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 Ekaterinburg, their faces smashed to prevent recognition, their flesh destroyed in a wash of sulfuric acid. At least twice before their official exhumation in 1991, the remains had been disturbed, once by the laying of a power cable, and again, during the Brezhnev era, by a team of amateur sleuths, who tore up the ground with shovels and poles and concluded, when skulls emerged, that they had found what they were looking for -- the bones of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

"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 America, England, and Russia have been trying, with the most sophisticated means available, to establish whether the unearthed skeletons are really those of the last Russian imperial family.

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 Soviet Union's public silence on the matter was the most tantalizing (and confusing) factor in the whole affair. In the early 1920s a White Russian monarchist investigation team, writing in exile, concluded that the corpses had been cut into pieces after the murder, burned on bonfires, dissolved in acid, then tossed down an abandoned mine shaft. Many were unconvinced, but there seemed no alternative explanation. A suit for legal recognition brought in Germany by Mrs. Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be Anastasia, the tsar’s youngest daughter, dragged on for nearly 40 years and ended in a draw when the West German Supreme Court left the case unresolved: judicially, the claim was neither established nor refuted.

Anna Anderson (1965)

By that time, Mrs. Anderson was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had married a local historian and genealogist and where she died in 1984 in circumstances of extreme eccentricity. In the summer of 1973, when I met her for the first time, she was still compos mentis -- brisk, commanding, and charming in unguarded moments, although she had already begun to dress in bag lady style and was irritating her patrician neighbors in the Old Dominion with mongrel dogs, overgrown shrubs, unmowed lawns, and dozens of stray cats. She was the only claimant to Anastasia's name and title anyone really took seriously, the woman around whom all the legends were born and controversy never ceased to howl. Her case divided the royal families of Europe and inspired books, plays, TV dramas, a film with Ingrid Bergman, and even a ballet by Kenneth Macmillan. My own book on the subject, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, in which I concluded that Mrs. Anderson's claims were just but probably unprovable, was published just six months before her death.

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 Russia. I decided it was my duty to discover the truth about the execution and the burial of the Romanovs and to tell people."

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 May 30, 1979, the group was “rewarded":

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 Moscow, where it was kept for months under Ryabov's bed, but "the time wasn't right" for a forensic analysis. Asked to reveal the precise location of the grave, Ryabov answered that he would do so only with permission to give the executed a proper Christian burial. He and his companions had reburied the skulls and left a cross, along with a quote from the Bible, as a token of their respect: "He who endures to the end will be saved.” It was a line from Matthew, the first expression of the retro-monarchist, semi-hysterical, anti-Soviet flavor of the whole affair. Ryabov's story was a wholesale attack on the Soviet system, and specifically on the reputation of Lenin, whose personal involvement in the murder of the Romanovs had long been denied by Soviet authorities. Ryabov wanted "no blank spots and no black spots in our history.” In that sense, the bones were a weapon:

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 London in April 1990, a year after the first revelations and at the very moment when the trickle of Gorbachev's domestic reforms had burst into a flood. It was open season on the dying regime, and Ryabov had come to England as part of a cultural delegation from Russia. The occasion was an overhyped auction at Sotheby's, where, along with an assortment of icons, paintings, and imperial Russian gewgaws, the records of the monarchist investigation of the murder of the tsar were also up for sale. These documents, known as the Sokolov papers, after the White Army magistrate who examined the imperial family's disappearance at Ekaterinburg, had been carefully, even lovingly preserved by monarchists in exile, and were advanced at Sotheby's now as the final nail in the coffin of Soviet heinousness. There was nothing new in the papers in the way of information, but Sotheby's nevertheless had estimated their value at from $500,000 to $800,000.

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 England for a glimpse of their own relics. The icons, the paintings, the monarchist documents -- they all belonged in Russia now, an attitude hastily seconded by Sotheby's later in the day, when the file of Romanov papers ("Sotheby's £300,000 flop," The Daily Telegraph called it) failed to find a buyer. I talked with Ryabov over breakfast the next morning and saw that he was eager to get home. It was “a sad day" for Russia, he kept saying; it was "a shame" his country couldn't afford to purchase the records of its own history. But he refused to discuss the only thing that interested me: the bodies of the Romanovs.

“That would be a very long conversation," he told me through Dilyara. Everything was "chaos" at the moment, everything in London was "smoke and fire.” Would I come to Moscow? If I came to Moscow, he said, all would be revealed.

Later, I learned that Ryabov was famous for promising this -- also that he is one of the hardest men in Russia to track down. He had never been a mere "researcher," of course, in the vast arrangement of the Soviet bureaucracy, but "a sort of secretary" to Nikolai Shchelokov, the head of the Interior Ministry under Brezhnev and a man with access to all kinds of secrets. Edvard Radzinsky, whose recent best selling biography, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, shed new light on the murders at Ekaterinburg, thinks Ryabov got "very confused" when his story of finding the skeletons started to raise more questions than it answered. By the time I got to Russia in September, he had dropped from the picture, moved to St. Petersburg, and removed himself completely from the ongoing investigation.

"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 England, who was said to have declined Gorbachev's invitation to visit Russia until "certain formalities" were seen to. The queen was understood to mean a decent burial for her cousins, the Romanovs, and a public atonement for their terrible end; until that happened, no British monarch would set foot in Russia.

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 Moscow to know how badly they'd botched the job.

About three weeks after my return from Moscow, I met the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. She had read my book on "Anastasia" and wanted to talk.

"We didn’t get any proper information about that case in Russia," she confessed. People had heard about Anna Anderson, of course; they knew that "a woman in the West" had claimed to be the only survivor of the Ekaterinburg massacre, but no one took the story seriously. “No one knew how complicated it was,” Tolstaya said. Had my book been published in Russia? "It ought to be. There are three subjects that are popular right now: pornography, astrology, and monarchy."

We both laughed. A visiting fellow at Princeton, Tolstaya has been living in the United States for several years and watching events unfold in her native country with a mixture of relief and trepidation. She is not surprised by the sudden resurgence of media interest in the Russian imperial family or the current fascination in Russia for anything to do with the last Romanovs.

"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 Greenwich Village, but she's quite sure the Russian people haven't yet finished their romance with the Tsars.

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 Russia, Tolstaya thinks -- "It's all taking place right now, don't you feel that?" What’s needed is an end to the story, some permanent resolution.

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, Buckingham Palace has not revealed whether hair has been plucked from the royal head.

There is a certain sensitivity -- indeed, paranoia -- among Europe's royal families about the fate of the Romanovs. The late Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip's uncle, funded the fight against Anna Anderson in the German courts, and Europe's monarchs have been mainly obstructionist when it comes to opening private archives or otherwise helping to resolve the case. For what it's worth, the scientists at Aldermaston will also be examining strands of Anna Anderson's hair (she was cremated in 1984, and nothing else remains) in an attempt to identify her as a Romanov or to exclude her from the genealogy.

"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 Long Island, with the purpose of "building confidence" in the procedure among lawyers and jurists in the United States. DNA analysis is more widely accepted in England, Mandelbaum says, than in America, where the judicial system lends itself famously to "expert wars" and so much depends on lawyers' briefs.

"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 New York, and bits of the alleged Tsar may cross the Atlantic for verification. Already rumors are circulating in London that Dr. Gill's initial efforts to identify the bones have failed, though Home Office spokesmen describe his tests as "revolutionary" in nature, and insist that Gill is making encouraging progress. What is not in dispute is that DNA testing is the only hope of solving the case and that, even so, scientists and officials of the Russian government are going to have a tough nut to crack when it comes to convincing the Russian people.

"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 Ural State University in Ekaterinburg and the woman who supervised the excavation of the skeletons in 1991, confirmed in the London Sunday Times that the bodies "showed traces of violence and mistreatment before death," which "match the existing accounts of the murders.” Some of the victims were shot while lying down, says Koryakova, Their faces were smashed. Many bones were broken, while others were "crushed as though a lorry drove over them.” (The final detail of the Yurovsky report indicated that the grave of the imperial family was driven over many times to pack down the earth and disguise the site.) Dr. Koryakova is an expert in prehistoric settlements in Western Siberia and the Ural region of Russia. She has seen lots of burial sites in her time, turned over lots of bones, "but never so many that were so badly damaged," so violated, she tells me. "I was ill. It was a terrible picture."

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 Komsomol Museum in Ekaterinburg, now dedicated to the youth of the region, claims there is evidence indicating that "the so called Romanov bones" actually belong to the family of a local industrialist killed in the revolution at the same time as the Romanovs. The White Army magistrates who investigated the murder of the imperial family in 1918 found hundreds of corpses just in that area of the forest where the family's grave was thought to be. It's true that no attempt had been made to conceal them, unlike the victims in the forest pit, and that most of the corpses did not have 18-karat gold bridgework, or, in the case of the "middle aged female" currently presumed to be the empress, platinum crowns on her teeth. At the Moscow office of Dr. Vladislav Plaksin, the chief medical examiner in Russia's Ministry of Health, who last year was given the task of coordinating the examination of the bones at the national level, I was shown pictures, charts, maps, and edicts, but nothing that could prove conclusively, one way or the other, whether the bones were the Romanovs' or not.

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 Moscow in August 1991.

"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 Russian University in Moscow, from the Medical Military Academy in St. Petersburg, and from hospitals and labs in Ukraine and in the Russian cities of Saratov, Krasnoyarsk. and Voronezh, but it's Ekaterinburg that's still giving him headaches. Last year, a Swiss and Russian commodities firm, Interural, was hired by Ekaterinburg's regional government to take care of "publishing and picture rights" to the Romanov remains.

"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 (Sverdlovsk) -- the Ipatiev House -- destroyed (right) on Moscow’s order, 1977

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 Moscow, in a displacement gesture that was meant to prevent "pilgrimages" to the Ipatiev house, issued a secret order for the mansion's destruction. Yeltsin was forced to take the blame for the decision. He apologized in his memoirs for this "piece of barbarism," but he is known to be sensitive on the subject of the Romanovs, and all my requests for clarification from his office met with the usual shrugs and vague reassurances that "the authorities have it in their hands.” The local government in Ekaterinburg was supposed to have obtained the president's consent before proceeding with the formal exhumation of the bones in 1991; at most, I am told, this would have amounted to "a nod" from Yeltsin, and Ekaterinburg has been acting from the start on its own initiative. Ludmilla Koryakova, the archaeologist at Ural State, was marched into the forest “practically at gunpoint” that July, having been approached by top officials of the regional administration and ordered to excavate "an unknown grave from the Soviet period."

"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 Moscow reached Ekaterinburg in August 1991, the reputed bones of the last tsar’s family were lying in heaps on the floor of the shooting gallery at police headquarters. If anyone noticed the lapse of taste, no one said so. It was the moment of the attempted coup against Gorbachev. "Tanks were coming into Moscow at the moment we were due to leave," said Sergei Abramov, the director of "new technologies" in Dr. Plaksin's office. It was Dr. Abramov's job to assemble the skeletons, literally, as they lay on the firing room floor: 700 bones and bits of bone were pieced together between August and October; 250 more were found in the mud when Abramov's team went back to the forest and panned the grave’s 16 cubic feet of marsh and freezing swampland for loose and missing pieces.

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 Russia, and the pictures being handed out in Moscow now -- photographs of the Tsar and the empress superimposed on shots of the excavated skulls -- do not include the ones of Anastasia that Stern so proudly ran. So far, only Nicholas, Alexandra, and their personal physician, Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, are purported to have been positively identified by Abramov's computers. It's a different story with the four grand duchesses, who were very close in age, and whose individual features, especially given the degraded condition of the skulls, are difficult to distinguish.

The tsar computerized -- Russian forensics at work

In Moscow, Abramov has told independent researcher Alex Anderson that he could "tell at a glance," looking at pictures, that Anna Anderson was not the tsar’s daughter. Since Plaksin’s office also told me that they have no more than six pictures of the imperial family on hand, I took it with a grain of salt. There's been slapstick confusion over the identity of the maid, Demidova -- for a while the experts thought her skull belonged to the Tsar -- and last summer, acting on the initiative of a lawyer in Riga and working with six photographs from the Archive of the October Revolution in Moscow, the forensic bureau of the Latvian Justice Ministry identified the family of a certain David Beryozkin, a railway worker, as the Tsar and his children.

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 England for DNA analysis. As far as Plaksin is concerned, and pending the results of the DNA tests, it's still a question of "Skeleton No. 1, Skeleton No. 2, Skeleton No. 3," and so forth. If Plaksin knows the blood type of the victims in the pit, it doesn't help, because he doesn't know the blood type of the Romanovs or their servants. If experts say that the five family members in the larger group of nine skeletons received the same exquisite dental treatment (in other words, that they had the same dentist), it adds up to nothing, because the dental records of the imperial family are nowhere to be found.

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 Berlin in 1920, 19 months after the murder of the imperial family, about eight of her teeth were extracted in a charity hospital because they were painful and loose. The cause of their degeneration was never explained. In a moment of impatience Plaksin burst out, "I know who those three girls [in the pit] are, but until the expertise is completed, I am not going to say anything."

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 Moscow is, and while I talked with Plaksin about the Romanov investigation, workmen tramped through the hall with buckets, scrapers, ladders, brooms: it seemed to me symbolic of the attempted revival of the whole of Russia. Everything in the country is makeshift at the moment: everything and everyone are up for review. It would have been unthinkable even five years ago for the head of Russia's forensic service to concern himself with the bones of any Tsar at all, let alone the last, "Nicholas the Bloody," whose overthrow in 1917 paved the way for the socialist Utopia. There is still a certain wonder in Plaksin's office and a try-it-on spirit when it comes to the Romanovs, a sense that even the top scientists in the land can't quite believe what they're dealing with. Dr. Svetlana Gurtovaya, a biologist at the Ministry of Health -- she is an expert in blood, hair, skin, and sweat -- thinks that Plaksin and his staff have taken the lead role, whether they like it or not, in a national psychodrama of recovery and atonement.

"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 Russia for a return to the monarchy, but "monarchist centers" keep springing up. The Orthodox Church is seeing a revival, and at least one member of the imperial family, the empress's sister Elizabeth, has been canonized as a saint. (Elizabeth became a nun after her husband's murder by revolutionaries in 1905; she was killed by the Bolsheviks at Alapayevsk, not far from Ekaterinburg, in July 1918.) In Moscow, the recently reconstituted Russian Nobility Association is reported to have denied membership to people who can't provide documentation of their exalted birth.

"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. Vladimir was the only son of Nicholas II's cousin Kyril, whose own claim to be "Tsar in Exile," first advanced in 1924, was hotly disputed by other members of the Romanov family.

"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 Miami last spring when he died of an apparent heart attack. He was buried with full pomp and splendor in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, the first Romanov to be so honored since the revolution. Press accounts were careful to state that the funeral "was regarded by civic and Russian authorities as an obligation to the Romanov family rather than a step toward restoration of the monarchy.” It was "a way of cleansing our guilt,” according to a government spokesman, but it's been a tremendous plus for the "Vladimirs," the only branch of the family that is making political headway in Russia.

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 Russia, she had just finished touring the country with her 11-year old son, George, the new "Tsarevitch," whom The Washington Post was once unkind enough to compare to Pugsley Addams. Asked by reporters if he expected to mount the throne one day, young George replied, "I hope so."

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 Moscow, a post Communist morality play about the murder of the imperial family, Vengeance Is Mine, still packs the house after a two year run. Stanislav Govorukhin's reactionary film The Russia We Have Lost, another hit in the capital, upholds the myth of a Russian golden age around 1913, on the eve of World War 1, when Papa Tsar and Mama Tsarina kept watch across the nation and Lenin was only a "slit eyed" malcontent with "obsessions.” At Dr. Plaksin's office, Dr. Gurtovaya is quick to point out that neither she nor anyone else in Russia really knows a lot about the last Romanovs. When it comes to the imperial family, the citizens of the former Soviet Union were not just badly educated, they were “anti-educated.” And when it comes to personal particulars that might help in the forensic investigation (How tall was the Tsar? What were the relative heights of the four grand duchesses?), the experts are in diapers.

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 U.S. experts followed an offer of help from then secretary of state James A. Baker, who had visited Ekaterinburg in February on an unrelated mission and seen the skeletons at the morgue. Dr. Lowell J. Levine, a dental expert with the New York State Police forensic service and part of the American delegation that spent a week in Ekaterinburg at the end of July, said it was "tantamount to the U.S. asking the Russians for help in investigating the death of John Kennedy.” The invitation provoked a lot of bad feeling in Moscow. Plaksin never complained about it to me, but he has to others, and in the Russian papers he has felt free to let loose.

"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 University of Florida in Gainesville and the official leader of the American team. The grand duchess was just 17 when her family was killed, and according to Dr. Maples the bones at Ekaterinburg "show completed growth, which indicates more mature individuals.” Anastasia was also by far the smallest of the sisters, nearly a head shorter than the others -- it's evident in any group photograph in which the girls are standing. Much was made of Maples's suggestion at the Ekaterinburg conference that the Russians keep digging for the remains of Anastasia and her brother, Alexei. "I think the bodies are out there," he said, though he based this judgment solely on the information provided by Yurovsky's account of the secret burial, which mentions that two bodies were burned on a separate bonfire. [See further the notes of my interviews at Plaksin’s office and Greg King’s critique of the Russian forensics team.]

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 Ohio who says she's the granddaughter of Anastasia and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I told this to Plaksin in Moscow, but he didn't think it was funny.

"There are at least 10 Anastasias in Russia fight now," he complained, along with any number of Alexeis and hordes of cryptic letter writers who know where the missing bodies are buried. The Romanov case is making Plaksin "rougher and tougher" all the time, he says. I asked him whether anyone had plans to continue the dig at Ekaterinburg in search of the children's remains, and he answered it was the end of the interview. "The commission has everything under control."

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 England for the DNA tests. There was a sense of anticlimax in the city, where the bones had been the main topic of conversation since July 1991. At the police morgue on the outskirts of town, daisies were growing at the back door entrance, and a sign told visitors: FAMILIES MAY COLLECT THEIR CORPSES DAILY FROM 9 TO 5. CLOSED ON SUNDAYS. I never expected to see the skeletons themselves, and I find it hard to believe that even a hefty bribe could have got me into the refrigerated room where they lie on tables, logged and numbered. There is a feeling in Ekaterinburg that the dead should be allowed to rest, and a concern that the victims should not be parted after so many years together in the pit.