Yakov Yurovsky,
April–May 1922, Moscow
Despite Gueli Ryabov’s ministerial pedigree and Soviet-era filmmaker fame, the work he and ethnographer Alexander Avdonin have cut out for themselves is highly sensitive, even dangerous. And it is conducted secretly, by the crudest of means. First, they use a sniper-rifle telescope (small enough to conceal in a coat pocket so as to minimize attention) to calculate the coordinates of the presumed location of the Romanov mass grave site. (The area of the abandoned mine is little changed from decades ago—a wooden fence still surrounds the mine shaft.) Next the stealthy crew begins probing the earth with a metal pipe until their sod soundings finally reach a blackened portion of earth in the terra-firma test tube. Avdonin and the other scientists immediately recognize this as organic matter that has been exposed to sulfuric acid. Then they excavate farther to see what will emerge. What the illegal team discovers is a wicked, blackened time capsule created by Comrade Yurovsky. First, a pelvis; next a couple of skulls. Forensic testing will eventually determine that these were once the heads of the Czar Nikolai II and Czarina Alexandra, while the pelvis belonged to the czar.
Ryabov takes the bones back to Moscow.
The year 1979 in the USSR under Comrade Brezhnev was not exactly the time to lug a couple of skulls into a lab for analysis, and especially not skulls belonging to the czar and czarina. But Ryabov manages to make molds of the skulls for the sake of history. A year later, Ryabov returns to Yekaterinburg so that he and Avdonin can reinter the bones in the original (that is, second) mass Romanov grave.
A decade passes, and it is now 1989 and the era of Gorbachev, Perestroika, and Glasnost. Ryabov, ever the showman, wants to go public. Avdonin, the empiricist, the academic, thinks it is too early. The former trumps the latter and gives a series of newspaper articles and a long interview to Soviet television, replete with details about the Romanov mass grave, but he deliberately gives false coordinates that are off by about five hundred yards from the real burial site.
The trickery is fortuitous, because within days of Ryabov’s media circus, earthmoving equipment suddenly arrives at the announced location to dig enormous holes and pile the excavated earth into huge trucks, which are driven off to an unknown destination. Even if that destination might have been a top-secret forensics lab, one can only imagine the befuddlement of those tasked with finding the remains of the last czar and his family in the small mountain of late-Soviet dirt and rock. (Because that is precisely what their sifting yields, dirt and rock and nothing more.) Ironically, it would be only in early 1991—just months before the demise of the Soviet Empire—that the Kremlin would come up with the funds to begin the “official” exhumation of the Romanovs.
IT IS NOW less than forty-eight hours before the bones are to be put in caskets and moved to St. Petersburg, and I make my way back to the morgue again. Coroner Nivolin stands outside, feigning interest as he fields stock questions from journalists from everywhere: Moscow, Japan, Germany, Greece, England, and of course the gaggle of wannabe Romanov royalist hacks from my homeland, the United States. Since when did we become czarists? Is it the lingering fascination with events whose details are now being discovered eighty years later, two dead empires later, the Russian and now Soviet?
Nivolin looks on in barely disguised disgust as conscript soldiers hurriedly drive steamrollers to and fro, laying asphalt along the pitted road leading to his morgue. Another unit practices carrying mock coffins along the side of the same road.
“They can’t rehearse and lay asphalt at the same time, so they have to take turns,” he cynically tells me. “They killed him [the czar] in an inhuman way, and now he’s being buried in an inhuman way.”
The night before the transfer of the remains to St. Petersburg, the deceivingly soft-spoken but always determined Reuters TV producer Nino Ivanishvili manages to coax exclusive TV pictures out of one government official connected to the forensic investigation. The footage reveals that some of the bones from the czar’s entourage have been kept in a cardboard box used to ship a computer printer. In exchange for the TV pictures, shot on an amateur camera, the uniformed man nervously agrees on five hundred dollars as his price for “sharing” such information, muttering a comment to Nino about supposedly using the money to buy embroidered cloths to cover some of the coffins.
The appointed time arrives and the coffins are carried out, one by one. The poorly rehearsed soldiers tilt the czarina’s coffin into a precarious position, nearly dropping it, which elicits gasps. The czar’s funerary motorcade makes its way to Yekaterinburg’s main cathedral. The crowd is relatively small, and includes the man who took the five hundred bucks for the pictures of the bones being unpacked from the cardboard box. Tears slowly well up in his eyes. Then the Yekaterinburg duties are done, and it is time to move on to St. Petersburg.
There, things go far more smoothly. Boris Yeltsin decides to attend the reburial and delivers an eloquent speech about repentance and the need to close the door on a “bloody century.”
For some of those watching, it might have seemed like bookending the birth and death of the Soviet Empire. Myself, I find succor in remembering Coroner Nivolin’s words: “He [the czar] was killed in an inhuman way, and now he is being buried in an inhuman way.…”
But gradually the prevarications cease. The bones are finally universally acknowledged as his, and with that, reflection and closure finally becomes a possibility.…
A KGB CHURCH AND LATTER-DAY SAINTS
It is a late-winter evening, 2002, and Russia’s patriarch, His Holiness Alexius II, stands in front of the assemblage of icons (iconostasis). Drifting into what for most Russians is the semicomprehensible Old Church Slavonic, he leads a prayer consecrating a small cathedral in central Moscow. It has just reopened after being closed during the Soviet era and used as a warehouse.
Consecrations keep His Holiness Alexius II very busy these days. There are many churches reopening, or being newly built, to accommodate the resurgence of Orthodoxy, or at least the practice of attending services.
But this is no ordinary cathedral. After the sanctification rites are delivered for the Church of Sophia the Divine Wisdom, men dressed in long dark overcoats join His Holiness in front of the iconostasis for a photograph. They are high-ranking members of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the renamed version of the Soviet KGB, which is itself the renamed version of Stalin’s NKVD, which grew out of Lenin’s Chekha, or Bolshevik Party enforcers. Among the men posing with the patriarch is the chief of the ex-KGB, Nikolai Patrushev. His Holiness and the KGB chief exchange gifts.
Was the organization that did the grunt work for the party—carrying out purges, killing millions with a shot to the back of the head, littering the country with mass graves—finding God?
Perhaps, but His Holiness the Patriarch makes it clear that even if there is an element of repentance, there is also something else: He says he hopes that the Church of Sophia the Divine Wisdom will help Russia’s intelligence services “carry out the difficult work of ensuring the country’s security in the face of external and internal ill-wishers, if not enemies.” A partnership, in other words. The Kremlin will support the church. The church will support the Kremlin. If this is not clear enough, a plaque is placed at the entrance to St. Sophia:
THE CHURCH OF SOPHIA THE DIVINE WISDOM WAS RE-CREATED UPON THE BLESSING OF THE PATRIARCH OF MOSCOW AND ALL RUSSIA AND BY THE ZEAL OF THE FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE
Regardless of the fact that the Soviet state repressed religion and infiltrated the clergy with informers, there is now a new motivation for a church-state union: Unhealthy “sects” are making inroads into Russia all too quickly. The month after St. Sophia’s sanctification, the heads of Russia’s four Catholic dioceses—all foreigners—were effectively deported when they appeared on an FSB blacklist: Russia’s intelligence services even hinted that one was a “spy.” At about the same time, the late Pope John Paul II hosted a live closed-circuit television hookup between t
he Vatican and worshippers in one of Moscow’s few Catholic churches. (Following the split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy a millennium ago, popes have not been welcome in Russia, or Rus’—the pre-Russian former Slavic incarnations that included present-day Ukraine and Belarus, among other lands.) The metropolitan of Moscow, Kirill (later to become Russia’s patriarch), lambasted the electronic event and even compared it to a sixteenth-century Polish Catholic invasion of Russia.
Yet what if this new devotion on the part of the security services to somehow atone is sincere, and what if some of the post-Soviet spooks have truly turned toward God?
A GOOD PLACE to start was to attend services at Sophia the Divine. The problem of finding it was solved by a quick stop at the once notorious FSB/KGB headquarters known as Lubyanka. My National Public Radio producer, Irina, doesn’t like this at all. Anything dealing with the security services or the church gives her the creeps, she says. It’s a freezing early Sunday morning and no one is out front, so we go around to the back of the Lubyanka and find a couple of sleepy guards. I bang on a heavy glass door.
“Hey!” Irina says, turning pale. “People just don’t bang on the door of the KGB!”
But our sheer audacity seems to do the trick. One of the sentries even picks up an internal phone and gets us directions to the Church of Sophia the Divine Wisdom.
Tucked behind a Metro station and a gaggle of other buildings, the seventeenth-century edifice is smallish, almost miniature in size, requiring taller Congregationalists (like me) to duck slightly upon entering. Unlike a typical Orthodox church, with its odor of decades of melted candle wax and censer smoke wafting around the icons, the Divine Wisdom smells like the interior of a new car. The walls are a bright yellow; the iconostasis is glitteringly new, tarnish-free, polished to a high gloss.
The gathering on this morning is tiny—perhaps twenty, ourselves included. The priest enters, smoke lingering as he slowly waves the mysterious box filled with burning embers to and fro. Most of the worshippers are older—there are a roughly equal number of women and men. Are there KGB officers in attendance? I cannot tell.
The next stop on my quest is the Russian parliament, or Duma, where I run down the ex-head of the now-renamed KGB, Nikolai Kovalyov, in between sessions. A twenty-seven-year veteran of the “organs,” Kovalyov rose all the way to the top of the security service in 1996, until being replaced by none other than Vladimir Putin two years later.
If I expect to catch him off guard with my question about the idea of the former KGB—which persecuted religion, or persecuted the religious, for so many years as the Marxist-defined “opiate of the people”—and now promoting the Orthodox Church as being somehow disingenuous, I am mistaken. Kovalyov’s eyes light up with delight at my question, and the ex-head of the former KGB beamingly tells me that he was always a secret believer.
Kovalyov says that when he was growing up in then Soviet Russia, he kept a small icon in his room. The ex-FSB chief delcares to me that he had always felt Christ in his heart.
Mikhail Grishankov is another Duma member with a KGB connection who now claims a unique bond to the Orthodox Church. “I came to be a believer because I realized I couldn’t live any other way. God gives my life meaning,” he tells me. Over the years I interviewed Grishankov frequently, and the fact that he had essentially converted to being observant, and did not pretend to always have been a fervent “secret believer,” convinces me that he is probably being honest.
Another KGB man, Lieutenant Valery Ovchinnikov, wears a gold cross, four years after being baptized. Ovchinnikov tells me that he thinks many KGB men turned to Christianity because of their brutal experiences in Chechnya. I find this plausible. If Chechens can be driven to more religiosity—or even radical Islam—because of their horrific war experiences, why can’t Russian intelligence agents?
It is time to contact the current FSB leadership to find out about current operatives embracing Jesus. I make the requisite calls to the FSB headquarters to secure an interview but am told that all questions must be in writing and submitted by fax. A secretary tells us the FSB’s fax machine is broken, and it takes several days before the almighty FSB replaces it. Finally I submit my questions. I wait weeks for the answers, until I get a call from the once-dreaded Lubyanka to answer my questions about religion and the heart of the intelligence man.
“It is impossible to deny that certain mistakes were made in the past involving the relationship between the church and the state …,” laconically reads the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone, answering one of my questions. “A moral backbone [sterzhen’] is desirable to instill an ethical set of values indispensable for the work of individuals involved in issues of national and international security” is the response to another.
• • •
AND HOW DOES the church take the new alliance with its former persecutors? I decided to ask Father Divakov of the Moscow Patriarchate. A bespectacled, intense clergyman, he reacted sharply to my query about KGB sincerity.
“The Apostle Paul persecuted the early Christians,” he seethed, his forehead burrowing as if to cast a spell.… “But that did not prevent Paul from becoming an apostle after he turned to Christ! The church does not cut itself off from anyone who is willing to repent.”
Father Divakov’s reaction made clear that the conversation was over. And in a way it would be hypocritical to judge him, or at least some of the FSB (former KGB) men. Among Americans, how many recovering something-aholics, scandal-plagued politicians, hedonists, violent convicts, or other wayward souls have tried to ease the acceptance of their transgressions by declaring a lightning embrace of the faith?
SO THE FORMER KGB had its new church.
But many still needed a new icon. Not just of the painted variety, like the ones on the walls at Sophia the Divine. A flesh-and-blood symbol of good versus evil. And they would find him, or his remains, in a small town about an hour outside of Moscow.
THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR asked me, ‘What are you carrying in that bag?’ ” said Lyubov Radionova.
It was a security measure, a typical passenger check. Perhaps the woman holding the bag held it so tightly that she evoked suspicion. Suicide bombers have blown up Russian trains, after all.
“I told the train conductor, my son’s head is in this bag. She looked at me as if I was crazy.”
She was not crazy.
The woman indeed carried the head of her son in that cotton-sewn bag. The route was Chechnya-Moscow and then a suburban train home to tiny Kurilovo, an hour from Moscow.
She held it and held it.
Her son’s name was Yevgeny (Zhenya) Radionov. He was one of thousands of Russian soldiers to die during the brutal Chechen wars; in a way his fate was seemingly little different from many others, his modest goal being to become a cook after army service. Nineteen years old, he was captured by the Chechen fighters and held for a hundred days, likely as prisoner exchange material or for ransom money. And then executed.
I am sitting with his mother, Lyubov, a woman whose eyes convey exhaustion and despair. In her tiny apartment there is a mini-shrine to her son, Zhenya. There are photos of him in uniform that are indeed iconlike, his bulky frame and boyish face recast in the mystical iconic fashion, a halo above his head.
The late Zhenya’s mother, Lyubov, then tells every detail: how a telegram came saying Zhenya had deserted his post. Lyubov did not believe it. “Zhenya wasn’t capable of it,” she tells me. Like the mothers of many missing Russian soldiers in Chechnya, she sets off for Chechnya, eventually finding the patrol post from where he supposedly “deserted.” Locals there confirm the military lied; there had been a battle, and Zhenya and two other conscripts were captured by Chechen fighters after a firefight. Lyubov goes on a crusade, traveling throughout the republic and even meeting top commanders, now dead, like Aslan Maskhadov and Shamyl Basayev. Over a dozen trips in all, until the right contact is made.
A Chechen field commander, Ruslan Haihoroev, confirms it to Lyubov
: He even says he personally executed Zhenya Radionov on his nineteenth birthday. The commander tells Lyubov Radionova that her son was given a choice: He could convert to Islam and join the Chechen resistance. He refused, and, moreover, refused to remove the small silver cross he always wore.
“I begged him to tell me that it wasn’t true, that he had a chance to live and preferred to die,” Lyubov says. “But even the Chechen commander confessed to me that he considered Zhenya had died with great dignity, a real man.”
In exchange for four thousand dollars, the commander disclosed the exact site of Zhenya’s grave. Lyubov and several helpers, also Russian conscripts, began digging with their hands. There was the body, decapitated, supposedly as added treatment for refusing to take off the cross, which through the clumps of dirt still hung there around what was left of Zhenya’s neck. The headless body was spirited back to Moscow. Lyubov returned yet again to the Chechen commander, who gave her the bag of skull fragments. Zhenya had not only been decapitated with a rusty saw; his head had been smashed, part of a Chechen belief that if a victim is decapitated, his spirit will not come back for revenge after death.
An elaborate grave was constructed, and the story spread from tiny Kurilovo across Russia like wildfire, becoming especially popular with nationalist groups. Russian military commanders took their troops on pilgrimages to the gravesite. Songs were written about the boy saint. “Zhenya never took the cross off …,” go the lyrics.
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