The Romanovs Read online

  Now Reds and Whites agreed that the entire Imperial family was dead. But to Sokolov’s description of the destruction of the bodies, Bykov added what seemed a minor editorial variation:

  Much has been said about the absence of corpses. But … the remains of the corpses, after being burned, were taken quite far away from the mines and buried in a swampy place, in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate. There the corpses remained and by now have rotted.

  In a single sentence, Bykov had offered five fresh clues: There were remains which had survived the fires; these remains had been buried; they had been buried “quite far away from the mines”; “in a swampy place”; “in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate.” In other words, something had been hidden, but it was nowhere near the Four Brothers site where Sokolov had searched.

  Bolshevism’s grip on Russia intensified, and the revolution appeared permanent. Famous cities were renamed after its heroes: St. Petersburg became Leningrad, Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad, Ekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk. Lesser men sought recognition of their revolutionary heroism in recording their personal participation in the massacre in the cellar. In 1920, Yakov Yurovsky gave the Soviet historian Michael Pokrovsky a detailed account of what he had done in Ekaterinburg in July 1918 “so history would know.” In 1927, he presented his two revolvers, the Colt and the Mauser, to the Museum of the Revolution on Red Square. Peter Ermakov, the local Ural commissar, sometimes challenged Yurovsky for “the honor of having executed the last tsar” and gave his revolver, also a Mauser, to the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution. In the early 1930s, near Sverdlovsk, Ermakov liked to appear before groups of boys gathered around campfires on summer nights. His enthusiasm fueled by a bottle of vodka, he would describe how he had killed the tsar. “I was twelve or thirteen,” recalled one of these listeners, a member of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Pioneer Camp in 1933. “He was presented to us as a hero. He was given flowers. I watched him with envy. He ended his lecture by saying, ‘I personally shot the tsar.’ ”

  Sometimes, Ermakov modified his story. In 1935, the journalist Richard Halliburton visited Ermakov, supposedly dying of throat cancer, in his Sverdlovsk apartment: “On a low, crude Russian bed … piled with red cotton quilts … a huge … fat man of fifty three [was] turning restlessly in his feverish efforts to breathe.… His mouth hung open and from one corner there was a trickle of blood.… Two bloodshot and delirious black eyes gleamed at me.” During a three-hour conversation, Ermakov admitted to Halliburton that it was Yurovsky who had killed Nicholas. His own victim, he said, was Alexandra: “I fired my Mauser at the tsarina—only six feet away—couldn’t miss. Got her in the mouth. In two seconds she was dead.”

  Ermakov’s account of the destruction of the bodies buttressed Sokolov’s assumptions: “We built a funeral pyre of cut logs big enough to hold the bodies, two layers deep. We poured five tins of gasoline over the corpses and two buckets of sulfuric acid and set the logs afire.… I stood by to see that not one fingernail or fragment of bone remained unconsumed.… We had to keep the fire burning a long time to burn up the skulls.” Ultimately, Ermakov said, “we didn’t leave the smallest pinch of ash on the ground.… I put the tins of ashes in the wagon again and ordered the driver to take me back toward the high road.… I pitched the ashes into the air—and the wind caught them like dust and carried them out across the woods and fields.” Back in New York, Halliburton published his interview as Ermakov’s deathbed confession; in Sverdlovsk, however, Ermakov arose from his red quilts and lived another seventeen years.

  In 1976, forty-one years after Halliburton’s book appeared, two journalists working for BBC Television asked new questions about the disappearance of the Romanovs. In their book The File on the Tsar, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold challenged Sokolov’s conclusion that, in two days, even with a plentiful supply of gasoline and sulfuric acid, the executioners had been able to destroy “more than half a ton of flesh and bone” and, as Ermakov had claimed, “[pitch] the ashes into the air.” Professor Francis Camps, a British Home Office forensic pathologist with thirty years’ experience, explained to the authors how difficult it was to burn a human body. Fires char bodies, he said, “and the charring itself prevents the rest of the body being destroyed.” Professional cremation, performed in closed, gas-fired ovens at temperatures up to two thousand degrees, can reduce a body to ashes, but this technique and equipment were not available in the Siberian forest. As for sulfuric acid, Dr. Edward Rich, an American expert from West Point, told the authors that with “eleven fully-grown or partly-grown bodies … merely pouring acid on them would not do too much damage other than disfigure the surface.”

  The most glaring forensic discrepancy in Sokolov’s findings, both the Home Office and the West Point experts agreed, was the total absence of human teeth. “Teeth are the only components of the human body which are virtually indestructible,” wrote Summers and Mangold. “If the eleven members of the Romanov household were really taken to the mine, there are about 350 missing teeth.” The West Point expert told them that he had once left several teeth completely immersed in a beaker of sulfuric acid, not for two days but for three weeks. They emerged as teeth.*

  During the Second World War, Sverdlovsk grew from a town to a large city. As the German Army rolled eastward across Russia and the Ukraine, whole factories and thousands of workers were moved behind the Urals. By the end of the war, Sverdlovsk produced tanks and battlefield Katyusha rockets. After the war, once the Soviet Union acquired the knowledge to build an atomic bomb, secret new towns, ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers, mushroomed near Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk to the south. Both of these cities and the entire region were declared off-limits to foreigners, and a generation grew up in the Urals without ever meeting anyone from another country. It was to probe the secrets of Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk that CIA pilot Gary Powers flew his U-2 spy plane over these cities in 1960.

  During these years, the Ipatiev House became a museum of the revolution, an antireligious museum, the home of the Council of Atheists Society, the Regional Party Archive, and the Rector’s Office of the Ural-Siberian Communist University. Pictures of Bolshevik leaders lined the walls; if they had been natives of the Urals, their hats, coats, and medals were displayed in glass cases. Posters and diagrams proclaimed the glories of Communism, showing how many more tractors, airplanes, tons of steel, and suits of underwear were made under Stalin than under the tsar. An upstairs room was devoted to the Romanovs. There were selections from Nicholas’s diary, pages of Alexis’s diary, and the front page of an Ekaterinburg newspaper with these headlines: EXECUTION OF NICHOLAS, THE BLOODY CROWNED MURDERER—SHOT WITHOUT BOURGEOIS FORMALITIES BUT IN ACCORDANCE WITH OUR NEW DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES. The cellar room was not part of the museum; piled to the ceiling with old packing cases, it became a storeroom.

  Visitors to the Ipatiev House, perforce Soviet citizens, stared at the pictures, posters, and diaries, and then shuffled out into the Square of the People’s Revenge. They displayed no particular sympathy for the Romanovs; the Imperial family was a part of history, condemned, its diaries placed in glass cases, no longer relevant. But the Party and the KGB never forgot. In 1977, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov convinced aging President Leonid Brezhnev that the Ipatiev House had become a site of pilgrimage for covert monarchists. An order flashed from the Kremlin to the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Region, a native Siberian named Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was commanded to destroy the Ipatiev House within three days. On the night of July 27, 1977, a giant ball wrecker accompanied by bulldozers arrived in front of the house. By morning, the building, reduced to bricks and stones, had been carried off to the city dump. Subsequently, although Brezhnev and Andropov gave the orders, Yeltsin was blamed for carrying them out. In his autobiography, Against the Grain, he accepted his share of responsibility: “I can well imagine that sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism.”

  * Although The File on the Tsar attra
cted wide attention, it also drew strong criticism onto itself and its authors. In part, this was because of its style, which breathlessly announced the discovery of “new evidence … deliberately suppressed at the time … [which] has lain hidden for nearly sixty years.” The villain in this thesis was Sokolov, who, the authors charged, “meticulously included all evidence that supported his premise that the entire family had been massacred at the Ipatiev House, but omitted evidence that hinted or stated categorically that something else had happened.” This “something else” was that the empress and her daughters had been taken to Perm, been imprisoned there from July to November, and then disappeared. Authority for this was a woman in Perm who had said, “In the poor candle light I could make out the former Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and her four daughters.… They slept on pallets on the floor without sheets or bedding. The weak light of a tallow candle was the only illumination.” Sokolov had read this statement, along with reports of numerous other Romanov “sightings,” during his investigation. He did not include it in his conclusions because he believed it to be false. But he did keep it in his papers. Summers and Mangold found it, not hidden or suppressed, in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

  When the book appeared, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was asked, “What about the Romanov rescue and those sensational documents?” Inimitably, the secretary replied, “That whole story is a lot of crap.” Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard, reviewing the book in The New York Times, was so indignant at Summers and Mangold’s claim to have discovered fresh evidence and so scornful of a claim of identification in Perm by “the weak light of a tallow candle,” that he applied Kissinger’s statement to the book as a whole.

  Nevertheless, the two authors did perform a service by asking questions of the Home Office’s Professor Camps and West Point’s Dr. Rich. One did not have to think Sokolov dishonest or believe in the woman in Perm to wonder what had happened to the bones and teeth, which are difficult to destroy with acid or fire.

  CHAPTER 3

  LET ME FIND NOTHING

  I had never imagined that I would find the remains of the Romanovs. I was not planning to get involved with this whole thing in any way. All of it somehow happened by itself.”

  Alexander Avdonin was speaking truthfully and, at the same time, telling only part of the truth. It is true that fifty years ago, when he set out on the journey that would lead to his remarkable historical discovery, he did not know where this journey would end. But the finding of nine skeletons in a shallow grave four and a half miles from the Four Brothers mine shaft did not happen by itself. It was a purposeful enterprise, carried out over many years, successful in spite of towering obstacles. It was a team effort, but the team was small, and Alexander Avdonin was its leader and motive force.

  Avdonin, now sixty-four, is an intense, silver-haired man of average height, with light blue eyes which gaze out through thick, steel-framed glasses. His tanned skin and sturdy, resilient body are not surprising: he was a geologist—he is now retired—and most of his life has been spent outdoors, tramping the meadowlands and forests near his native city. He was born and grew up in Ekaterinburg, then called Sverdlovsk. As an adolescent in school, he was drawn to the natural sciences—geology and biology—and also to the history and folklore of this rolling country east of the Urals. There were dark strands woven into this history: rumors that the floor of the forest was filled with the bodies of people shot by the Cheka; legends about the Romanovs; tales about the execution, about Sokolov, about pretenders reappearing. As a boy, Avdonin saw Ermakov walking about the town. Curious, young Avdonin went to the Ipatiev House, visited other museums, and read what he could about the Romanovs. “Whenever I heard anything, I would somehow accumulate it, just for my own knowledge, not for any other purpose. But as I collected information and documents, material evidence and other historical facts, my thoughts began to change. Our Soviet history was so restricted and boring that I began to think of restoring unknown spots in the history of our region, not for use at that time, but for the future.”

  Because the subject was forbidden, most of what Avdonin learned came by word of mouth. He spoke to a niece of one of the guards at the Ipatiev House, to the wife of a member of the Ural Soviet who had voted to shoot the Romanovs, to the son of one of the executioners, and to a reporter for the newspaper The Urals Worker who, as a teenager, had participated in Sokolov’s investigations. In 1919, this man, Gennady Lissine, had been one of twenty children and adolescents whom Sokolov gathered and brought to the woods at the Four Brothers. He lined them up six feet apart and sent them walking in a row through the woods, picking up everything they found. Near Ganin’s Pit, they found a button, the remains of a small scarf, and another rag. More important to Sokolov, they found nothing anywhere else; for this reason the investigator concentrated his work near Ganin’s Pit and the Open Shaft. In 1919, Lissine was fifteen; in 1964, when he was sixty, he took Avdonin to the Four Brothers and told him what he remembered about Sokolov and his work. Neither man had ever seen Sokolov’s book, which was banned. Avdonin read Bykov’s book, which said that there had been remains that had been burned, but not completely burned, and that had been taken some distance from the Four Brothers and buried in “a swampy place.”

  Over time, Alexander Avdonin became known in Sverdlovsk for his particular interest and knowledge, but his work was stymied. “It was not simple to gather information in the sixties and seventies,” Avdonin said, looking back from the vantage of the mid-1990s. “There were no tape recorders, it was all word of mouth. And people were afraid to talk.”

  Then, out of the blue, Avdonin found a powerful ally. Geli Ryabov was an important man in Moscow, a famous filmmaker and writer of detective thrillers. One of his films, a well-known ten-part series, The Birth of the Revolution, was about the MVD, the ordinary Soviet police, or militia, who handle nonpolitical crime (as opposed to the more sinister KGB, the Office of State Security, responsible for dealing with political dissent). In 1976, Ryabov came to Sverdlovsk to show his film. Out of “pure human curiosity,” he went to the Ipatiev House, then closed to visitors (and only a year away from destruction). He persuaded the police to let him in. He went down to the cellar room. When he came out, Ryabov remembered, “I decided that I must get involved with this story. I felt a moral obligation, a mission, that will stay with me until I die, to write about all that happened to those people.”

  Ryabov needed somewhere to start. He asked the local MVD chief whether anyone in the city knew anything about the Romanovs. He was told, “If anyone, Avdonin.” A year later, the two men were introduced. Avdonin’s first reaction was dismissive (he says “cautious”). He told Ryabov that it would be impossible to find anything; looking would be a waste of time; houses and a factory had been built over the places where everything had happened. In time, Avdonin—whose first reaction to newcomers remains a strained politeness—began to mellow. He said he found Ryabov “a very intelligent and interesting person. I liked him.”

  They talked at length about their motives: why should they look for the remains? “We both had only honorable goals,” Avdonin recalled. “We wanted to do this in order to restore one of the pages of our history. In principle, the question of the tsar’s remains should have been handled by the government. But the government had just knocked down the Ipatiev House. We thought it was possible that they would liquidate the remains as well. We didn’t know where they were, but we thought that if we didn’t find them, they could easily be destroyed. We decided that we had to look for them.”

  There was another consideration to be discussed. “This is very dangerous,” Avdonin told Ryabov. “If anyone finds out about this, if it reaches ‘the organs’ [the KGB], this will end up being very lamentable for me. I have a family and two sons. Ryabov told me that he worked for Sholokhov, the minister of internal affairs, and so, what do I have to worry about? ‘I will always cover for you,’ he said. So I said, ‘Under those conditions, let’s start. You supply me with mater
ials from the archives and I will search for the spot.’ ”

  Ryabov returned to Moscow and told Sholokhov that in order to continue writing his history of the Soviet militia, he needed greater access to secret archives for books, memoirs, and documents. Sholokhov wrote a letter of permission and “thereafter”—Ryabov smiled—“everything I needed was given to me.” One of the books acquired was Sokolov’s, which Ryabov brought, to Sverdlovsk. Avdonin took Ryabov to the Four Brothers mine shafts, which, according to Avdonin, made a tremendous impression on the filmmaker. Together, the two men found more objects—buttons, a coin, wires, glass, a bullet—which Avdonin gave to Ryabov. “We treated Ryabov with great respect, as an older person, a well-educated person, a writer,” Avdonin remembers.

  They went back and forth over the Sokolov and Bykov accounts. Bykov said that there had been remains and that they had been taken quite far from the Four Brothers site. Where had they been taken? Curiously, Nicholas Sokolov, whose book had firmly denied the existence of any remains, provided a clue. In it, there was a picture, taken during his 1919 investigation, of a simple platform or bridge made of fresh logs and railway ties laid over a muddy spot in the Koptyaki road. In the photograph, Sokolov himself is standing beside the bridge. His explanation for its existence was that on the night of July 18, two days after the executions, a truck left Ekaterinburg and went down the Koptyaki road. At 4:30 A.M. (by now it was July 19), this truck got stuck in the mud. The railroad operator at the small workstation where the road crossed the tracks said that men came to him, told him their truck was stuck, and asked for railroad ties to make a bridge across the mud. They made the bridge and the truck left; by 9:00 A.M., it was back in its garage in Ekaterinburg.