The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  Abramov’s work, therefore, had to be done in Ekaterinburg. He had no money for expenses. The budget for his office is decided a year ahead of time, and no project of this magnitude had been expected. Therefore, during the autumn of 1991, Abramov repeatedly had to travel to Ekaterinburg, live in a hotel, eat his meals, and pay these expenses partially out of his own pocket. Avdonin—whom Abramov calls “a good man”—promised to help from his foundation, Obretenye, but then Avdonin found that he, too, had no money. The local forensic people had no time to assist Abramov during working hours—“they had their hands full dealing with current murders,” he said. Some were willing to work overtime on Saturdays and Sundays, but they wished to be paid and Abramov was unable to pay them.

  In December, Abramov told Investigator Volkov that for financial reasons he could not continue. Volkov suggested that this Russian government forensic scientist find commercial sponsors. Abramov started looking. He found a television company, Rus, from the city of Vladimir, which agreed to pay some of his expenses if they were allowed to film the bones. Another sponsor, a charity called the Fund for the Potential of Russia, was willing to pay for work and travel in return for being acknowledged everywhere as sponsor of this research. Abramov was pleased; while he had these sponsors, he traveled to Ekaterinburg three times in the spring of 1992 and even was able to bring some of his technicians from Moscow.

  The television people were invaluable to Abramov, not only because they provided money but because they brought cameras. “We did not even have a camera in Ekaterinburg, and our superimposition work required cameras.” Later, it was said that it was impossible to identify these skulls by superimposition because Abramov did not properly photograph his work during their reconstruction. “It is true,” he admitted, “that there are no photographs of the work I did in the fall of 1991. The reason is that I was not permitted to take photographs. Only in May 1992, when we had help from these television people, were photographs taken.

  “But”—Abramov’s face darkened with disgust—“once they had the film, the television people spat at us. They went out and tried to sell these films. And then”—he threw his arms up in the air; he was a character from Gogol, caught in a maze of bureaucratic villainy and deceit—“the government of Ekaterinburg demanded that all films and tapes of the remains must be left in Ekaterinburg. Further, the authorities demanded that everything written down on a piece of paper must be left behind in the city. And then, these same Ekaterinburg people turned on me and said, ‘Abramov deceitfully has brought in a television company, which, despite the ban of the Ekaterinburg government, has taken and is selling this film.’ ”

  In the summer of 1992, still shuttling between Moscow and Ekaterinburg and trying to complete his work, Abramov encountered an apparently disinterested angel, Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, a wealthy Russian emigre in his middle eighties, now living in Liechtenstein. Falz-Fein had heard about Abramov’s superimpositions and, when in Moscow, came to his office to see them. “When he found out that I had people working for nothing,” Abramov remembered, “that we did not have enough diskettes, enough of this or enough of that, he silently reached into his pocket, peeled off ten hundred-dollar bills, and gave them to me. I immediately told my superiors. Their eyes lit up … the biologists wanted serum, everybody wanted something. But I said no, this is only for the research on the Imperial family. The first thing I did was pay the people who were working for me. I paid them in dollars. My brilliant mathematician who came to us from the space rocket program had worked here, doing only this, for a year without pay. He was the first one I paid out of the money Baron Falz-Fein gave me.”

  By the summer of 1992, Sergei Abramov and his colleagues were convinced that they had found Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, Dr. Botkin, Demidova, Kharitonov, and Trupp. Alexander Blokhin, deputy vice governor of the Sverdlovsk Region, had backed them publicly, holding a press conference on June 22 to announce that “computer modeling, comparing ancient photos of the tsar and the empress, has definitely proved that the remains found were their remains.” Everyone knew that the tsarevich was missing. And Russian experts accepted Abramov’s finding that the ninth skeleton he had examined belonged to the youngest of the tsar’s daughters, Grand Duchess Anastasia. The missing daughter, everyone believed, was Marie.

  * The figure perched atop a huge rock and intended to be heroic depicts a small, bespectacled man fiercely angry, wearing a coat too large for him. He is striding into the future, his arm flung out, pointing the way. A pigeon sits on his head. Local monarchists have tried to have the statue removed; failing, they continually scribble graffiti across its base.

  CHAPTER 5

  SECRETARY BAKER

  In February 1992, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, in his last year of office, was barnstorming around the former Soviet Union. During his three years of working for President Bush, the Soviet Union had splintered into a plethora of independent states, all of them interested in attracting American investment capital and technological know-how. Baker, accordingly, was warmly welcomed in Moldavia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan—and, of course, in Russia. On February 14, his blue and white Air Force 707 touched down at Ekaterinburg, his last stop before Moscow. In fact, visiting Ekaterinburg itself was not the primary reason for this stop. Baker was on his way to a secret nuclear research center called Chelyabinsk 70, one hundred miles to the south. The very fact that Baker was coming measured the distance recently traveled by the two superpowers. For decades, Chelyabinsk 70 had been considered so secret that the entire small city was encircled by high barbed-wire fences and watchtowers. For miles around, the countryside had been kept empty of population. The purpose of Baker’s visit was to see how the scientists who had been making nuclear weapons now were using their technology to make artificial diamonds; this was being offered to the Americans as a reassuring example of Russia’s ability to convert former war-making capability to peaceful purposes. Accordingly, Baker, his staff, and a group of American reporters made the trip to Chelyabinsk 70, the secretary addressed the scientists, and then the Americans returned to Ekaterinburg for the night.

  The following morning was what the State Department calls “downtime”; that is, there was nowhere official to go and nothing official to do. President Yeltsin, whom Baker was scheduled to see in Moscow, was not returning to the Russian capital until the afternoon and did not want Baker to arrive before he did. As it happened, Margaret Tutwiler, Baker’s principal spokesperson, had been looking forward to a morning free in Ekaterinburg. For years, Tutwiler had been interested in the Romanovs, and she had read widely on the subject. She knew that the Ipatiev House had been destroyed, but she hoped, nevertheless, to be able to go and see the site. Before arriving in the city, she had mentioned this to Secretary Baker.

  After returning from Chelyabinsk 70 the previous evening, Baker had eaten dinner with Governor Edvard Rossel in Rossel’s small family apartment. Baker, himself a hunter, had admired Rossel’s hunting rifle and the large moose head mounted on the wall. He had listened to Rossel’s description of the attractive business opportunities awaiting Americans in this part of the Urals. Then, as he had promised Margaret Tutwiler he would, the secretary had asked about seeing the site of the Ipatiev House. Yes, of course, Rossel had responded, and as you are interested in the Romanovs, why not also come and see their bones? Baker had asked if he might bring another person.

  In the morning, Baker and Tutwiler accompanied Rossel to the Ipatiev site. “There was snow on the ground, red and white carnations lay at the foot of the concrete cross, and people were coming and lighting candles,” Tutwiler remembered two years later. Baker went up to the cross, leaned over, and touched it with a gloved hand. Then the party drove to the two-story morgue where the bones were kept. Alexander Avdonin was there, and Rossel introduced him. The visitors watched a demonstration of computer superimposition and then looked at the skeletal remains. At one point, Baker picked up one of
Nicholas II’s bones. The singular nature of the situation was not lost on him. Early in 1994, sitting in his Washington law office, he recalled his feelings: “There was a real sense of history in that room. When we—the Bush administration—came into office, we were still confronted with a threat to our very existence from the Soviet Union and its ability to destroy the United States in a nuclear war. I remember how chary we were of the Soviets even as late as May and June of 1989. So, a scant three years later, here was an American secretary of state, standing there in what had been one of the most closed cities of the Soviet Union, just back from the nuclear site at Chelyabinsk, looking at the bones of the tsar. It was a striking example of how far things had come.”

  Tutwiler remembered another moment from that unusual day. In the morgue, she and Secretary Baker were told that the tsar’s son and one of his daughters were missing from the skeletons laid on tables before them. “Is it Anastasia?” Tutwiler asked. Someone—she does not know which of the Russians present—answered decisively, “Anastasia is in this room!”

  While Baker was still in the morgue, Rossel asked a favor. He said that scientists in Ekaterinburg were certain the bones belonged to the Romanovs, but they knew that in order to have this finding accepted in the West, they needed the endorsement of Western forensic experts. “Do you have anyone who could assist us?” Rossel asked. Baker replied that, when he returned to Washington, he would see what he could do. The American reporters accompanying the secretary wrote down this statement, and the following day it appeared in many newspapers.

  Baker was as good as his word. Passing through Moscow, he instructed the U.S. Embassy to establish direct contact with the Ekaterinburg authorities. Returning to Washington, he told the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, “See what we can do to help.” Tutwiler remained involved, and cables stressing that “the secretary is very interested in this” flowed from her office. The two primary U.S. government forensic and pathological laboratories, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology based at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the FBI, were asked to participate. The AFIP had extensive experience in identifying bones unearthed after many years. Samples of the bones and teeth of American servicemen killed in Vietnam that could not be identified in Hawaii by standard anthropological, dental, and radiological methods were sent to AFIP for DNA analysis. Similarly, the FBI laboratory stands behind federal, state, and local police authorities as an ultimate resource for identifying criminals, victims, and missing persons. With the agreement of the secretary of defense and the director of the FBI, both laboratories agreed to help.

  A joint team, led by Dr. Richard Froede, then the armed forces medical examiner and a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, was assembled. Dr. Froede was a forensic pathologist; that is, he dealt with remains when they were dead bodies. His assistant for the trip was Dr. Bill Rodriguez, a forensic anthropologist who deals with remains when they have become bones. Dr. Alan Robilliard of the FBI also was coming; his specialty, like that of Moscow’s Dr. Abramov, is computer graphic reconstruction. In all, eight American specialists, all employees of the U.S. government, made up the team. The costs were to be borne by the government as a contribution to good relations with Russia. (In fact, the salaries of the team members were already part of the federal budget; the additional expenses were primarily travel.)

  The team met several times in Washington and began assembling materials and equipment. Glass-plate X-ray photographs of the tsar and the empress for radiographic comparison were acquired. Handheld X-ray machines, special laser scanning equipment, and computer graphic equipment, designed to work from different power sources in the field, were collected. There was a sense of urgency about these preparations; the Russians had stressed that they wanted the team in place by May. The team was ready on deadline: the equipment was crated, the scientists had their passports, Russian visas, typhoid and diphtheria shots, and airplane tickets. Then suddenly, two days before departure, the trip was canceled. A cable from the American Embassy in Moscow said that the authorities in Ekaterinburg preferred a different American team, led by Dr. William Maples, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Florida.

  Members of the AFIP-FBI team were shocked and disappointed—some still are angry. “I’m not saying anything against Bill Maples, because he’s an excellent man,” one of the proposed leaders of the team said of the episode. “But this was an offer to the Russians by Secretary Baker, and we were the U.S. government team. From the point of view of forensic investigation, we are probably the best the U.S. has. We could have offered much more, particularly in the way of DNA analysis, because Maples couldn’t do that, and it ended up being done by the British. We have one of the few labs in the world capable of doing mitochondrial DNA, so we could have done it here, in house. We’re a huge pathology lab with state-of-the-art equipment both here and at the FBI. Being a U.S. government team, we thought we could really represent the United States. Nobody ever said ‘thank you’ or ‘we’re sorry.’ It was a sore subject around here for quite a while.”

  CHAPTER 6

  CURIOUS ABOUT DEATH

  The Gainesville campus of the University of Florida sprawls over several square miles of lush central Florida landscape. Divided into a grid of streets, it is so large that students sometimes need buses to travel from one class to the next. Some of these blocks are empty, others almost so. On one of these flat, mostly empty plots, a grove of tall bamboo trees breaks the horizon. A bumpy, rutted driveway turns off the concrete street, leads past an impromptu vegetable garden, and arrives at a high wire fence crowned with rolls of coiled barbed wire. Behind the fence, nestled under the bamboo trees, is a windowless, light green, all-metal building with a number of ventilator pipes on the roof. This is the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, the creation and workshop of Dr. William Maples.

  The building is not large. The door opens on a small secretarial office; behind this is Dr. Maples’ office. There is a small conference room and a bathroom. And there is the laboratory which Dr. Maples himself designed on a Macintosh computer. No one enters this room without his permission. The door lock has pins coming from three directions, and neither the university police nor the university locksmith possesses one of its unique keys. There is no possibility of entry through the roof. The building has an elaborate, highly sensitive alarm system. In the four and a half years of the Pound Laboratory’s existence, the alarm has never gone off.

  Few people would wish to enter this room. On the tops of work tables there are human skulls, skeletons, and parts of skeletons awaiting examination. Along the back wall are shelves filled with carefully labeled cardboard boxes containing numerous other human bones. There are computers, X-ray machines, X-ray drive processors, and a video camera; there is a workbench with a drill press, a small anvil, screwdrivers, wrenches, and diamond blade saws; there are refrigerators and freezers. Along one side wall, there are three large stainless-steel vats, each closed by a transparent plastic odor hood, which is connected to one of the ventilating shafts on the roof. In these vats, Dr. Maples and his assistants “macerate remains.”

  “Macerate?”

  “That’s a euphemism for ‘boil the meat off the bones.’ ”

  Dr. Maples is a forensic anthropologist; he deals with bones. If the bones come to him still encased in flesh, he must remove the flesh before he can begin to work. He places the body in one of his vats, fills the vat with boiling water, and tends the contents until he has a skeleton. Actually, most of this work is done by his graduate and undergraduate students, who rotate observing the vats, switching every hour or two.

  “It takes a lot of attention to make sure that the soft tissue comes off as quickly as it can,” Maples explained. “We have to make sure that the bone isn’t softened by being in the water too long and also that the water doesn’t boil dry and burn the bone. The hoods protect against splash—we worry about hepatitis B, AIDS, and tuberculosis—and, at least partially, aga
inst odor. Yes, it’s a very distasteful task, but I can only recall one or two students who have been unable to handle it.”

  Maples’ office next door is a relatively cheerful place. It is true that there are eighteen human skulls on top of three large file cabinets, but the cabinets are painted a sprightly orange. Maples’ desk lies under an untidy mountain of documents, correspondence, photographs, and X rays. But William Maples himself, a balding man in a blue blazer, gray flannel trousers, and wire-rimmed glasses, is almost exaggeratedly neat. His voice is low, flat, and Texan, reflecting his childhood. His speech, like his methodology, is controlled and precise. Dr. Maples almost always knows exactly what his next word or act is going to be and why he is going to say or do it.

  “All my life I have been curious about death,” he said. In college at the University of Texas, where he was majoring in English and anthropology, he paid for his education by riding in an ambulance owned by a funeral home. Night after night, he hurtled at 105 miles an hour toward accident scenes in order to be there first and get the business. He saw “terrible things,” but before he was twenty he had learned to eat a chili-and-cheese hamburger in an autopsy room after a watching an autopsy. At twenty-four, he and his wife began four years of trapping baboons in Kenya for research. When one old baboon bit deep into Maples’ arm, tearing an artery, Maples himself had a brush with death. In 1968, Maples arrived in Gainesville with his Ph.D. and became an assistant professor of anthropology. After six years, he moved out of active teaching to the Anthropology Department of the Florida Museum of Natural History.