The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  This proposal shocked Maria’s cousins, the numerous Romanov princes and princesses led by Prince Nicholas Romanov, head of the Romanov Family Association, who lives in Switzerland. Their view was that all of the remains should be left in Ekaterinburg and buried together. “It would be a crime to split them up,” said Prince Rostislav Romanov, a London investment banker who is a grandnephew of Nicholas II. “They died together and they should be buried together. It would be intolerable for the commission and the government to start rejecting these people as unimportant. Further, it makes sense to leave them in Ekaterinburg. If you’re going to canonize them in martyrdom, why not bury them where they were martyred? If you bury them in St. Petersburg with the other tsars, you’re pretending that nothing ever happened. Besides, you could make an awfully good argument that the future of Russia lies in the east, so it would be symbolic.”

  Prince Nicholas Romanov, the head of the family, passionately insisted that the remains not be divided. “I have written twice to the patriarch,” he said. “I have spoken to government ministers, and I’ve said it in public on Russian television: we Romanovs want everybody, every victim of that massacre, to be buried together, in the same place, in the same cathedral, and, I’d say, in the same tomb. You want to bury the tsar in the Peter and Paul Fortress cathedral? Good! Then bury the doctor, the maid, and the cook with them, in the tsar’s mausoleum. They have been lying together for seventy-three years. They are the only ones who never betrayed the family. They deserve to be honored at the same time, in the same place. If present-day Russians don’t understand this, then, even if some Romanovs go to this funeral, I will not.”

  Nikolai Nevolin, the forensic specialist who for almost four years kept watch over the remains in the Ekaterinburg morgue, still hoped that they would be buried in his city. “The Romanovs were executed here and our city would like to have some sort of memorial. But there are two other cities in our country, Moscow and St. Petersburg, who during the seventy-four years of the Soviet regime have always pulled all the blankets on top of themselves. Now, they are trying to take everything again.” When Nevolin was told that most of the surviving members of the Romanov family believed the remains should be buried in Ekaterinburg, he was astonished. “I didn’t know this,” he said. “If this were to happen here, I would be so beholden I cannot even begin to express it. You know, I was born here in the Urals. I am a patriot of my region.”

  Boris Yeltsin also was born in the Urals, but he has moved onto a wider stage, where his fragile presidency needs all the buttressing it can get. Politically, the support of Anatoly Sobchak is essential to Yeltsin, and Sobchak has set his heart on burying the remains in St. Petersburg. The likeliest possibility, therefore, is that Yeltsin will remain in the background until the commission makes its recommendations and then will ratify whatever site the commission recommends. Once this is done, however, Yeltsin will place himself at the center of the Russian politicians and church officials, and the visiting royal and other persons attending the burial.

  Three dates for the burial were chosen and then discarded. Originally, the ceremony was scheduled for May 18, 1994, Nicholas’s birthday, which, coming ten months after Doctors Gill and Ivanov had verified the bones at Aldermaston, seemed sufficient time to make arrangements. Then, in April 1994, the Moscow Patriarchal Church demanded additional research, including the exhumation of Grand Duke George. The date slid back to July 3, 1994. When that day arrived with George still unmolested in his tomb, the burial was rescheduled again, this time for March 5, 1995. This new date was religiously appropriate: in the Russian Orthodox calendar it was the pre-Lenten Day of Repentance; by burying the tsar and his family on that day, the Russian government, the church, and the people could ask forgiveness, not only for the killing of the Imperial family but for the murder of millions of others since 1918. This kind of public repentance, a nationwide exorcism of historical guilt, was the kind of ceremony over which President Yeltsin might wish to preside. In November 1994, that date was canceled. No new date has been set.

  The years went by, and Alexander Avdonin waited. While the scientists argued, the commission pondered, the church leaders demanded additional proof, and the emigres hurled accusations, the earthly remains of the last Russian emperor, his wife, three of his daughters, and four faithful Russian followers continued to lie on metal tables in a little room on the second floor of a morgue in Ekaterinburg. Avdonin cannot understand why this is permitted. “This family was slandered while they lived, then horribly murdered,” he said. “For many years they lay in a pit where cars drove over them. Now they have been brought out. The discovery has tremendous historical meaning. These remains should be the source of unification of our people, who were split by the revolution. But they still cause division. These remains could unite the churches—our church and the church abroad—but they do not. They could unite the scientists, but, again, nothing is working out. People abroad do not believe—Koltypin, and Scherbatow and Magerovsky—they foment various kinds of disinformation and distortion. This is not the way it should be.”

  Since the exhumation, Avdonin has tried to set aside as a memorial site the place where the bones were discovered. His small foundation, Obretenye, is dedicated to acquiring the land from the local authorities and then creating a park and a monument. He wants to erect a stone cross, a memorial plaque, and, eventually, when there is money, a chapel. “You understand, their blood and bodies are still right here, part of the soil,” he said. He turned and pointed to a place of tossed garbage, churned mud, and pools of dark water.

  Tsar Alexander III died of nephritis in November 1894 in the Crimea at the age of forty-nine. As his funeral train rolled north across the Ukraine and Russia, peasants gathered and removed their hats along the track. In the cities of Kharkov, Kursk, Orel, and Tula, the train halted for religious services. In Moscow, the coffin was transferred to a hearse to be carried to the Kremlin. Low clouds whipped across a gray November sky, and splinters of sleet bit into the faces of Muscovites who lined the streets to watch the cortege. Ten times before reaching the Kremlin, the procession stopped and litanies were sung from the steps of ten churches. In St. Petersburg, red-and-gold court carriages draped in black waited at the station for the body and the family. For four hours, the cortege advanced slowly across the city to the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, where the Romanov tsars and empresses were buried. Throughout the city, the only sounds were the beat of muffled drums, the clatter of hooves, the rumble of iron carriage wheels, and the tolling of bells. Sixty-one royal personages, including three kings, arrived to join the family mourners. The ministers of the Imperial government, the commanders of the Russian army and navy, the provincial governors, and 460 delegates from cities and towns across Russia came to pay their respects. For seventeen days, the body of the emperor lay exposed in its coffin while tens of thousands of people shuffled past. On November 19, 1894, the tsar was interred.

  One week later, briefly setting aside the atmosphere of mourning and without a reception or a honeymoon, the new, twenty-six-year-old Tsar Nicholas II married his twenty-two-year-old German fiancée, Alexandra Feodorovna.

  Here comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as they could foot it … One of these fellows was about seventy or upwards and had a bald head and very grey whiskers. He had an old battered-up slouch hat on, and a greasy blue woolen shirt, and ragged old blue jeans.… The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about as ornery. After breakfast we all laid off and talked, and the first thing that comes out is that these chaps didn’t know one another.…

  Nobody never said anything for awhile; then the young man hove a sigh and says, … “Ah, you would not believe me; the world never believes—let it pass—’tis no matter. The secret of my birth … Gentlemen,” says the young man, very solemn, “I will reveal it to you, for I feel I may have confidence in you. By rights I am a duke!”

  Jim’s eyes bugged out when he heard that; and I reckon mine did, too.


  “Yes, my great-grandfather, eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater, fled to this country about the end of the last century, to breathe the pure air of freedom; married here and died, leaving a son, his own father dying about the same time. The second son of the late duke seized the titles and estates—the infant real duke was ignored. I am the lineal descendant of that infant—I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater; and here I am, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised by the cold world, ragged, worn, heartbroken, and degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft.”

  Jim pitied him ever so much and so did I. We tried to comfort him.… He said we ought to bow when we spoke to him, and say “Your Grace,” or “My Lord,” or “Your Lordship.…” Well, that was easy so we done it.… But the old man got pretty silent by and by.… So, along in the afternoon, he says, “Looky here, Bilgewater.… I’m sorry for you, but you ain’t the only person that’s had troubles like that.”

  “No?”

  “No, you ain’t the only person that’s had a secret of his birth.… Bilgewater, kin I trust you?… Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin.… Yes, my friend, it is too true—your eyes is lookin’ at this very moment on the poor disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.… Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France.”

  … He said it often made him feel easier and better for awhile if people … got down on one knee to speak to him, and always called him “Your Majesty” and waited on him first at meals, and didn’t sit down in his presence till he asked them.… So Jim and me set to majestying him.… This done him heaps of good, and so he got cheerful and comfortable. But the duke kind of soured on him.…

  Mark Twain, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

  CHAPTER 13

  THE IMPOSTORS

  The mysterious disappearance of the Russian Imperial family in July 1918 created fertile soil for the sprouting of delusion, fabrication, sham, romance, burlesque, travesty, and humbug. Since then, a long, occasionally colorful, frequently pathetic line of claimants and impostors has glided and stumbled across the century. Their stories have a common beginning: among the executioners in Ekaterinburg there allegedly existed a man, or men, of compassion—even Yurovsky was assigned this role—who secretly helped one Romanov, or two, or perhaps the entire family to escape. A recurring motive in many of these impostures was the belief that Tsar Nicholas II left a fortune behind in a foreign bank. As for delusion, who would not choose being a grand duke to real life as a gulag prisoner, a horse trainer, or even a famous spy? And being treated as a grand duchess must be preferable to being a factory worker or a milliner. Public support, naturally, is essential to these masquerades. For many years, a charming fellow adorned the society of Scottsdale, Arizona, wearing the name of Alexis Nicholaevich Romanov. When a Phoenix newspaperman was asked whether people in Scottsdale really believed that the man sitting next to them at dinner was the tsarevich, the newspaperman replied, “They wanted to. They wanted to.”

  These legends originated in and were nourished by the “disinformation” spoken, published, and broadcast by Lenin’s government: Nicholas had been killed, but his wife and children were safe; Alexis had been executed along with his father; the Kremlin did not know where the women were—they were missing in the chaos of the civil war; the Soviet foreign minister supposed that the daughters were in America. This stream of disinformation continued until, as Investigator Soloviev noted, the regime felt itself secure enough to boast that everyone, children included, had been simultaneously murdered. Given the constant alterations and amendments to its tales, few outside the Soviet Union believed anything the Soviet government said.

  Sokolov’s investigation, not finding the bodies, further opened the door to doubt. Some accepted without question his belief that eleven people had been killed and their bodies totally destroyed. Others accepted his findings but had reservations. Still others rejected Sokolov absolutely. White Russian emigres and Western newspapers passed back and forth rumors that the murders had been a hoax. In 1920, the tsar was said to have been seen in the streets of London, his hair snow white. Another story placed him in Rome, hidden in the Vatican by the pope. The entire Imperial family was said to be aboard a ship cruising eternally through the waters of the White Sea, never touching land.

  The confusion over the death of the Imperial family, and the multitude of contradictory stories in the Soviet Union and the West, made almost inevitable what happened next. Over the years, dozens of claimants stepped forward, presenting themselves as this or that member of the Imperial family. Nicholas and Alexandra did not reappear (although in one version, they were reported to have escaped to Poland), but all of the five children appeared in different times and places. The Soviet Union (now Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States) produced the largest assemblage:

  A young woman claiming to be Anastasia, whose documents named her as Nadezhda Ivanova Vasilyeva, appeared in Siberia in 1920, trying to make her way to China. She was arrested and shuttled between prisons in Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, Leningrad, and, finally, an island gulag in the White Sea. In 1934, she was dispatched to a prison hospital in Kazan, from where she wrote letters in French and German to King George V (“Uncle George”) pleading for help. For a brief period in the hospital, she changed her story and said that she was the daughter of a Riga merchant. She died in an asylum in 1971, but, according to the head of the Kazan hospital, “except for her claim that she was Anastasia, she was completely sane.”

  Not long ago, Edvard Radzinsky traveled “one day by train, one day by bus, one day by horse” to a remote village in the Urals which believed that it had given refuge in 1919 to the tsar’s two youngest daughters, Marie and Anastasia. The grand duchesses, Radzinsky was told, had lived together as nuns “in terrible poverty, afraid every day,” sheltered by the local priest, until they died, both in 1964. The villagers showed Radzinsky the tombstones inscribed “Marie Nicholaevna” and “Anastasia Nicholaevna.” Radzinsky himself gave some credence to a story he was told about a former gulag prisoner named Filipp Grigorievich Semyonov, who claimed to have been the Tsarevich Alexis. Described as “a rather tall man, somewhat stout, sloping shoulders, slightly round-shouldered … a long, pale face, blue or grey slightly bulging eyes, a high forehead,” Semyonov had served in the Red Army as a cavalryman, studied economics in Baku, and worked as an economist in Central Asia. In 1949, he turned up in a psychiatric hospital where he was classified as an “acute psychotic.” Questioned by Soviet doctors, the patient knew more about the names and titles of the Imperial family, the Imperial palaces, and court protocol and ceremonies than his interrogators. He also had a cryptorchidism (one undescended testicle), which the examining physician said he had been told was the case with the tsarevich. His hemophilia, apparently untroublesome during his years in the Red cavalry, “returned,” Radzinsky said, “two months before his death.”

  The Semyonov story attracted the attention of Vladimir Soloviev and the Office of the Public Prosecutor. “Semyonov was a puzzling, very doubtful person,” Soloviev said. “He was arrested during the war. Men leaving for the front were given money, and he stole that money, one hundred thousand rubles. He was sentenced to death, and then he remembered that he was the tsarevich. They sent him to a mental hospital, and that is how he avoided the death penalty. He wound up as a worker in the morgue, the lowest position, carrying corpses.” Radzinsky possessed a photograph of Semyonov, which, in the playwright’s view, bore a similarity to the thirteen-year-old tsarevich. In the opinion of others, there was no resemblance.

  Alexander Avdonin had several large files filled with letters and photographs sent by the “children” and then the “grandchildren” of Nicholas II. Turning through them, he said, “Here is Alexis and here is his daughter.… This is Marie Nicholaevna.… Here is the daughter of Olga Nicholaevna; she is one of two daughters of
Olga.… There is Anastasia … there is the daughter of Anastasia … and there is the grandson of Anastasia.… Here is another Anastasia.” Avdonin did not mock these people; because they wrote to him mostly pitiable letters, he was sympathetic. “I wish that we could afford to do blood testing or DNA testing on all of them,” he said. “So that they would know who they are. And who they are not.”

  In Europe, other claimants appeared. A woman named Marga Boodts, living in a villa on Lake Como in Italy, declared that she was the tsar’s oldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga; the money supporting her was said to come from the pope and the former kaiser.

  Another daughter, Grand Duchess Tatiana, was reported to have been rescued from Siberia by British agents in an airplane and flown to Vladivostok, then carried across the Pacific to Canada in a Japanese battleship, then escorted across Canada and across the Atlantic to England, arriving one month after the executions in Ekaterinburg. A different story depicts Tatiana as a belly dancer and prostitute in Constantinople, from which plight she was rescued by a British officer who married her. This woman, Larissa Feodorovna Tudor, died in 1927 and is buried in a graveyard in Kent.

  The tsar’s third daughter, Marie, is said to have escaped to Rumania, where she married and bore a child named Olga-Beata. Olga-Beata, in turn, had a son, who lived in Madrid as Prince Alexis d’Anjou de Bourbon-Condé Romanov-Dolgoruky. In 1994, the prince proclaimed himself “His Imperial and Royal Highness, Hereditary Grand Duke and Tsarevich of Russia, King of Ukraine, and Grand Duke of Kiev.” In 1971, the Dolgoruky family and the Association of Descendants of the Russian Nobility of Belgium brought an action in a Belgian court against “Prince Alexis,” charging that he was in fact a Belgian citizen named Alex Brimeyer. The court sentenced Brimeyer-Dolgoruky-Romanov to eighteen months in jail. In 1995, he died in Spain.