The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  Dr. Maples’ fax produced no result, and, in June 1994, one year after Dr. King had received the teeth and bone fragments, she still had not released her report. Maples’ trip to Moscow was postponed; he continued calling her and receiving no reply. Ultimately, King did return his call and told him that her findings were ready and that, if he wished, she would accompany him to Moscow to testify before the Russian government commission. At that point, however, Maples’ Moscow invitation had evaporated.

  In June 1994, although Maples had not seen King’s final report, he did pass along startling information: “Dr. King and Dr. Gill,” he said, “both have difficulty in the same area of Tsar Nicholas’s mitochondrial DNA.” King, Maples reported, still needed to resolve whether this difficulty “is a problem of contamination or whether the tsar had an unusual genetic anomaly (that is, a heteroplasmy) or whether there was a mutation.” The possibility of heteroplasmy and a mutation, of course, was precisely what Peter Gill and Pavel Ivanov had reported eleven months before and what William Maples and his American colleagues had vehemently attacked.

  * Dr. Walter Rowe of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is a professor of forensics who works closely with DNA identification teams at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the FBI, and Cellmark Diagnostics in Bethesda, Maryland, the largest commercial DNA identification laboratory in the United States. Frequently, on behalf of one or another of these organizations, he gives courtroom testimony. He admires William Maples’ work in forensic anthropology and has great respect for Peter Gill’s reputation in DNA testing. Rowe’s quarrel on the matter of the Romanov bones is with Dr. Lowell Levine’s assertion that 98.5 percent probability “wouldn’t stand up in court.”

  “Well, I’d tell Dr. Levine that it stands up in court all the time,” said Dr. Rowe. “We go to court many times with a lot less certainty than that. I’m sure Dr. Levine is knowledgeable about some aspects of forensic science, but I don’t think he’s quite as knowledgeable as he’d like to believe. I notice he’s often given to making statements that are frankly contrary to my personal experience in court. Most chemists [Rowe’s Ph.D. is in chemistry] are happy to operate at a 95 percent confidence level on most things they do, so why does 98.5 percent bother anybody?”

  CHAPTER 10

  EKATERINBURG CONFRONTS ITS PAST

  Peter the Great, tall, visionary, and impatient, founded two of the preeminent cities of modern Russia. One was St. Petersburg, which he named after his patron saint; its purpose was to give Russia access to the sea. The other was Ekaterinburg, named after his wife, Ekaterina (Catherine), who became his successor and Russia’s first sovereign empress. This town in the Urals, just thirty miles east of the border between Europe and Asia, was constructed because of the region’s immense mineral wealth. The first ore brought out of the ground was iron; in the eighteenth century, four fifths of the iron produced in Russia was mined and smelted here. Later, the earth also yielded coal, gold, silver, and other metals in such profusion that the town became rich, famous, and proud.

  In the 1990s, the city of 1.4 million is one of the preeminent industrial centers of modern Russia. The massive, belching defense factories that long epitomized Soviet power are being converted to production of civilian goods. Heavy machinery, electrical equipment, metallurgical and chemical plants encircle the city. Civic pride continues strong. In June 1991, 91 percent of the city’s voters cast ballots for their native son, Boris Yeltsin. At the time of the August 1991 coup, Sverdlovsk was chosen as the alternative headquarters of the Russian government should the president be forced to leave Moscow. On September 4, 1991, the city changed its name from Sverdlovsk back to Ekaterinburg.

  Unhappily, all these good things—wealth, fame, civic pride—continue to be shadowed by a single grim event. During this same momentous summer of 1991, the exhumation of the Romanovs occurred. When this happened and the world turned to look, the city was forced to confront the fact that it is and always will be famous throughout the world not for its minerals or its industry but for what happened there on the night of July 16–17, 1918.

  People in Ekaterinburg developed a variety of reactions to this most famous event in their city’s history. Some were defensive: “Sure, we knew this story, but why publicize it?” said the city’s last Communist Party chief. “Don’t people have more important things to think about?” Others are curious, uneasy, anxious to understand and to come to terms. “As someone raised in an environment of hostility to the monarchy, I was taught that the shooting of Nicholas II was the people’s revenge for years of oppression,” recalled the chief architect of the city government. “But reprisals against the children? This I could never understand.” A twenty-seven-year-old computer assembler brought his four-year-old son to the site of the Ipatiev House. “I had no idea what happened here,” he said. “I only learned the truth a few years ago. Now I bring my son here and tell him about our history. It’s good we’re finally learning the truth about these things. The killing of the tsar was a great tragedy for our country, and we should know all the details.” “We must remember,” a metallurgist agreed. “We must not allow a barbarian act like this to happen again.”

  Recently, it has become a tradition for newly married couples to visit the tall white cross erected on the site of the bulldozed Ipatiev House. They kneel, leave flowers, and are photographed. “We wanted our picture taken in front of the cross,” said a newly married twenty-five-year-old gold miner. “We hope for good luck, but we also came because it makes us feel more Russian. It’s part of the revival of real Russia that is taking place today.” Another group of visitors, most of them older, look to the cross for something more than luck; they are sick, believe in miracles, and hope to be healed. “They say this is a holy place,” said Lilya Subbotina, a fifty-two-year-old elementary school teacher whose headaches and high blood pressure have not responded to medical treatments. “I’ve heard about people who came here with sickness and went away completely healed. I’m hoping that happens to me too.” Drawn by these stories, afflicted people walk up to the cross, lean over the flowers, and reverently press one hand against it. “When you touch the cross, you feel an explosion of positive energy,” said a fifty-nine-year-old pilgrim from Vladivostok who traveled three thousand miles hoping to halt a progressive weakness in his legs. “After three days in this sacred place, my legs are strong again. God blessed this cross because our tsar was murdered here.”

  The Russian Orthodox Church, crippled by seventy-five years of compromise with an atheistic state, is still struggling to find a way to deal with the execution of the Romanovs. If the family died as martyrs, then they must be canonized as saints—as, in fact, they were in 1981 by the Orthodox Church Abroad. Even if Nicholas and his family are not deemed to merit martyrdom and canonization and are considered simply victims of political assassination, the church would seem to be obliged to take some notice of their violent deaths. (The Russian Orthodox Church did not consider the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg a martyrdom, but nevertheless it constructed the Cathedral of the Blood on the assassination site to perpetuate Alexander’s memory.)

  Even before the exhumation of the skeletons in Ekaterinburg, the local archbishop wished to construct a memorial church on the site of the Ipatiev House. “This is the place where the suffering of the Russian people began,” said Archbishop Melkhisedek. The church, he explained, would be called the Cathedral on Spilled Blood and “would symbolize society’s penance and cleansing of the lawlessness and wholesale repressions inflicted during the years of Bolshevism.” A competition to design the church was announced in 1990, and architects from everywhere in Russia were invited to submit drawings. In October 1992, Konstantin Yefremov, a Siberian architect, won the contest with a design for a tall white stone-and-glass church combining old Russian and modern design, a bell tower, and, nearby, a hotel for pilgrims and tourists. Unfortunately, there was no money available to the archbishop from his own diocese, or from th
e city of Ekaterinburg, or from the patriarch who is the religious chief of the Orthodox Church in Moscow, or from the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. In April 1995, two and a half years after a design was chosen, the memorial cathedral remains only a drawing.

  In another sense, however, money has been much on the minds of some citizens of Ekaterinburg. From the time the bones were exhumed, hope stirred in the city that they might prove a bonanza. “We think these remains will be very valuable,” said a local police official. “There is talk of a reward. At least, people think they will have some value for tourists.” In a curious but not uncommon mingling of Communist and capitalistic perspectives, a college student said, “Today we take pride in the fact that the tsar was killed in our city. We hope something good will come out of this tragedy.”

  A disagreeable manifestation of Ekaterinburg huckstering of the Imperial remains took place at the time of the scientific conference in July 1992. The conference organizers first attempted to charge foreign journalists a thousand dollars apiece for “accreditation” to the press briefing after the conference. The foreign reporters refused and, after a brief standoff, were admitted anyhow. Next, the reporters were asked to pay ten thousand dollars apiece to see and photograph the bones. Some paid, but far less than the demanded sum. Behind this commercial enterprise was a Swiss-Soviet firm called Interural, commissioned by the Ekaterinburg authorities to handle publishing and picture rights to the remains. Its motive, Interural told the London Sunday Times, was a noble one. “We are doing it out of love,” said Vladimir Agentov, a director of the company, explaining that the profits would be used to help build the church on the site of the Ipatiev House. “We had a proposal from an American newspaper,” Agentov said, “whereby they would buy the copyright in everything connected with the remains and then give us a share in the syndication rights. How much do you think that might be worth?”

  The key to all of these civic hopes lies in Ekaterinburg somehow keeping the remains permanently in the city. Historical precedent would call for them to be entombed in St. Petersburg in the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, the traditional resting place of the Romanov tsars. Nevertheless, early in 1995, Ekaterinburg still hoped that precedent could be overturned. This attitude troubled and sometimes outraged other Russians. “Today, as before [their death], Ekaterinburg doesn’t want to give up the Romanovs,” said Edvard Radzinsky, the Russian playwright and author of The Last Tsar. “In Ekaterinburg, they have a crazy dream, to create the Romanov grave as part of a tourist complex. It is fantastic, terrible, awful. The Romanovs, who were executed by Ekaterinburg people, would have to lie in the same ground and make profits for Ekaterinburg people.”

  Nicholas II, painted by Serov.

  Empress Alexandra.

  Tsarevich Alexis.

  Grand Duchess Olga.

  Grand Duchess Tatiana.

  Grand Duchess Marie.

  Grand Duchess Anastasia.

  The Ipatiev House. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Alexis occupied the main-floor corner room, with two windows facing the front and two windows on the side. The four daughters were next to them in the side room, with a single window. The cellar room where the prisoners were massacred is directly below the daughters’ room, behind the small central window on the side of the house.

  The Ipatiev House surrounded by a palisade and guards, 1918.

  The Ipatiev House being demolished, July 27, 1977.

  The Ipatiev House cellar room, with wallpaper and plaster destroyed by the fusillade of bullets.

  Dr. Eugene Botkin, who died with the family.

  Yakov Yurovsky, “the dark man,” who was the chief executioner.

  Nicholas Sokolov, the White investigator.

  The grave from which the remains of nine bodies were exhumed, July 11–13, 1991:

  Body No. 1: Demidova Body No. 6: Maples believes

  Body No. 2: Botkin this is Tatiana; Abramov

  Body No. 3: Olga thinks it is Anastasia

  Body No. 4: Nicholas Body No. 7: Alexandra

  Body No. 5: Maples believes Body No. 8: Kharitonov

  this is Marie; Abramov Body No. 9: Trupp

  believes it is Tatiana

  Three additional skulls were found in the wooden box into which Avdonin and Ryabov had placed them in 1980.

  Alexander Avdonin.

  Dr. Sergei Abramov.

  Abramov’s superimposition technique: a picture of Nicholas II superimposed on the skull of Nicholas II.

  Nikolai Nevolin (left) and Dr. William Maples in Ekaterinburg.

  Dr. Mary-Claire King.

  Dr. Peter Gill.

  Dr. Pavel Ivanov.

  CHAPTER 11

  INVESTIGATOR SOLOVIEV

  The struggle between Moscow and Ekaterinburg for control of the Romanov bones began as the remains were exhumed. Indeed, from the moment in 1989 when Geli Ryabov revealed what he and Alexander Avdonin had discovered, Ekaterinburg regarded the bones as belonging to it. The exhumation in 1991 was ordered by the Sverdlovsk regional governor, Edvard Rossel, and his deputy, Alexander Blokhin. The actual digging was supervised by Deputy Investigator Volkov of the Sverdlovsk Region Office of the Public Prosecutor. With the bones laid out in the morgue, Volkov began the investigation into their identity. It was Volkov who forbade Moscow forensic expert Sergei Abramov from taking pictures of the skeletons and who, once pictures had been taken, demanded that all film and written notes be left behind in Ekaterinburg. It was Rossel who asked Secretary of State Baker for American scientific help.

  Throughout this period, the Russian government never accepted the argument that the murder of a Russian emperor and the discovery of his bones was a local issue. But at the time of these events, the government’s political position was weak. President Yeltsin survived one coup attempt by Old Guard Communists and another by the leader of the elected Parliament and his own vice president. During this battle for survival in Moscow, the only central government officials concerned with the Romanov investigation were in the relatively low-level Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in the Ministry of Health. In addition, the Ekaterinburg authorities were certain that what they were doing had the unofficial support of their native son, President Yeltsin.

  This belief was publicly articulated by Sverdlovsk Deputy Governor Blokhin at the July 1992 conference in Ekaterinburg. His statement came in response to a pointed question from Vladimir Soloviev of the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Russia, who was present as an observer. During the press conference, Soloviev asked: “At present, the Sverdlovsk administration has decided to appropriate the remains of the Imperial family. This discovery belongs to Russia. Has the question of burying the remains been posed to the Russian government?” Blokhin calmly replied that the regional government did not consider what it had done as “appropriation.” Sverdlovsk Region had not officially asked the Russian government for permission, but—he said to Soloviev—“you, apparently, are informed that prior to starting any investigative or exhumation work, the head of the administration phoned the Russian president Boris Nicholaevich [Yeltsin] and reported to him the fact that such work was being contemplated by the region.” Soloviev was rebuffed but not defeated. To him, it continued to seem absurd that a provincial capital should attempt to seize and profit from a significant event in Russian history. Besides, he had observed and been disgusted by the fledgling efforts to market the bones that had accompanied the 1992 scientific conference.

  In August 1993, the Ekaterinburg monopoly abruptly ended, and the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Russia assumed control of the Romanov investigation. Vladimir Soloviev was assigned as chief investigating official. A Russian government commission was appointed to sit in Moscow.* Its assignment was to receive from the Russian public prosecutor all available evidence as to the validity of the bones, weigh this evidence, and then inform the government of its conclusions. If the commission ruled that the remains were legitimate, it was to make further recommendations as to where, when, and by what ritual they s
hould be buried.

  The commission worked on an ad hoc basis. There were no regularly scheduled meetings; members were summoned when there was new evidence to receive and discuss. Few members attended regularly. Edvard Rossel, still nominally on the commission, never came. Veniamin Alekseyev appeared only rarely. From Ekaterinburg, that left only Alexander Avdonin, who came to every meeting at his own expense. Sometimes, people were invited to join and then not informed about meetings. Bishop Basil Rodzianko, who is eighty and is respected throughout Russia for his twenty-five years of religious radio broadcasts from London and Washington, D.C., was officially asked by Anatoly Sobchak, said that he would be happy to come to a meeting, and then never heard from anyone again.

  Vladimir Soloviev, although not a member of the commission, quietly became the pivotal figure in its work. He was the representative of the Public Prosecutor’s Office assigned to provide the commission with evidence. His task was to track down scientists, historians, and archivists, locate documents, authorize tests, and gather results. He attended most of the commission’s meetings in order to answer questions or to receive requests for additional information. He had been given broad powers. When, in the summer of 1994, Alexander Avdonin asked on my behalf whether I could see the remains in Ekaterinburg, the first answer of the local authorities was no. Soon, a fax arrived from Soloviev in Moscow instructing that I was to be shown “everything.”