
the forest with spades, had dug up the tsar unmolested. By his own account, Ryabov spent more than
three years searching for relics in the woods outside Ekaterinburg -- it was a
closed city in those days, a sensitive defense industry town -- helped only by
a small band of unnamed "friends" and "volunteer
assistants.” When the moment of
discovery finally carne, on
We took a water pipe [Ryabov told The Orthodox Word], a few inches wide in diameter, sharpened it and
began to insert it over the approximate site of the grave, using a heavy
mallet. At first we hit virgin topsoil,
undisturbed by human hands. But further
down we hit soil which showed evidence of human action.... Soon we made the
first find -- the very first one was black green.... It was the pelvic bone of
Nicholas II.
They "reached down into the grave” and
"touched at, least eight or nine skeletons.” Then they pulled some skulls from the
ground:
In the skull of Alexandra there was a big hole nine
millimeters in diameter, indicating a shot fired by a high caliber rifle. Another, smaller hole on the other side of
the skull showed where the bullet left her head. That was a horrible sight, a terribly
horrible sight.
Ryabov and
his find
In the end, the absurdities in the story were hard to
miss. Ryabov claimed to have identified
the skeletons from, among other things, their "treated" teeth, but
since no dental records of the imperial family are known to exist, this means
nothing. "The skull of the
tsar" had been taken to
The final end would be the redeeming of that blood
[Ryabov said] which was spilled as a result of the horror which ruled in Russia
during the October Revolution, during the civil war, Stalin's times, and
afterwards. We have to reject all that
and even cast the dust of it from our feet.
There's simply no other way. The
redemption of that blood can be accomplished only if the innocent Romanovs,
executed without court trial, can be exhumed from that pit and buried with the
proper Orthodox ritual... The whole of our nation needs this. Without it, it is simply impossible to go on
living.
I met Ryabov in
Sokolov’s men
at the Four Brothers’ Mine, 1919
The monarchists' dossier included a section of
wallpaper cut from the cellar of the Ipatiev house, along with a soiled and crumpled
page from a medical textbook, which one of the Bolshevik leaders in
Ekaterinburg had apparently used as "lavatory paper*' while burying the
Romanovs in the woods. This detail
inevitably turned up in the British press, along with some late fulminations
about Communism. John Stuart, Sotheby's
Russian expert, took it upon himself to explain the deeper significance of the
murder of the Romanovs to the curious onlookers at the sale. He talked about the need for the Russian
people to "ask for and receive forgiveness,” while Ryabov stood placidly
in a corner, surrounded by burly companions and posing for photographs.
"You
must be very disappointed," Ryabov’s frost-blonde, leather-jacketed
interpreter, Dilyara, remarked when I broke through Ryabov’s phalanx at the
auction. I had my own notoriety among
Russians as the champion and most recent biographer of Anna Anderson. "But I'm afraid all the skulls have been
identified by medical experts. And so
this story about Anastasia is a fake one.
Her body was found in the grave.”
Anastasia and
Anna Anderson (1912; 1938)
There was the faintest indication in Dilyara's voice
that she was sorry to have to tell me this, but also that she wasn't surprised
I had wasted my time on Mrs. Anderson. I
was not Russian -- I couldn't understand.
The members of the Russian cultural delegation were upset in the first
place because they'd had to come to
“That would be a very long conversation," he told
me through Dilyara. Everything was
"chaos" at the moment, everything in
Later, I learned that Ryabov was famous for promising
this -- also that he is one of the hardest men in
"He'd just made too many claims," Radzinsky
says. "He couldn't go forward, he
couldn't go backward, he just went out.”
No one close to the investigation in Russia doubts that the bones of the
tsar (if that's what they are) were first made to surface for political
reasons, though no one can say with any accuracy what those reasons were. Rumors were rife in 1989 that the bones had
been "planted" in Ekaterinburg in an effort to mollify the queen of
The late V.
I. Lenin -- Edvard Radzinsky -- Tatyana Tolstaya
Radzinsky is the foremost playwright of his
generation, an elfin character with a mischievous grin and an eye on his
country's foibles. Everything Radzinsky
says is a definitive take on the epic of Russian history and the still pounding
hangover of the Soviet regime. No one is
more surprised than Radzinsky himself by the international success of The Last Tsar. It almost didn't get published in America, he
says -- "It was thought to be too Russian” -- and might not have been if
Jacqueline Onassis hadn't felt a "deep sympathy" with the story,
according to Radzinsky, and snapped it up for Doubleday. The book has been criticized on both sides of
the Atlantic for its episodic structure and overwrought style ("The
general impression is of a literary collaboration between Cecil B. DeMille,
Barbara Cartland and Old Moore's Almanac,"
said London's Independent), but
there's no denying that The Last Tsar is
a riveting read or that Radzinsky, through documents ferreted from Soviet
archives, oral histories, "secret confessions," and interviews with
descendants of the Bolshevik killers themselves, has added a whole new
dimension to our understanding of the purpose and horror of the Ekaterinburg
tragedy.
"The tsar was my co author," says Radzinsky
in a quiet voice. He was a young man
when he became obsessed with Nicholas II, as a student at Moscow's Historical
Archival Institute; he was past 50 in 1989, when, examining the Romanov files
in the Central State Archives of the October Revolution, he saw a copy of the
"Yurovsky note," the secret report of Yakov Yurovsky, last commandant
of the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg and the man who led the firing squad when
the imperial family was killed. It tells
a hair-raising story of the night of the murders, of bodies stripped and tossed
into a mine, then raised again and transported to another part of the forest,
where they were piled naked in a freshly dug pit, drenched in acid, covered
with earth and railway ties, and left to rot.
"Practically everything that could have gone
wrong with the disposal of the bodies did go wrong," one commentator
observed. "The burial squad repeatedly
tried to pilfer the corpses and was persuaded to desist only by the threat of
summary execution. Nobody knew where the
bodies were to be buried. Trucks either
didn't show up or broke down at crucial moments. At one point Yurovsky fell off his horse,
badly injuring himself.” At the last
minute, according to the Yurovsky report, two of the corpses were supposedly
cremated: the Tsarevitch Alexei, who was
smaller than the others, and Anna Demidova, the empress's maid, who was burned
accidentally when the murderers "mistook" her for the empress
herself. No one has attempted a
reasonable explanation for this unlikely confusion of female corpses,
especially as we are also told that the burial detail had to be prevented from
raping the empress after death. But it
explains why, when the bones Ryabov found were finally exhumed in the summer of
1991, there were only 9 skeletons in the grave, not the 11 there should have
been if the whole imperial family and their four servants had been
counted. Radzinsky thinks that the story
of the separate cremation may have been invented by the killers in order to
cover their tracks: two of the victims
were obviously missing, and they wouldn't have wanted
About three weeks after my return from
"We didn’t get any proper information about that
case in
We both laughed.
A visiting fellow at
"It's complex," she says, "but there
are simple feelings behind it. I feel
that when you're dealing with the Russian mentality you shouldn't compare it to
the Western mentality.” There’s an idea
here of Russia as a nation that straddles two cultures, Europe and Asia,
medieval and modem, and settles on neither, harking back to its own mythic,
half remembered time when "the king was the state," as Tolstaya says,
and "the Tsar was responsible for the welfare of the whole nation.” The murder of the imperial family was never
"political," in this view of things.
It was an act of deep psychic significance for the whole country,
fraught with "fear, superstition, and mystery." That is why the Bolsheviks tried to hide the
crime in 1918, and also why they sought to exploit it later, as it suited them,
through silence, rumors, legends, and lies.
Tolstaya is reluctant to advance a unified theory of Russian history
over a cup of coffee in
The
coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra, 1896 -- caricature of Rasputin with the
tsar and the empress, ca. 1911
"It wasn't completed," Tolstaya
explains. “There were all these
mysteries about it, these uncertainties and rumors. Even this Anastasia" -- she means Mrs.
Anderson -- “even if she was a fraud, she existed, you see. She existed and she disturbed everybody. It just adds to the story. It was never completed.” What we're
seeing now is no mere effort to "come to terms with the past," for
there is no past in
The bones, of course, are meant to do that. Whether they will or won't depends on the
ability of the Russian people to blend science with myth and square the results
of forensic testing with their own idea of themselves and their history. Under the direction of Dr. Peter Gill at the
British Home Office's forensic research center at Aldermaston, in Berkshire,
nine femurs found in the Ekaterinburg forest are now undergoing a process of
"mitochondrial DNA sequencing," a complicated and not invariably
successful procedure by which strains of DNA are extracted from human remains,
then copied in the lab and reproduced for purposes of comparison. Mitochondrial DNA (as opposed to any other
kind) is passed down only through the female line and has what scientists
regard as a "slow" evolution; it is unchanging and sharply dissimilar
from family to family.
By amplifying the particular strains and comparing
"bar codes" in the bones, Gill's team ought to be able to tell
whether the Ekaterinburg skeletons are related, first, to one another, and,
second, to living descendants of Nicholas's and Alexandra's parents, some of
whom will be asked to give hair and blood samples for the study. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is
thought to be the ideal subject in this regard, since he is closely related to the
Tsar on his father's side and to the empress on his mother's. So far,
There is a certain sensitivity -- indeed, paranoia -- among
"But you'd better get a second opinion,"
says American scientist Syd Mandelbaum, "and maybe a third.” Mandelbaum is writing a book about DNA
testing in conjunction with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on
"Different labs use different probes, too,"
Mandelbaum adds, "and each is interested in pushing its own work. In a case of this importance historically,
you would want to make sure the results are verifiable right down the
line.” So more of Mrs. Anderson's hair
will be tested in
"I wouldn't say that Russians are religious,
" Tatyana Tolstaya concludes.
"They are not. They are
superstitious. They love everything that's
mysterious. So to the extent that
religion is mysterious, they are religious.”
And to the extent that there's still a mystery about the bones in
Ekaterinburg -- well, mystery is what a lot of people, not just Russians, would
prefer.
Monarchist
renditions of the death scene
There isn't any doubt about the horror that befell the
victims in the pit. Dr. Ludmilla
Koryakova, a professor of archaeology at
But were they the Romanovs? There are bodies buried in
unmarked graves all over the Ural region:
victims of the revolution, of the famines, of Stalin and the camps. Witnesses speak of "untold horrors"
in Ekaterinburg precisely at the time of the Romanovs' detention there, in
1918, as Czech forces and White Army troops menaced the Bolsheviks from the
east and drove them to a frenzy of killing.
When Isadora Duncan toured the city in 1924, she wanted to have her hair
done for an evening performance but couldn’t find a hairdresser, because there
weren't any "ladies" left in town:
"They shot 'em all."
"Hundreds of the better class were murdered
simply because they were decent people," according to notes left by Arthur
Thomas, who in 1918 was assistant British consul in Ekaterinburg, "and not
because of any anti Bolshevik activities or even tendencies. It was also in Ekaterinburg that hundreds of
workingmen and peasants were mowed down by Bolshevik guns because they were
criminal enough to hold contrary opinions and men enough to stand up for
them.” Vadim Viner, a historian at the
former
There's been too much talk, Dr. Plaksin thinks, too
much sensationalism. "There have
been intrigues.” Plaksin speaks the word
with the surprised condescension of the professional scientist who happens also
to be a political appointee. His life
has been made difficult lately, both by the international press, which jumped
on the story of the tsar’s remains and, according to Plaksin, "garbled
everything," and by the local authorities in Ekaterinburg, the mismatched
assortment of politicians, apparatchiks, geologists, and freebooters who have
kept the pot boiling since Gely Ryabov quit the scene, and now, to the
frustration of the central government, have blocked the transfer of the bones
to Moscow. Pictures of the putative
relics -- blackened femurs, grinning skulls -- have been sold to the press
without authorization. In May, the Sunday Times, in a front page story that
served mainly as an attack on Anna Anderson, came forward with an
unsubstantiated report that "the entire Romanov imperial family" had
been identified in the forest grave, and that questions about Anastasia's
survival could thus he put to bed:
"The scientists say she is one of two skeletons found outside the
pit and that a woman who claimed for 60 years to be 'the Grand Duchess
Anastasia' was an impostor.”
The
Tsarevitch Alexei -- Anna Anderson -- Anastasia
In fact, the scientists had found nothing whatever
outside the pit, and they still have not.
Anthony Summers, co-author of The
File on the Tsar, rates the international coverage of the Romanov bones as
"irresponsible" from the start.
"The media have been much too easily seduced by
this story," says Summers.
"The reporters have simply not read up on the subject, and have
swallowed the handouts whole.” If Dr. Plaksin, in Moscow, mentions the
Japanese psychic Aiko Gibo in the same breath with the deal he's recently
struck with the British Home Office for DNA testing on the bones -- Gibo went
to Ekaterinburg last summer and meditated over the relics -- it's well to
remember the atmosphere of scoop and sensation he's been working in. He waves a copy of the official order issued
from the General Procurator's Office in
"The chief of the bureau, Mr. Plaksin," he
reads, "is alone empowered to conduct the work, employing the best specialists
of his country and foreign specialists if necessary.” So far, Plaksin has enlisted the help of
forensic experts from
"We are doing it out of love," said a
company director. The announced purpose
of Interural's involvement is to raise enough money "to help give the Tsar
a decent burial.” Meanwhile, the Sunday Times reports that "the
price for a glimpse of the remains," at least for journalists, "has
been fixed at $10,000," and that a "tourist complex in Ekaterinburg is envisioned to one day
house the relics.”
"It's fantastic, sure," says Edvard
Radzinsky. “But you cannot exaggerate
the effect of the hunt for hard currency in this country.” On the site of the Ipatiev house, which was
destroyed in 1977, a church is due to be built this year -- Khram na Khrovu, the Church on the Blood
-- and a national competition was held recently to determine its design. On the other side of the coin, a lot of
people in Ekaterinburg are quietly hoping that the bones turn out not to belong
to the Romanovs. The city can't live
down its reputation in history as one of the most sinister places on earth, and
there are people who think the skeletons are being foisted on them now as a
kind of punishment, a grim reminder of the murderous past. They don't want to let the relics out of
their sight lest the central government concoct something at Ekaterinburg's
expense.
Ekaterinburg
(
It may or may not be significant in this context that
the national government got involved in the Romanov case only when Boris
Yeltsin came to power. Yeltsin is
Ekaterinburg's most famous native son, the former party boss of the Sverdlovsk
Provincial Committee and the man who presided over the demolition of the
Ipatiev house.
"I was one of the very few people who had access
to the secrets surrounding the execution," he explained in his memoirs
(while revealing none of them). The
decision to knock down the house coincided with "the results of new
research published in Western newspapers," said Yeltsin -- he was probably
referring to Summers and Mangold's File
on the Tsar -- and with dramatic new evidence in favor of Anna Anderson's
claim to be Anastasia: a comparison of
the shape and structure of her ears with photographs of the tsar’s daughter,
which left German forensic experts convinced that the two women were the same.
"Some of this material was broadcast in Russian
by Western radio stations," Yeltsin went on, and the Politburo in
"What grave?" she asked, though she knew the
answer perfectly well and agreed to cooperate only when her superiors at the
university insisted. There was "no
time to prepare," she told me in Ekaterinburg, "no tools, no
instruments," none of the things you really need for a proper excavation. Parts of the skeletons and of the site of the
grave had been “considerably destroyed" by the 1979 dig and the laying of
a power cable. Some of the bones were in
"such bad condition" by the time Koryakova got to them that they
could hardly be distinguished from the surrounding soil. If bits and pieces got left in the mud, it's
not to be wondered at: the excavation
was done in three days when it should have taken weeks.
Diagram of
the grave outside Ekaterinburg -- the pit during excavation
"We had only one big digging machine,"
Koryakova complains, "some military trucks, several spades.” There were fences and klieg lights around the
pit, and the most bizarre company of helpers on the job “two of everything," Koryakova told the Sunday Times, "just like Noah's
ark: two police colonels, two detectives
laden with cameras and video equipment, two forensic experts, two
epidemiologists, the town procurator and his secretary, and two policemen with
submachine guns.” Everyone took a shovel
and dug: the colonels, the detectives,
the procurator, and Alexander Avdonin, a local geologist who worked with Ryabov
during the first excavation, in the 70s, and now heads an organization in
Ekaterinburg called Obretenie -- the
word translates loosely as "recovery," and has religious
overtones. The announced goal of Obretenie is "to restore the
morality of Russian history.” The actual
plan, according to a former associate of Avdonin's, is to create a memorial on
the site of the grave, with a park around it and an office for Avdonin on
Resurrection Hill, the finest address in Ekaterinburg. It isn't possible any longer to sort out the
details of Avdonin's association with Ryabov -- Ryabov isn't talking, and
Avdonin reacts badly, according to all reports, whenever it's suggested he was
not the prime mover in the hunt for the bones.
"He is very jealous of everything concerning the
imperial relics," says Avdonin's former deputy, a man who quit Obretenie on account of Avdonin's
determination to control everything.
"He thinks he is the only person with the right to publish anything
or to give out information, and when other reports appear, with information
from different people, he just can't stand it.”
Boris Yarkov, a reporter for Ekaterinburg's irreverent newspaper Na Smyenu!, calls Avdonin "the
chief undertaker," and complains about "the veil of secrecy" he
has tried all along to cast across the investigation.
Alexander
Avdonin at the gravesite -- bones under
the old regime
By the time a team of forensic experts from
Having thus "defined" the skeletons, the
experts were able to state for the first time that they represent the remains
of five women and four men , that they appear to correspond to the historical
record of the victims in the Ipatiev house; that five among the nine are
"almost certainly" members of the same family; and that if they are
the Romanovs, two of them are missing:
the Tsarevitch, Alexei, and one of the grand duchesses (not Anna Demidova,
the maid whose body, according to the Yurovsky report, was supposedly burned in
place of the empress's). I asked Dr.
Plaksin to tell me which of the tsar’s four daughters had been found in the
pit, but he wouldn't.
"Our charge is too serious," he said. "We haven't the right to make
mistakes.” Plaksin is conscious of the
bearing this case may have on the public profile of his department, and he
obviously regrets the focus in the press on individual names. Last June, the German weekly Stern, in a sensational account of the
Russian investigation which concluded with a highly dubious dismissal of Anna
Anderson's claim, declared that a new process of computer modeling, a
supposedly up to the minute forensic technique pioneered by Dr. Abramov with
the help of Russia's Institute for Space Studies, had identified the skull of
Anastasia among the nine recovered at Ekaterinburg. If this is so, the point was quickly
dropped. Not a single person mentioned
it to me during interviews in
The tsar
computerized -- Russian forensics at work
In
The world media, so far, have been mightily impressed
with Abramov's photo technique. It's
exactly the sort of showpiece procedure our expert crazy age adores, and it
looks terrific on television screens.
But it hasn't convinced the parade of specialists in Plaksin's
office. If it had, the bones might never
have been sent to
The five also share "a special family dental
disease," Plaksin told me incidentally, which looks congenital and which
was already advanced at the time of their deaths, despite the obvious care that
had been taken of their teeth. My heart
leapt a little at that: when Anna
Anderson surfaced in
We were sitting in Plaksin's sun filled office in the
former town house of Pierre Smirnoff (of the vodka Smirnoffs), a once elegant,
currently crumbling quayside mansion that my interpreter said was
"sentenced to death" by the Soviets.
It's under restoration now , as much of
"People are saying, 'Maybe if the Tsar hadn't
abdicated, the October Revolution wouldn't have happened,' " says
Gurtovaya. She knows it's a long
shot: "But after so much time you
only remember the good things. People
want to believe that it was better under the Tsars, and that it will be better
again.” Polls confirm that there is no
real support in
"All members are to be treated the same,"
the association states, in a bizarre holdover from the vanished period, and
despite the fact that the documents asked for now might have meant a death
sentence in Stalin's time. This is
"the Year of Nicholas ll," the 125th anniversary of the last tsar’s
birth and the 75th of the massacre at Ekaterinburg; in July, the Nobility
Association plans a reenactment of the tsar’s last train ride, from St.
Petersburg to Tobolsk, in Siberia, and thence to Ekaterinburg, where local
monarchists hope the guest of honor will be Grand Duchess Maria, "Head of
the House of Romanov" and "Curatrix of the Throne" by decree of
her late father, Grand Duke Vladimir.
"To say the family is divided is a euphemism,"
one of them stated. "The family is
raving mad.” Grand Duke Vladimir was
addressing a gathering of Spanish speaking bankers and investors in
Grand Duchess
Maria Vladimirovna and her son, Grand Duke George, 1992
"Let God settle everything," says Maria, the
39 year old heiress, "but the people have to decide.” Maria is practicing ribbon cutting. She's smart, and she's large, and she puts
you in mind without much difficulty of some of her imposing ancestors. With her ample figure and her big hair (it
looks as though it were designed in the early 1970s for Ethel Merman), you get
a sense of autocracy on the loose, as if the Curatrix of the Throne just might
throw her slipper at you in a moment of temper.
She frowned at the mayor of Moscow recently when he ventured to suggest
that "all 27 religious faiths known to operate in the capital" were
worthy of the government's support:
Maria is conscious of her mission as an Orthodox princess, even if she has rejected, in principle, the
concept of absolute rule. When I got to
It's hard to know, of course, how
"political" all this is, what the difference may be in Yeltsin's Russia
between a conscious monarchism and a muddled nostalgia, but plainly the
movement, the royalist effort, hits a sensitive nerve. At the Maly Theater in
Plaksin was annoyed last summer when officials in
Ekaterinburg, preparing for an international conference on the Romanov relics,
went over his head and invited four American specialists to help authenticate
the bones. The involvement of
"The legal procedure was violated," he told Moskovsky Komsomolets, whose reporter added her own stem
commentary: "It's humiliating and
insufferable to watch how the best Russian specialists carry out a brilliant
study while the government begs for foreign help.” Plaksin is gentleman enough, and scientist
enough, to acknowledge "great respect" for his American colleagues,
and to say that their conclusions agreed with his own on nearly every
particular. Where they parted company
was over the refusal of the American delegation to keep quiet about the
identity of the missing grand duchess:
it was Anastasia after all.
"All the skeletons appear to be too tall to be
Anastasia," said Dr. William Maples, director of the C. A. Pound Human
Identification Laboratory at the
Maples is much more cautious in all his conclusions than
news reports have made him sound. In
conversation with me, he referred repeatedly to "the five presumed
Romanovs" whose skeletons he saw, and stressed that they had not been
positively identified according to all the laws of forensic science. Maples envisions as "the next step"
in the case a harder search for "ante mortem records," along with a
"really sophisticated" archaeological excavation at the site of the
grave, with an eye toward locating traces of the bonfire Yurovsky talked about.
"If that's found," Maples says, "I
guarantee with confidence we can establish that human remains are there and
that they're teenagers. And probably the
number of the victims.” Not that even
this, Maples thinks, would stop the mail he's been getting. His favorite letter so far is from a woman
who told him that Anastasia and Alexei weren't found in the grave with the
others because they "went to the bathroom" at the last minute and
thus escaped the executioners. I myself
heard recently from someone in
"There are at least 10 Anastasias in
By the time I got to Ekaterinburg, the experts had
already left, taking samples of the bones (nine left femurs, to be exact) and heading
to
This isn't just an academic question. If the bones of the imperial family are one
day interred in
"There are so many martyrs," one woman said
to me. "Why should we raise these
above the others?" An exhibition at the youth museum in Ekaterinburg
chronicles the fortunes of young people in the city, starting with a mock
cellar room, where pictures of the tsar’s children have been mounted on a torn
and battered wall, and ending with a simple memorial to a local couple, the
Tariks, Vladimir and Vera, whose lives were destroyed in the Stalinist
terror. Under Stalin more than 100 Gulag
camps operated in the Ural region alone; boys from the regional Komsomol were
drafted by the tens of thousands during World War II, and most of them never
came back. The final display at the
museum is a stuffed dummy whom the curators call "Fedya.” He stands with his face to the wall and
pushes hard against it.
"If he wants to move," the curators say,
"he has to go to the left or the right.
We are hoping he will find another way."
The site of
the murders (1991) -- the future Cathedral on the Blood in Ekaterinburg, where
the Ipatiev House stood
Ekaterinburg has had some trouble, putting it mildly,
forging a new political identity. At the
site of the Ipatiev house, where the Church on the Blood is due to be built
this year and where couples already come on their wedding day to lay flowers
for good luck, an iron cross had to be erected because the first two, made of
wood, were burned by recidivists. Not
everyone in the city is a closet monarchist or even anti-Soviet. The streets that surround the future church
still bear the names of Bolshevik saints
"That is a good question," Melkhisedek says,
"and the right question to ask. But
the rules of the Russian government have not yet evolved to take the views of
the church into account.” Not only did
no one in authority ask for his blessing when the bones were exhumed, but he
wasn't even consulted in the matter.
"It all took place without my authorization or participation,"
he complains. "And when the head of
the regional administration called to say, 'We have found the bones of the
tsar’s family,' my answer was firm:
'Unless there is an internationally recognized commission of
identification, I will not recognize them.' " And he hasn't. He's been a real thorn in the side of Obretenie, the "recovery"
operation headed by Alexander Avdonin.
For all intents and purposes, the city is divided into two camps: the "constructive group" (as I
heard it called), which demands international verification of the Romanov
relics and counts the church among its sponsors, and Avdonin's crew, which
works with the blessing of the civil authorities and is trying to get the bones
"recognized," immediately, by everyone in town.
"The local government wants pilgrims," says
Vadim Viner, the historian at the youth museum.
"They want tourists, they want hard currency. But they've acted without regard for the
interests of the Romanov family, the church, or the Russian nation as a
whole. That's why they're in a corner
now. They have no ticket home.” Viner himself is quick to whip out a letter
from the late Grand Duke Vladimir, written just five days before his death in
"Maria?"
I asked.
"Maria!"
said Avdonin, banging on the table. It
was an astounding remark. Earlier in the
summer, before the arrival of the American experts, Avdonin told The Washington Post that Tatiana was missing from the grave -- anyone but Anastasia, I felt sure, whose
legend leaves a lot of loose ends and wouldn't be helpful at a
canonization. In August, with the
blessing of the local administration, Avdonin mounted a second excavation in
the forest to hunt for the missing children, but he's not going to find
anything he hasn't found before, and he knows it. "It's like looking for a black cat in a
dark room," he remarked, then added, as if contemplating the rash of
future claims, "This is going to be endless."
I went to the grave with Dr. Koryakova, the
archaeologist, on a Saturday morning at the end of September. It isn't far from civilization, as I'd
imagined it must be, but only a few miles north of Uralmash, Ekaterinburg's
leading industrial complex, whose belching stacks give a poisonous glow to the
air around the city and make the grave look hazy in the Russian birches. The mine shaft where the bodies of the
imperial family were first taken after the murder, and where they were thought
for many years to have been completely destroyed, lies deeper in the woods, in
a section of the forest that's truly remote, but the grave itself is in a wide
open clearing, about 600 feet off the Moscow road and in full view of the
railway line. Koryakova agreed with me
when I said it seemed an unlikely spot to have left the bodies -- “unless the
murderers were drunk," she suggested, "or tired, or fighting, or
horrified by that time.” This is in line
with Edvard Radzinsky's explanation in The
Last Tsar for the evident haphazardness of the final burial.
"There wasn't time
for anything else," he told me in
"The tsar’s two youngest daughters," says
one, "pressed up against the wall, were squatting, covering their heads
with their arms, and then two men fired at their heads.” The maid, Demidova, "grabbed the bayonet
with both hands and began screaming.
Later they got her with their rifle butts."
After 20 minutes, the job still wasn't done: "When they laid one of the daughters on
the stretcher, she cried out and covered her face with her arm. The others [the daughters] also turned out to
be alive. We couldn't shoot anymore with
the open doors the shots could have been heard on the street.” And if the bodies were thrown still alive on
the truck? If they were driven out of the city with the girls still
moaning? "It is easy to write that
they 'checked,' says Radzinsky, "but how could they really have checked in
that smoke, in that horror, in that fever amid the pools of blood'?"
Radzinsky has pinpointed a specific moment on the
route to the grave when one or more of the tsar’s children might have been
rescued in the darkness. If it sounds
farfetched, there are documents in the party archives that still haven't seen
the light of day. Russian archives are
like a smiling matrioshka doll, one stuck inside the other. The director of Ekaterinburg's Center for
Documentation tells me that his office is currently negotiating with the
Russian Nobility Association for the right to publish additional material from
the party files relating to the murder of the Tsar, including testimony no one
has seen yet. There are
"discrepancies," the curator emphasizes, echoing Dr. Koryakova, in existing
accounts of the murder, and "we aren't at the end of our surprises.” In
"But he
believed it," Radzinsky says, pointing to a shot of the prisoner's
face. "Look at him. He isn't crazy. I have to go on with it. I have to.”
I asked a Russian friend in
"People are sorry," she said, "that the
family had to suffer such a terrible fate.
They wish it hadn't happened.” In
The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes
names
BY PETER
KURTH
TSAR: THE LOST WORLD OF NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA
ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON
SPECIAL
TO THE WEB
ANNA-ANASTASIA:
NOTES ON “FRANZISKA SCHANZKOWSKA”
Anna Anderson’s biographer
takes a closer look at the 1994 DNA results …
Japanese
scientists have their doubts …
And
so does
Dr
Knight argues that the Home Office results were too good to be true and doubts
the researchers could have obtained such long stretches of DNA from old bones,
particularly those that had spent more than 70 years in a shallow, wet earthen
grave.