(Left) The skull of “Anastasia” before its “reconstruction” by Russian scientists; and her “tomb” (right) in St. Petersburg.

From: Greg King (madking@seanet.com)

Subject: Re: Yekaterinburg: bones discovered

Newsgroups: alt.talk.royalty

Date: 2002-05-29 08:26:26 PST

Bob Atchison <boba@pallasweb.com> wrote in message news:<3CF3C7FD.BC5206C1@pallasweb.com> ...

Susan:

I met with the forensics team in Petersburg and they made a three hour presentation on why they believed they identified the youngest female remains as Anastasia with Maria still missing. These guys were hardworking, sincere scientists. They had no agenda at all. I still see no reason to doubt their findings. [See the notes of my interviews in Russia in 1992.]

I think the Russian scientists who worked on this project were justifiably hurt and angry because foreigners - especially the press - doubted their expertise simply because they were Russians; as if their science, education or experience wasn't as good as their Western partners on this project. They were right to feel this way because people were making all sorts of crazy claims about the Russian scientists - that they were government hacks, KGB agents, or lacking in professional standards.

The men I meant were not interested in the personalities involved, they weren't monarchists, communists or people with an agenda, they were just professionals doing their job. They received no glory or money for their work - only complaints when their findings didn't jive with what others wanted to hear.

I have said the following before and it is not scientific - it's just my opinion - take it or leave it as such. When I saw the remains - and I had two hours with them - it was clear to me who-was-who from the skulls among the women. Tatiana looks like Tatiana, Olga looks like Olga, and Anastasia looked like herself - it did not at all look like Maria to me at all. This is just my personal observation, but I have looked at pictures of these people everyday of my life since I was 8 years old and that's what I thought.

Bob

The idea that the Russians had "no agenda" here is VERY generous and contradicted by a number of facts. Without evoking the question of who is missing, simply consider the known facts and how these decisions were arrived at:

The Skull in question is No. 5. This was missing everything below the tops of the eye sockets on the face front, except for a three and a half inch section of the upper jaw; three whole teeth were intact, and one tooth was broken off while the skull was being man-handled in the Ekaterinburg morgue. Identification of this face and its so-called cardinal points therefore rested on a reconstruction, not on existing features.

First, in 1989, when the news first broke, Gely Ryabov, in interviews, went out of his way to claim that "Anastasia was among those we found in the grave." This was, of course, before any testing had been done, and two years before the remains were exhumed from the Koptyaki grave.

By 14 February, 1992, Abramov had, by his own account, spent "only two days trying to work with the skulls" and had made no matches or reached any conclusions. Nevertheless, when US State department Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, accompanying then US Secretary of State James Baker on his visit to Ekaterinburg, asked an official at the Ekaterinburg morgue if Anastasia was missing, she was told "Anastasia is in this room!"(See Massie, page 51) And this, before any testing had been done to establish the identity of the remains by Abramov.

On 22 June 1992 Alexander Blokhin announced, based on Abramov's computer superimposition, that Anastasia was among the remains.(AP Report, 23 June, 1992)

On 26 July, 1992, Vladislav Plaksin, Chief Forensic Expert of Russia, Chief of the Forensic Bureau of the Republic of Russia, said, "Not all the skeletons will be identified. Their condition is different, they had been buried for a long time, they were subjected to acid."

Dr. Filipchuk, a forensic expert from the Ukraine, explained on 27 July, 1992, that No. 5 was a young woman aged about twenty. He based this on an examination of bone lengths, measurements, and vertebrae analysis, the same methods by which Maples had arrived at his own same conclusions.

Abramov's superimposition method and identification of Anastasia was based on a comparison of a total of four photographs.(See Massie, 45) On the issue of identification by photo superimposition (the only method by which a consensus of Russian scientists have based their claim to have Anastasia), on 23 April, 1993, Abramov said "We had to apply a new method of superimposition on computers because the authorities in Ekaterinburg prevented us from doing proper scientific and forensic analysis of the remains." He further claimed, at the same time, that Maples, when in Ekaterinburg, had "also done photo superimposition," an assertion contracted by Maples, Baden, Levine, and the rest of the US Team. Then, knowing that Maples, Baden, Levine and the other members of the US team had all agreed, based on varying and independent methods, that Anastasia was missing, Abramov said, "We got the same age for those remains [No. 5] as he did." Quite obviously, they didn't, so Abramov's remark is inexplicable.

More to the point, also on 23 April, 1993, Abramov said, "We used superimposition to determine for sure who was missing. On our second trip to Ekaterinburg we spent eight days only, which is why we had to make these identifications without using the traditional scientific methods but with superimposition. We did comparisons and estimations to figure out who was missing."

Abramov further declared: "Some scientists think that these remains should be analyzed with a mathematic evaluation which would help better determine how exact the computer superimposition is, but I don't agree with that. I think our experts can evaluate this."

Instead, Abramov said he tested his measurements (which Massie in his book called "space age mathematics"-Massie, page 42) with "an abacus, which we use to count the angles and do all of our complicated calculations. The computer is no good at these things."

Abramov also admitted that during his superimposition process "we discovered that we would have to correct the computer calculations using the abacus to get a correct estimation of the mathematical similarities and shape of the skull to get a match." In other words, Abramov changed the computer calculations to make them match the photos he was attempting to fit them to.

Abramov admitted that he was forced to "manipulate the computer" to get the correct fit: "We have to close the overlapping area when we compare the pictures with the skulls or they won't fit, so we erase some of the lines and points."

Abramov, on 23 April, 1993, acknowledged that his computer superimposition method was "subjective, and that many scientists here [in Russia] have called for further study." Nor did Abramov match every skull to a photograph, as he also admitted: "Those worth superimposing," he said, "were selected. Superimposition was not applied to everyone. It was selective. First it was determined who should be superimposed and who can be skipped. So it was done selectively for who we thought we had." In other words, they determined who they had, then conducted the superimposition to obtain a match; they did not engage in what would have been regular forensic anthropological practice and attempt matches and exclusions with all skulls.

Professor Victor Nikolaievich Zvyagin, Head of the Physical and Technical Department, said of Abramov's superimposition (after the work had been done): "It's still too early to talk about any significant success in this approach but it has a big future." He said that he believed (as did Maples) that it was impossible to identify No. 5 because "the nose bones, the middle face, and the edges of the upper jaw and sides are missing. In this case the reconstruction of the missing parts was needed. There are several ways to do it. We usually prefer to do it using reconstruction based on the skull, not superimposition, which can give pre-defined answers." He criticized the superimposition because "they introduce some alterations to the object."

Nicholas Nevolin, the director of the Sverdlovsk Region Bureau of Forensic Medicine, said of Abramov's superimposition: "It works better in a negative sense. If the skull does not fit within the image of the photograph, we can say that this skull did not belong to the person in the photograph. So each skull is fitted into each photograph. It will not fit into some of them; it may fit into one of them. One must not accept this as a categorical method, especially in this case. The method still is not very reliable, and second, in this case, practically all of the facial parts of the skulls have been destroyed and some of the cranial parts of the skulls are damaged by bullets."(Massie, 77)

Peter Gritsaenko, Deputy Chief of the Sverdlovsk Regional Forensic Bureau, said, referring to Abramov's superimposition technique, in 1993 that he did not want "to talk about it, because there are also other, powerful people involved in this who want their own conclusions confirmed."

Dr. Vyascheslav Leonidovich Popov, forensic dentistry expert from the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy, said on 21 July, 1993, that by the teeth found in the Skull of No. 5 he identified it as "a young woman of about twenty years." Six days later, at the 1993 Ekaterinburg Conference, he said he believed that No. 5 was either Tatiana or Marie, but could not be Anastasia.

On 30 December, 1993, the Commission of Forensic Medicine Examination of the Skeletal Remains released findings which declared that Anastasia had been identified as No. 6. This Commission included Plaksin, Kryukov, Kuznetsov, Gedygushev, Amranov, Ivanov, and Gurtovaya, but pointedly excluded Dr. Popov, Dr. Filipchuk, Dr. Nevolin, and Dr. Zvyagin-four trained scientists who had worked extensively on the remains and the question of their identification, and who, not coincidentally, disagreed with the Commission's findings. Thus the idea that the Russian experts came to a unanimous conclusion is without foundation.

Further, the Commission, in complete contradiction to the work of Baden, Maples, Filipchuk, Nevolin, and Zvyagin, claimed that the remains attributed to No. 5 exhibited "complete osteal knitting of the 5th lumbar vertebrae process"-the very absence of which had led the other scientists to conclude that this set of remains was not Anastasia. And these were not simply Americans who spent a few hours with the bones but, as above, included Russians who worked on them for nearly two years. One team had to be wrong.

As to the professional level of Russian science and the investigation carried out, even the Russians complained repeatedly that they lacked the resources, funding, and equipment to facilitate the identification. This is one reason why they made the arrangement with the Home Office in the UK to do DNA testing there-they did not have the capability to do it themselves. On 27 July, 1992, Dr. Lowell Levine said, "This case is getting short shrift from an examination standpoint. It isn't getting anything like the quality of investigation scientifically or forensically that even the average citizen in the US would get."

The Russians, in fact, had a habit of misidentifying these skulls. According to an interview with Ryabov, who first broke the story, Abramov, after examining the skulls personally, told him that he had Alexei. In August, 1991, Abramov determined that the remains of No. 1 [Demidova] were Nicholas II, as he admitted in 1992: "Until we determined that it wasn't a man, we were working on that version and that skeleton was considered to be the Tsar. We didn't talk much about that because we didn't want much ado, since we had two versions. And when we got the idea who really was skeleton No. 1, then we made results of our research public." And yet, again to the level of Russian expertise, it took Maples, Baden and others all of "two minutes" as Maples told me to confirm that No. 1 had a female pelvis.

Further, on 23 April, 1993, Abramov said: "We don't know what level of expertise the Americans work at, how they perform examinations, how good they are." Thus, it is erroneous to say that only the Russians were subjected to criticism-Abramov himself openly questioned their credentials-which is quite a bit more than Maples or anyone from the US did in disagreeing with the Russians' conclusions.

All of this is in the way of indicating that the identification using superimposition was far from conclusive. The Russian experts disagreed-and continue to do so-amongst themselves. It is surely not a criticism of the Russians involved, nor a personal attack, to say that they were hampered by funding, resources, disagreements, and often by a lack of knowledge. Trying to point the finger at foreign criticism as unwarranted given the circumstances of the case is reverse prejudice in favor of the Russians and clearly ignores the complexities involved here.