The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  Dr. Maples was convinced that none of these three skeletons was young enough to have belonged to Anastasia, who had been seventeen years and one month old on the night of the murders. One reason was height. Numerous photographs of Anastasia standing next to her sisters taken up until a year before her death showed that she was shorter than Olga and much shorter than Tatiana and Marie. In September 1917, ten months before the murders, Empress Alexandra wrote in her diary: “Anastasia is very fat, like Marie used to be—big, thick-waisted, tiny feet—I hope she grows more.” Could Anastasia have undergone a growth spurt of more than two inches during her final year? It is possible, says Maples, but highly unlikely.

  A second reason was the development of the third molars of the three daughters whose remains are present. Dr. Levine, who examined the teeth in every skull, firmly supports Maples’ findings. “He did it anthropologically, I did it dentally; then, independently, we wrote down our estimates of the ages,” said Levine. “We came up with the same numbers.”

  Finally, and for Maples most significantly, there was the condition of the vertebrae of the three youngest skeletons in Ekaterinburg. In his opinion, none displayed the characteristics of a seventeen-year-old female. Later, in his laboratory, Maples explained that human beings grow when their bones lengthen at the ends. Soft, cartilagelike material forms at these ends and gradually hardens into bone, making the overall bone—and the human being—larger or taller. In the vertebrae—the column of roundish bones making up the spine—the bones grow larger (and the human being taller) when cartilage forms and hardens on the edges of the upper and lower rims. “In an older person,” Maples explained, “or in portions of the back of a younger person, we have a completed ring around the top and bottom edge of the vertebrae. But when this person still is incomplete in this part of the vertebrae, it gives me a clue that we’re dealing with a young individual.”

  Death, of course, arrests the process which transforms cartilage into bone, and in the skeletal bones of young people, the cartilage turns to a yellowish, waxy substance which tends to crumble and flake off. In his laboratory, Maples has several skeletons of adolescents; he used them to make his point: “This person’s vertebrae have the ring, but you see it is in the process of uniting and has flaked off here.… It is almost complete here, but you see is still open there.… Here, this one has virtually flaked off all around.… On this, it is present on the base, completely united with just a little scar on front, but the sides still show the opening.” Maples applied this knowledge and experience to the vertebrae he saw in Ekaterinburg: “Females age more quickly than males in the same age-group,” he said. “In a seventeen-year-old female, you expect to see incomplete vertebrae like this. None of the three skeletons in Ekaterinburg had any incomplete or even partially complete rings. This condition simply is not seen with a seventeen-year-old woman. I’ve never seen it. Since that time, I had a graduate student do a master’s thesis on it, and not in one seventeen-year-old female did we find any complete vertebrae in the back.”

  Dr. Maples was well aware of the contradiction between his findings and those of Dr. Abramov. “I believe that Anastasia is missing, and he believes that the missing daughter is Marie,” he said. “I won’t change my mind and he won’t change his.” Why was Maples so certain that Abramov was wrong? His answers were blunt: he faulted Abramov’s technique in attempting to reconstruct with glue the damaged faces in Ekaterinburg. This job was done so poorly, he continued, that any effort to superimpose photographs and skulls could not possibly produce accurate knowledge. Reconstructing damaged faces from fragments of bone can be done, Maples said, but it has to be done with exquisite care. “I frequently reconstruct faces by gluing pieces of bone together,” he declared. “And for this reason I know that even when all the pieces of bone are there, a slight variation in the angle at which two pieces are glued together may result in several millimeters or even half a centimeter difference in where the bone is set. Then, when you try to piece another fragment in, it doesn’t fit. You’ve got a gap. It’s a half a centimeter too big or too small for the next fragment. You can’t get any of the rest to fit, all because one little angle was wrong earlier in the process.

  “In the case of the Romanovs, whole portions of the face—the whole of the right or left side of the face in some of the daughters—were missing.” When Maples at one point discussed this with Abramov and asked the Russian scientist, “What happens if you have landmarks that are missing?” Abramov’s answer was “We estimate.” This was unacceptable to Maples. “The Russians had labored manfully over Body No. 6, attempting to restore its facial bones with generous dollops of glue stretched over wide gaps,” he said. “They were forced to estimate over and over again while assembling these fragments, almost none of which was touching another. It was a remarkable and ingenious exercise, but it was too fanciful for me to buy. Seeing what they had done reinforced my conviction that Anastasia was not in that room.”

  Nor did Dr. Maples accept Dr. Abramov’s technique of computerized superimposition. “I do video superimposition,” he said, “but in my video superimposition setup we put the photograph under one video camera, we put the skull under another video camera, and we superimpose the images on a single monitor. I can change the position of the skull, I can change the size of the skull, I can move a skull, I can change its overall size in relation to the photograph, I can change its position relative to the face, but I can’t change proportion. It’s not within the system for me to be able to manipulate data. I do this using only cameras. If you use cameras and add a computer into the system, the computer can manipulate data and make things fit. And, in fact, Abramov’s whole system is designed to start with the skull that he digitalizes in three dimensions by only a few points. Then he manipulates that skull by the computer until it fits the photograph.”

  Actually, before coming to Ekaterinburg, Maples had planned to return bringing his own superimposition photographs and equipment. But “because of the damage to the faces, I decided during my first visit that there wasn’t any use doing superimposition even to establish that it was the Imperial family, let alone discriminating between the three sisters,” he continued. “And then I learned that Abramov was basing his identification of which of the four sisters was missing upon the reconstructed faces. When that disagreed totally with the age findings that I had made with the skeletons and Lowell had made with the teeth, I simply could not accept the presence of Anastasia.”

  On the larger issue, Maples agreed absolutely with Abramov that these are the Romanovs. The nine skeletons fit the requirements of age, sex, height, and weight of nine of the prisoners in the Ipatiev House. “If you were to go out at random and try to assemble another group of people to fit exactly these historical and physical descriptions, you would have to do remarkable research and then go out and find and kill nine identical people,” said Maples. He regards this as so unlikely as to be impossible.

  What happened to the two missing bodies? Maples’ long experience with violent death tells him that all eleven prisoners were killed. Given the ferocity of the attack on the family, he cannot believe that anyone was allowed to escape alive from the Ipatiev cellar. For further explanation, he looks to the Yurovsky account, which he accepts as truthful. Yurovsky described the burning of two bodies. One was the tsarevich, the other a female body which Yurovsky at first thought belonged to Alexandra, then decided must be that of Demidova. This female body, Maples believes, belonged to Anastasia. But how could Yurovsky have mistaken the body of a seventeen-year-old girl for that of a mature woman, whether forty-six like the empress, or forty like the chambermaid?

  The answer, Maples believes, lies in the changes wrought in the appearance of human bodies by decomposition. The Imperial family was killed in mid-July, when the daily temperature averaged seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Their faces had been crushed by repeated blows from rifle butts. Their hair, soaked with blood, would have dried into a black, caked, impenetrable mass. As the corpses, stri
pped of clothing, lay on the ground, the sex of the victims would have been obvious, but beyond that the naked bodies would have bloated to unrecognizability. Maples sometimes sees the bodies of adolescent girls, which, a few days after death, have ballooned to resemble obese middle-aged women.

  There is more to the process of decomposition. In the open air, flies easily find their way to recent death. They lay eggs in eyes, nostrils, and—as in these victims—in the bloody flesh of mutilated faces and mangled bodies. Within two days in these temperatures, the eggs would have hatched into maggots. No more need be said except that Maples understands why Yurovsky might not have been sure which female body he burned.

  In April 1993, Dr. William Hamilton, the Gainesville medical examiner, accompanied Maples on Maples’ second trip to Ekaterinburg. Later I asked them, based on their experience, what occurs in the mind of an executioner who is shooting, bayoneting, and crushing the faces of helpless people. Hamilton was first to answer: “I think it’s fairly typical of this kind of assassination. You depersonalize the victim and make him or her into a symbol, something other than an individual human being. You are killing the regime, the tsar, getting rid of the whole hated past and creating a new world order. Serial killers do the same thing. Commonly, they compartmentalize and completely dehumanize their victims and then can commit atrocities impossible for an ordinary person to imagine.” Maples agreed. “Once the decision was made to kill, under the circumstances you had that night in the Ipatiev House, I suspect that most of the participants wanted to make sure that it was done completely,” he said. “People don’t die the way you would like them to when you shoot them with handguns. They continue to live, they continue to moan, they convulse. And so, after emptying your handguns, you tend to use other means. And the rifle butts and bayonets were close at hand. That’s why I’m certain there were no survivors.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE EKATERINBURG CONFERENCE

  Maples and his team did not return directly home after their three days with the Romanov bones. Instead, they remained in Ekaterinburg for a two-day conference organized by the government of the Sverdlovsk Region, “The Last Page of the History of the Imperial Family: The Results of Studies of the Ekaterinburg Tragedy.” About a hundred people attended, and twenty papers were presented, mostly by scientists from different parts of Russia and the former Soviet Union. The governor of the Sverdlovsk Region, Edvard Rossel, opened the conference. Alexander Avdonin described how he and Geli Ryabov had found the bones. Professor Krukov of Moscow denounced the “rude violations of archaeological and forensic norms” involved in the exhumation of the bones. Nikolai Nevolin analyzed the condition of the bones taken from the grave. Professor Popov from St. Petersburg described the damage done to the bones by pistol bullets. Dr. Svetlana Gurtovaya of Dr. Plaksin’s office in the Ministry of Health described finding pubic hair from Bodies No. 5 and No. 7 and “objects resembling hair” from Body No. 4. All of these objects, she reported, “turned out to be extremely fragile and breakable and if they were touched would turn practically to powder.” Dr. Abramov described his identification of the family using computer-assisted superimposition. Dr. Filipchuk from Kiev explained his determination of age, sex, and height obtained by examination of the skulls, long tubular bones, and pelvises of the victims.* Victor Zvyagin from Moscow insisted that Body No. 1 (whom both Abramov and Maples had identified as the maid, Demidova) was a male; Filipchuk gently corrected Zvyagin, saying, “According to our data, this skeleton belongs to a large female … there is absolutely no doubt that the pelvis of this skeleton is that of a female.”† Dr. Pavel Ivanov of the Molecular Biology Institute of Moscow spoke of the further information that might be obtained from DNA analysis of the bones, possibly in England.

  Some of the speakers were not scientists. One discussed the uniforms worn by Nicholas II as a reflection of his personality A monarchist from the Russian Nobility Society in Moscow presented himself as the representative of “Their Imperial Highnesses, the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna and the widowed Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna.” Even Baron Falz-Fein, the Liechtenstein millionaire, was allowed to speak. He talked exclusively about himself, mentioned that the estate where he was born, “Askanya Nova, had been the largest in Russia,” and said that his devotion to Russian history and culture was enthusiastic and everlasting. The American team was not on the original program, but, at the end of the conference, Maples was invited to present its findings.

  In the press conference that ended the program, Maples was asked, “What is the level of Russian forensic science medical expertise if you were able to accomplish in three days what took our people an entire year?” His answer was diplomatic: “Don’t forget, they spent a great deal of time in putting all the skeletons in order, reconstructing broken faces and skulls. After this, I and my colleagues only had to come and look.” Nevertheless, although they did not speak Russian, the Americans understood enough to be surprised by the apparent lack of coordination among the Russian scientists present. Everyone, it seemed, specialized in a different part of the body and applied a different technique. An expert from Saratov specialized solely in human wrists; he determined everything about skeletal remains, including age, by examining the small bones of the wrist. The best way to determine the age of a skeleton, says Michael Baden, is to examine the skull, the teeth, the vertebrae, and the pelvis. “But”—Baden shrugged—“if you only know about the anthropology of the wrist, you do everything using the wrist.”

  Some of the Russians seemed to be hoarding their research, guarding what each thought was unique information. Maples and his colleagues were accustomed to Western scientific conferences, whose basic purpose is to share and disseminate new knowledge. Before a conference, Maples said later, Western scientists often prepare abstracts which are purposefully vague because the authors have not completed the research. But by the time of the meeting, a paper is expected to present results, analysis, and conclusions. In this respect, the behavior of the Moscow serologist, Gurtovaya, whose paper was on blood typing from hair samples, particularly fascinated Maples. She told the conference that she had tested bone and hair from the burial site for A, B, and O blood types, but at the conclusion she did not announce what she had found. Maples, sitting in the audience next to an English-speaking Russian art historian, leaned over to his neighbor and said, “Ask her if they were able to blood-type the remains.” The Russian asked the question, saying that it came from the American sitting next to him. “The speaker’s answer,” Maples said, “was ‘Da.’ Nothing more. I said, ‘Ask her if she got results from hair or from bone.’ She said, ‘Both.’ I said, ‘Ask her if the results were the same with the hair and the bone.’ He asked her, and she said, ‘Da.’ So I said, ‘Ask her what blood type it was.’ And she said, ‘Oh, we must keep our own little secrets.’ ” This reminded Maples of a quotation: “ ‘In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.’ In fact,” he said, “within fifteen minutes, somebody told me what her results were: A positive.”

  Cathryn Oakes, the hair and fiber specialist on Maples’ team, had an even more frustrating experience with Gurtovaya. Oakes made the trip from America because she had been told that there was human hair in the burial pit. Accordingly, when she arrived in Ekaterinburg, she asked, “May I look at the hair?” “Oh, that’s in Moscow,” she was told. But, her informer continued, Gurtovaya, the Moscow expert, would be in Ekaterinburg at the conference a few days later and would be bringing the hair with her. When Gurtovaya arrived, Oakes introduced herself and asked, “May I look at the hair?” “Oh, yes,” Gurtovaya replied. But she did not supply any hair. At their next encounter, Gurtovaya told Oakes that “the hair wasn’t any good.” Even now, Oakes does not know what to believe: “She did not appear to have the hair with her. Or perhaps she did and simply didn’t want to show it to me. In any case, I never got to see or do anything.” In the subsequent visits to Russia and Ekaterinburg by Dr. Maples and his team, Cathryn Oakes refused to participa
te.

  Maples did not know it when he arrived, but this compartmentalization of knowledge among the Russians extended to having kept secret from Plaksin and Abramov the fact that he and his American colleagues were going to be at the conference. “They didn’t know we were there until they walked in the door,” Cathryn Oakes remembered. “And they were not pleased.” “They were shocked,” agreed Lowell Levine. “There was a tug-of-war going on between Moscow and Ekaterinburg,” Maples explained. “The forensic people in Moscow wanted the remains sent to Moscow. The Ekaterinburg people wanted to keep the remains there. At some point in this struggle, Ekaterinburg realized that they were going to be outgunned. If they were going to maintain control, they had to have their own forensic team. But there were no forensic scientists of that caliber in Ekaterinburg. That’s when they made their request to Secretary Baker. As a result, we arrived, and we—without realizing it—became the Ekaterinburg team.”

  It was in this atmosphere of mutual shock, misunderstanding, and only partly concealed hostility that William Maples, who believed that the missing grand duchess was Anastasia, first met Sergei Abramov, who believed that the missing daughter was Marie.

  “Professor Maples’ participation at the conference in Ekaterinburg was arranged solely by the government of Ekaterinburg,” Abramov said later. “We found out by sheer accident. It was strange. He was allowed to photograph the bones, but we—Russian experts—had not been allowed to do this. I don’t have anything against Dr. Maples. I respect him greatly. But his role in all this has been puzzling to us. If he is doing the research independently from us, then why are we needed? And if he is doing the research together with us, then why is he hidden from us? We never stood side by side at the bones.”