The Romanovs Read online

  During the conference, after Maples announced his conclusion that Anastasia was the missing daughter, Abramov came up to him and advised him not to pass this opinion around when he returned to America. “I did this to protect him,” Abramov explained. “He had spent three days with the bones. We had spent a year with them. For his sake, I would not have liked it to turn out that we were right and he was wrong.” Unbeknownst to Abramov, of course, Maples already planned to tell the press conference at the end of the meeting in Ekaterinburg that he believed the missing grand duchess was Anastasia.

  One year later, in July 1993, Maples came back to Ekaterinburg to be filmed examining the bones by Nova, the PBS television science program. On his way home, he stopped briefly in Moscow and for the first time called on Abramov in his office. “Dr. Maples was exhausted,” Abramov said. “He had gotten up at 4:00 A.M. in Ekaterinburg to fly to Moscow. He had his television people with him; they were taking pictures of us shaking hands and being friendly.” Maples explained to Abramov that his technique of examining and measuring bones proved to him that none of the young female skeletons could be a seventeen-year-old. “Then it turned out,” Abramov said, “that he and I were not measuring the same bones. We measured the hip and the femur; he measured the bones of the forearm, the ulna, and the radius, which are a much less accurate indication of height. ‘But,’ Maples said to me, ‘you sawed the femur in half.’ I said, ‘No, we did not do that. Someone else did. But we measured the femur before it was cut. And, frankly, we did not expect any other experts would be coming.’ ”

  During that conversation, Abramov mentioned to Maples a problem regarding these forearm bones about which Maples already was concerned: “These bones easily could have been mixed up between the bodies. They were not brought out of the ground with the most scrupulous care. And once they were on the tables in the morgue, anybody could pick them up and, by mistake, put them down in another place. Professor Popov was there—without us. Professor Zvyagin was there—without us. And now Professor Maples has been there—without us.”

  Toward the end of this meeting, Maples, wishing to be conciliatory, said to Abramov that although his own results were different, if Abramov could prove absolutely that Anastasia was among the skeletons, “I will be happy for you.” Abramov, responding agreeably, asked Maples whether he knew of any other renowned Western scientist who, using superimposition, could help solve the problem. Maples supplied a name, Professor Richard Helmer of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Bonn, Germany, who was the president of the Craniofacial Identification Group of the International Association of Forensic Sciences. Abramov, who knew Helmer’s reputation and had read his monographs, immediately invited him to Moscow. A commercial company provided expenses, and, in early September 1993, Helmer spent five days in Moscow going over Abramov’s technique and results. He told Abramov that his was the best superimposition program he had ever seen—and that he had seen all the superimposition programs in existence. Further, he said he now believed Abramov’s results and agreed that Anastasia was one of the skeletons in Ekaterinburg.

  After that meeting, Abramov continued to propose solving the problem by having both Helmer and Maples come to Ekaterinburg to work with him at the bones. He would also invite Dr. Filipchuk from Kiev. In the absence of any such joint investigation, Abramov rests on his findings, buttressed by Professor Helmer. And by the fact that Dr. Maples gave him Professor Helmer’s name.

  “The fact of the matter is that with the methods which now exist and based on the comparative material we now have, I do not believe it is possible to determine who is missing, Marie or Anastasia.”

  The speaker was Nikolai Nevolin, director of the Sverdlovsk Region Bureau of Forensic Medicine, responsible for the Ekaterinburg morgue in which the bones have rested for four years. He lives in a multistory apartment building almost next door to the morgue, and it was there we went to look for him because we were late. We sat under the rustling poplars in the light of the setting sun, watching children play in the courtyard while Avdonin went inside to find him. Soon, Nevolin emerged, a powerfully built, soft-spoken man in his forties. He was wearing a black and orange American T-shirt, a gift of Lowell Levine. He is a forensic anthropologist whose routine work deals with the violent crimes and death which contemporary Siberians inflict upon each other. But he had grown familiar with these special bones. He had worked at the side of Abramov and at the side of Maples, and he had carefully studied the techniques of both. In his opinion, both were wrong.

  “Maples speaks of pinpointing age to such a degree that he can say that none of the skeletons belonged to a seventeen-year-old woman,” Nevolin said. “Yes, you can talk about averages. But a professional knows that from bones you cannot tell precisely the growth or age of an individual adolescent. Teeth are a better yardstick. Forensic dentists, studying growth, say they can estimate age within plus or minus two and a half years. That is reasonable. I would accept that.”

  Nevolin was neither defensive nor vehement in his criticism. He knew that both Maples and Abramov had reputations greater than his. But he was gently firm. He did not accept Maples’ contention that he can establish age by the degree of growth on the upper and lower edges of the vertebrae. “I don’t say that the calcification of the vertebrae which Dr. Maples is talking about does not occur; of course, it always takes place. But the process is not fixed to any particular age, such as sixteen or seventeen years old. Medical science does not know such a thing. What exist are intervals—let’s say fourteen to nineteen years old—when the growth process occurs. I think that Dr. Maples may have been misled by the fact that these bones have been in the ground for more than seventy years. The surface of the bones has been somewhat destroyed; they are very different from recent bones, which he—and we—usually work with in our laboratories.

  “Finally, I have to say that determination of age by vertebrae has never been considered reliable, either here or abroad. The most reliable methods of determining age are the degree of wearing of the teeth, the knitting of seams on the skull, and, most reliable method of all, Hanson’s method—investigating the structure of the upper portions of the long tubular bones. These are the basic methods that allow us most precisely to determine age. Vertebrae are not involved in this. Americans, Europeans, Russians—everybody is the same. And if someone attempts to differentiate these remains by height, that won’t work either. You cannot blame the difficulty on the fact that the bone has been sawed through.… Even if it were whole, it would be impossible to determine exact height. So if a person, judging by height, says that this is this victim and this is that victim, then I think, mildly speaking, this person is not quite telling the truth.”

  Nevolin turned to Abramov’s results, achieved with superimposition. “This is slightly better,” he said. “Because here we use the method of elimination. We take a photograph of the person taken as close as possible to the moment of death. We have the image of the skull. They are placed on top of each other. If the image of the skull fits into the image of the face of the person in the photograph, we can say that the skull can belong to the person shown in the photograph. It works better in a negative sense. If the skull does not fit within the image of the photograph, we can say that this skull did not belong to the person in the photograph. So each skull is fitted into each photograph. It will not fit into some of them; it may fit into one of them. One must not accept this as a categorical method, especially in this case. The method still is not very reliable, and second, in this case, practically all of the facial parts of the skulls have been destroyed and some of the cranial parts of the skulls are damaged by bullets.”

  Nevolin’s personal conclusion was offered with a wry smile: “Russian scientists believe one way, American scientists believe another. I believe in a third way. I believe that the argument regarding Marie and Anastasia cannot now be conclusively solved. They were too close in age and were not so very different in height so that forensic experts here or abroad could determine thei
r identity.” The ultimate solution, he insists, must be found the time-honored way: by locating the medical records and comparing teeth, bridges, crowns, fillings, broken bones, and any other skeletal abnormalities to written records and, if possible, X rays. Like Lowell Levine, Nevolin maintains that the medical records of the Imperial family must be somewhere in the archives. “I cannot believe that the medical records of the Romanovs have been lost,” Nevolin said. “They exist somewhere. Such documents do not get lost. But so much has happened in our country that only the Lord God knows where these documents have ended up. I believe that they will be found. If they are, there will be no more questions. We will know who was who.”

  * Filipchuk’s findings regarding the younger grand duchesses were more compatible with Maples’ than with Abramov’s. He believed that Body No. 5 was the tallest of the daughters and had been killed at the age of twenty. This was the skeleton which Maples had identified as Marie and Abramov as Tatiana. Filipchuk declared that Body No. 6 was the next tallest of the daughters and had died somewhere between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. Maples had identified No. 6 as Tatiana, Abramov as Anastasia.

  † This public rejection of Zvyagin’s research may have given some personal satisfaction to Abramov, who was in the audience. Zvyagin had been foremost in Abramov’s mind when he denounced the “idiots” who had criticized his work in Ekaterinburg and patronized him the preceding autumn, winter, and spring.

  CHAPTER 8

  AT THE FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE

  The seventeenth paper presented at the July 1992 conference in Ekaterinburg was given by a cheerful, dark-haired, forty-one-year-old molecular biologist, Dr. Pavel Ivanov of the Englehardt Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Ivanov’s subject was DNA testing. He told the conference that, at the end of 1991, Russian Chief Medical Examiner Vladislav Plaksin had asked him to look into the possibility of using this new technique to help identify the bones found by Alexander Avdonin and Geli Ryabov. Ivanov knew that this work could not be done in Russia. No one “in Russia had the experience of working with bone materials,” he explained to the conference, nor did Russia possess the necessary technology. Nevertheless, while in London in December 1991, he had visited what he called the “Central Criminal Research Center” of the British Home Office at Aldermaston in Berkshire and begun negotiations for a joint British-Russian study of the bones.

  Early in July 1992, just two weeks before this conference, an agreement had been reached between the Russian Ministry of Health and the British Home Office. A joint effort would take place at Aldermaston involving Dr. Peter Gill, director of the Molecular Research Center of the Home Office Forensic Science Service, Sir Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University, founder of the DNA fingerprinting technique, and Dr. Erika Hagelberg of Cambridge University, a specialist on molecular genetic analysis of bone remains. The Russian scientist would be Ivanov himself. All expenses except travel would be borne by the British Forensic Science Service, and travel costs (essentially Ivanov’s airfare to and from Britain) would be paid by the Sverdlovsk regional government, which had approved the arrangement. The tests in England, Ivanov told his audience, would enable the researchers to determine whether, among the nine exhumed skeletons, a family group existed. Further, if enough uncontaminated DNA could be extracted from the remains, and if living persons descended from blood relations of the Imperial family could be persuaded to donate samples for comparative purposes, it would be possible to prove whether or not the family group found in the grave was that of Tsar Nicholas II.

  The fact that the bones were going to England because DNA technology was not available in their own country was embarrassing for Russian scientists. “We were working on molecular genetic testing at one time,” said Nikolai Nevolin with a wry smile. “Academician Vavilov began using this method. Then Mr. Stalin shot his entire team. As a result, we began lagging behind.”

  When Stalin died in 1953, Pavel Ivanov was two years old. Twenty years later, in the era of Brezhnev, Ivanov was on his way to acquiring a degree in molecular biology at Moscow State University—“the best we have in Russia, very well regarded in Europe.” He began as a pure research scientist, working on the international human genome project at the Institute of Molecular Biology. In 1987, his group, trying to read the genetic codes which create human beings, discovered a technique of DNA fingerprinting similar, but not identical, to work first done by Alec Jeffreys in England. Ivanov, still a basic scientist, began to explore and develop this technique. His work came to the attention of “everyday, working” organizations, such as the forensic crime laboratory and the KGB. “They expressed interest in practical applications of my work and suggested that I establish a forensic DNA laboratory,” he explained. “I agreed because forensic science was very interesting for me and because, with the level of crime so high in Moscow, I thought I might be able to do something to help. I did not work for the KGB; I have never been a Communist. But I understood the potential of these techniques for combating crime. Since then, I have had two jobs. I have kept my position as a pure scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biology and I have also become the DNA adviser to the chief medical examiner of Russia, Dr. Plaksin. Later, when the Romanov case arose, I became the principal Russian DNA investigator by appointment of the Russian state procurator general.”

  Ivanov worked in both places in order to earn money. His wife, an assistant professor of biology, had a small salary; he helped his mother, a retired economist with a miserably inadequate pension; and he had two children. Despite his workload, he considered himself fortunate. He traveled far more widely than most Russian scientists, attending conferences as far afield as Australia and Dubai. He had worked at the FBI DNA laboratory in Washington, D.C., and had traveled back and forth across the United States. In the mid-1990s, his work on the Romanov bones had made him Russia’s best-known molecular biologist. During the summer of 1994, he drove his Volvo from Moscow to Ulm on the Danube in southern Germany in order to perform DNA tests on the remains of a recently deceased Russian emigre who claimed to have been the Tsarevich Alexis. During a long evening in a German restaurant, he talked about his involvement with the Romanov bones:

  “I was the one who decided we should go to England when Plaksin asked for my recommendation,” Ivanov said. “The FBI laboratory in Washington and the AFIP both do excellent DNA work, but I chose Peter Gill because I knew him and because the British Forensic Science Service had the highest level of expertise in this particular sort of investigation—that is, using mitochondrial DNA. Also, of course, I already had considered asking Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, to help us. And I knew that he would be much more likely to help if the work was being done in England. But we had to find money. For a Russian scientist today, it is always a question of money. There are no political barriers, but there are financial barriers. You can’t go where you want.”

  On September 15, 1992, Pavel Ivanov boarded a jet in Moscow. With him in a British Airways travel bag, carefully wrapped and sealed in polyethylene, he carried pieces of the femurs of each of the nine skeletons lying on tables in the Ekaterinburg morgue. At Heathrow, Ivanov was met by Nigel McCrery, a BBC television producer who had been active in the negotiations to bring the bones to England.* McCrery, feeling that it was “inappropriate to carry the Russian Imperial family in the boot of my Volvo,” had hired a Bentley limousine from Co-operative Funeral Services. In style, therefore, Ivanov, McCrery, and the Romanov remains were driven to Peter Gill’s house in the woods near Aldermaston, where the three men took photographs to memorialize the occasion. In the morning, Gill and Ivanov carried the bones through the high barbed-wire fences and security checkpoints of Britain’s huge Ministry of Defence atomic-research facility at Aldermaston. Inside the complex and off to one side, the Forensic Science Service had been given a small building to use as a research laboratory. For the next ten months, the two men and a team of others would attempt to compare and match the DNA of the
Ekaterinburg skeletons with one another and with that of living relatives of the murdered Russian Imperial family.

  If the Central Crime Laboratory of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation were to be turned into a private business, instructed to develop a “commercial, customer-focused, cost-conscious approach,” and told to break even or make a profit by charging fees and offering its services to all who walk in the door, this would approximate what happened recently to Britain’s equivalent of the FBI lab, the Home Office Forensic Science Service. For fifty years, beginning in the 1930s, the Forensic Science Service functioned as a source of expert investigative assistance to provincial and local police departments in England and Wales. Experts from FSS scrutinized evidence in cases of murder, rape, arson, burglary, drug use, poisoning, and forgery. They visited crime scenes, examined bodies, fingerprints, weapons, bullets, stains, alcohol levels, handwriting samples, and old typewriters. The beneficiaries of this specialized knowledge were the Crown prosecutors, on whose behalf the FSS provided expert testimony in court. The people of Britain paid for these services by paying taxes.

  In April 1991, the FSS was overtaken by Thatcherism. Its six hundred scientists, technicians, and other staffers, working at six laboratories scattered around the country, suddenly were transformed into scientific guns for hire. The FSS became a business, required to make its own way in the world by charging fees for services. The door was opened to everyone—“widening the customer base” was the terminology used. Defense attorneys, foreign governments, insurance adjusters, regional health authorities, and private citizens were invited in. The transformation was “turbulent,” admitted FSS Director General Janet Thompson. To most scientists, “the world of business still seemed radical.” In 1991–92, police case work dropped 18 percent and a deficit of £1.1 million was posted. But the following year, matters improved. The police came back and paid the required fees. The FSS made a profit equal to its earlier loss. Most spectacularly, in the summer of that year, the service and its leading molecular biologist, Dr. Peter Gill, made headline news, not only in Britain but around the world.