The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia

by Candace Fleming

  The following spring, after the snows had melted, the detective turned his attention to Koptyaki Forest. Not only had local peasants reported seeing men in the woods around the time of the murders, but deep ruts made by a truck still showed in the dirt path that ran through the woods. Following these tracks, Sokolov came to the mine shafts Yurovsky had scoped out the previous summer. Around the surface hole of the deepest one were hundreds of boot prints. Close by, he found evidence of two bonfires. Convinced he’d found the place where the bodies had been dumped, he ordered the water siphoned from the pit. He began to excavate.

  Helping with this grim job were Sydney Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard. Having rushed back to Ekaterinburg when the city fell, the men now offered to help identify anything Sokolov might find at the site.

  Among the dozens of objects discovered were a child’s military belt buckle identified by the tutors as belonging to Alexei; an emerald cross worn by Alexandra; the metal case Nicholas always carried his wife’s picture in; Dr. Botkin’s glasses and the upper plate of his dentures; shoe buckles like the kind worn by the grand duchesses; and remnants of six sets of corsets. There were also some bone fragments.

  But there were no bodies.

  This tragic evidence, however, convinced Sokolov that the entire family had been killed. Their bodies, he hypothesized, had been burned and dissolved with sulfuric acid, and the ashes tossed into the mine shaft.

  “But the children—the children!” cried Pierre Gilliard when he heard the detective’s verdict. They couldn’t all be dead, could they? “I could not believe it,” he said. “My whole being revolted at the idea.”

  I AM ANASTASIA … AND ALEXEI … AND MARIE

  Without bodies, rumors of escape swirled.

  Suddenly, the imperial family was spotted everywhere—in the Crimea, Japan, even America. But the most frequently sighted family members were Alexei, Anastasia, and Marie. Fascinated by tales of miraculous survival, the public claimed to have seen the youngest Romanovs in hospitals, prisons, peasant huts, and remote monasteries. One day, Anastasia was spied strolling down Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd; the next, she was glimpsed on a streetcar in Moscow.

  It wasn’t long before people began claiming to be the imperial children. The first Anastasia pretender appeared in Siberia in 1920, but was quickly exposed. Others stepped forward to take her place. Over the years, more than two hundred people, most saying they were Marie or Alexei, claimed they’d escaped the massacre in the cellar.

  But had they?

  Only time would tell.

  AFTER THE STORM

  After overthrowing their tsar, smashing two systems of government, and launching the country into what would be three years of civil war, had Russians improved their lives? Hardly. By 1920, the Bolsheviks—who had recently changed their official name to the Communist Party—were beginning to establish policies that would eventually oversee every aspect of a citizen’s daily life. Citizens became subject to “labor conscription”; that is, they had to work where, when, and at what the government told them. Factories came under the control of government managers, while in the countryside Red troops seized peasant crops and livestock at gunpoint. Shortages continued, and practically everything was rationed—food, clothing, even books and tobacco. In the cities, the government doled out food in canteens. Only those registered by the state to eat in these canteens were allowed to line up for a meal, if one could call it that. A ladleful of gruel was the usual fare. But even this meager meal was hard to come by. People spent hours each day searching for a meal, as well as the goods their ration coupons promised. Many came up empty-handed, their bellies still grumbling.

  Like food, fuel was also in short supply. To survive the freezing winters, city dwellers ripped up wooden houses and fences for firewood. They chopped down the trees in city parks and burned their own furniture and books. Electricity was rationed. In Petrograd, the city was divided into sectors. Because of the power shortage, each sector took its turn having its lights turned on in the evening. The rest of the time, citizens sat in the shadowy darkness of candles or homemade lamps. Streetlights didn’t work. Trams didn’t run. At times, the cities felt like ghost towns.

  “The houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries,” wrote one Petrograd citizen. “The people walked about [the city] like living corpses; the shortage[s] … slowly sapping [it]; grim death was clutching at its heart.”

  So bad did things become that in March 1921, thousands of sailors—once the most enthusiastic supporters of the Bolsheviks—openly rebelled against Communist authorities. Disillusioned by the treatment workers and peasants had received under Lenin’s dictatorship, they took to the streets, demanding freedoms the soviet government had taken away: free elections, free speech, freedom of the press, free trade unions, and freedom for the peasants to harvest their own land for their own benefit.

  Lenin refused to let anyone challenge soviet power. Moving the Red Army against the sailors, he launched a bloody attack lasting several days. When it was over, thousands of sailors lay dead; hundreds more were executed later.

  Always a realist, Lenin saw the rebellion as a sign of a sick society. And he began to wonder if the soviet victory had not in fact betrayed Marx’s vision of a classless utopia. Had he simply replaced the tsar’s autocracy with a government that was just as suppressive of the common people? Far from “withering away” as Marx had hoped, the soviet government had grown, extending a totalitarian control over every aspect of an individual’s life.

  Additionally, Lenin worried about who would succeed him when he died. Although he was just fifty-one years old, his health was waning; he suffered the first of three strokes in May 1922. Looking around at the soviet leadership, he was especially concerned about Joseph Stalin, a man who held the important post of general secretary of the Communist Party. In Stalin, Lenin saw a man whose thirst for power endangered everything for which Lenin had fought. “Comrade Stalin … has concentrated in his hands unbounded power,” Lenin warned, “and I am not sure whether he will always know how to use this power cautiously enough.”

  But Lenin died on January 21, 1924, and Stalin seized power. He immediately embarked on what he called a purge, eliminating all his old Bolshevik friends and rivals by exile, execution, or assassination. Now Soviet Russia would rest entirely in the hands of a man ruthlessly bent on making his country a global power—no matter what the cost in lives and freedom. For the next sixty-seven years, until communism fell in 1991, the Russian people would find themselves trapped, once again, by a totalitarian government—politically voiceless, and ruled by repression, fear, and iron-fisted control.

  BEYOND THE PALACE GATES:

  LIFE UNDER LENIN

  What was a typical day under Lenin’s rule like? In his diary, a Petrograd professor named Vasily Vodovozov describes one:

  3 DECEMBER 1920

  I shall describe my day—not because the minor details are of interest in themselves but because they are typical of the lives of nearly everyone—with the exception of a few bosses.

  Today I got up at 9 a.m. There is no point getting up before since it is dark and the house lights are not working. There is a shortage of fuel.… I drank some coffee (made from oats) without milk or sugar, of course, and ate a piece of bread from a loaf bought two weeks ago.… By eleven I was ready to go out. But after such a breakfast I was still hungry and decided to eat in the vegetarian canteen. It is frightfully expensive but the only place in Petrograd I know where I can eat … without registration or the permission of some commissar. It turned out the canteen was closed … so I went on to the Third Petrograd University, in fact now closed as a university but where there is still a cafeteria in which I am registered to eat.… But here too I had no luck: there was a long [line] of hopeful eaters, tedium and vexation written on their faces; the [line] was not moving at all.… Anyone reading this … may suppose that these people were expecting a banquet. But the whole meal was a single dish—usually
a thin soup with a potato or cabbage in it. There is no question of any meat. Only the privileged few ever get that—i.e., the people who work in the kitchen.… There was no choice but to go to work hungry.… By 2 p.m. I had reached [my workplace] by foot [the trams were typically not running for lack of fuel]. I stayed for half an hour and then went to the University, where there was supposed to be a ration of cabbage handed out at 3 p.m.… But again I was out of luck: it turned out that the cabbage had not been delivered and would be given out tomorrow. And not to professors but only to students. I also found out there would be no bread ration for a week: some people said that all the bread had already been given out to the Communists who run all the committees.… I went back to the vegetarian canteen with the hope of eating. Again out of luck: all the food was gone.… From there I went back home at 5 p.m. And there I had my first piece of luck of the day: the lights in our sector were switched on. That gave me one precious hour to read—the first hour of the day free from running around for meals, bread, or cabbage. At six I went to my [neighbors’] to eat (at last!), and came back to write these lines. At nine it went dark.… I lit a candle … drank tea … and at eleven went to bed.

  THE EARTH REVEALS ITS SECRETS

  In 1976, Ekaterinburg historian Alexander Avdonin and Moscow filmmaker Geli Ryabov went in search of the Romanov bodies. “We wanted to do this in order to restore one of the pages of our [Russian] history,” explained Avdonin. “We had to look for them.” Not only did the men scour archives and historical documents for clues to the bodies’ whereabouts, they scoured Koptyaki Forest, too. Three years later, in May 1979, they found what they were looking for—a shallow grave located just four and a half miles from the abandoned mine shaft that had been excavated so many years earlier. “It was frightening! It was frightening!” confessed Avdonin. “All my life I had searched for this.… And then, when we first started [digging], I thought to myself, ‘Let me find nothing.’ ”

  They unearthed nine skeletons.

  But the men were unable to tell anyone what they’d found. The family’s murder had long been a forbidden topic, the government clamping down on anyone who discussed the Romanovs. “We swore an oath,” recalled Avdonin, “that we would never talk about this until circumstances in our country changed.” So the men reburied their find. And waited.

  A decade passed, and the Communist hold in Russia crumbled. Finally, Avdonin and Ryabov’s secret could be revealed. In 1991, the Russian government officially opened the grave. Experts from America and Britain were called in to help with identification, and DNA tests were run on the skeletons. The results were conclusive. The remains were those of the Romanovs and their servants.

  In a poignant twist, this same series of tests also identified one of the grand duchesses as being a carrier of hemophilia. Unfortunately, while DNA testing could establish that a biologically related family consisting of a father, a mother, and three daughters had been found, it could not identify them more specifically. That is, it could not determine which bones belonged to which daughter. The name of the carrier remains a mystery.

  Another mystery also remained. Only five sets of Romanov skeletons had been found. Two remained missing. Scientists identified the missing family members as Alexei, and either Anastasia or Marie. This last discovery fueled speculation. Were the stories true? Had some of the children survived?

  FINAL RESTING PLACE

  Meanwhile, the Russian government wrestled with what to do with the remains. Most agreed they should be buried in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, where all tsars since Peter the Great had been buried. But there were some touchy issues to sort out first. Should the whole family be interred together? Traditionally, only the tsar and his wife were given tombs in the central part of the cathedral, while children were relegated to spots farther back. And what about the Romanovs’ loyal servants? Nonroyals had never been permitted burial in the cathedral before. Then there was the problem of the missing girl. Was she Anastasia or Marie?

  During DNA testing, a controversy had emerged. The Russian scientific team insisted the skeleton in their possession belonged to Anastasia, while the American team concluded it was Marie’s. “All the skeletons appear to be too tall to be Anastasia,” reported Dr. William Maples, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Florida. Besides, all the other female bones showed “completed growth.” But Anastasia was just seventeen at the time of the murders. Her bones would have still been growing. It was compelling evidence, but Russian scientists ignored it. The skeleton in their possession, they declared, belonged to Anastasia.

  On July 17, 1998—the eightieth anniversary of the murders—nine miniature coffins were carried into the chapel. Across the Neva River at the Winter Palace, flags flew at half-mast, and boughs of cypress adorned the bridge’s iron railings. Inside the cathedral, a choir chanted solemnly while incense from the priest’s censers curled toward the ceiling. The servants’ coffins were lowered into the vault first—Trupp, Kharitonov, Demidova, and Dr. Botkin. Next came the grand duchesses Olga and Tatiana, and one coffin said by the Russians to contain Anastasia’s remains. With music swelling, Alexandra’s casket joined her daughters’. Then, as Russia’s last tsar was laid to rest, the fortress fired a nineteen-round salute (reduced from the traditional twenty-one because Nicholas had died an abdicated tsar). Some of the Romanovs had finally come home. But where were the two missing children?

  FAMILY OF SAINTS

  At the same time, the Orthodox Church in Russia was wrestling with a question of its own: should the Romanovs be made saints? Church officials felt pressured to make a decision. Since communism’s fall, increasing numbers of Russians were making their way to Ekaterinburg to worship at the site of the Ipatiev house. Even though the structure had been torn down decades earlier, people still knelt on the barren ground, praying to the imperial family for help and guidance. This worship was aided by dozens of Romanov icons that were created when the Orthodox Church Outside of Russia canonized the family as saints a decade earlier.

  A separate branch of the Orthodox Church established by Russian emigrés sympathetic to the monarchy, the Orthodox Church Outside of Russia viewed Nicholas through a rosy lens. Largely ignoring his anti-Semitism, poor leadership, and brutal suppression of his subjects, church leaders focused on his piety and devotion to family. And they saw the family’s brutal murders as a sort of holy cleansing—the moment when the Romanovs transcended all their earthly flaws and became divine. For these reasons, the Orthodox Church Outside of Russia declared the family “martyred saints.” The highest designation of sainthood, martyred saints are those who have been killed specifically because of their faith, and refuse—even after torture and threat of death—to renounce that faith.

  But the Orthodox Church in Russia was not willing to simply accept this decision. Instead, in 1991, they formed their own commission to study the issue. Focusing their investigation on Nicholas’s reign, commission members looked closely at the events leading up to the revolutions. A year later, they concluded that neither Nicholas nor his family deserved sainthood. “His life, his actions … all of this is regarded by the Church and Society in a very ambivalent way,” explained one church leader.

  But the commission did not stop looking. Next they focused on the family’s days in captivity. Did they suffer piously without struggle? The Church believed they had. “[Nicholas] could have chosen a safe and … peaceful life abroad, but he did not do this, desiring to suffer along with Russia,” the commission wrote. “He did nothing to improve his situation, submissively resigning himself to fate.”

  While this statement stretched the truth—Nicholas had been eager to escape to England—it did allow the church a basis for sainthood. But it still wasn’t enough. So the commission began to look for evidence of miracles. Could the family be credited with any? Investigations turned up dozens of Russians claiming to have been cured of illnesses after praying at the Ipatiev house site. One person even asserted that Gr
and Duchess Marie had materialized with a cup of health-restoring tea! But most convincing of all were stories of an icon of Nicholas that many claimed seeped sweet-smelling myrrh whenever the faithful knelt before it.

  Given all this, the commission finally declared the family saints in 2000. But it did not designate them as martyred saints as had the Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Instead, it gave them the lowest designation of sainthood—“passion bearers”—persons who simply accept their fate piously and submissively. While the Orthodox Church in Russia did consider sainthood for Dr. Botkin and the other servants who died beside the Romanovs, they ultimately decided against it because, as the commission wrote, the four were simply “doing their moral duty by remaining with the Imperial Family.” It should be noted that the Orthodox Church Outside of Russia did canonize all four servants.

  At the Ipatiev house site a wooden cross was quickly erected until money could be raised to build a cathedral there. The Church on the Blood, as it is called, opened its doors just two years later. Meanwhile, close to the site where the bodies were found, the Monastery of the Holy Imperial Passion Bearers sprang up. In memory of the tsar and his family, the monks planted thousands of white lilies—a church symbol of resurrection. These days they sway in the summer breeze, perfuming the air with their thick scent. In front of these lilies stand seven wooden churches. Built in the Russian style, each with its own gold cupola and green roof, they are individual shrines, one for each of the now haloed Romanovs.