The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (34 page)

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 Not only did the men scour archives and historical documents for clues to the bodies’ whereabouts, they scoured Koptyaki Forest,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?

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?

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 Grand 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.

On a warm afternoon in July 2007, Sergei Plotnikov was searching Koptyaki Forest not far from the Romanovs’ grave site when he stumbled on a small hollow covered with nettles. Using a large, corkscrew-like instrument, Plotnikov—an amateur historian who often spent his weekends searching for the missing imperial children—poked deep beneath the soil’s surface. There was a crunching sound. Plotnikov started to dig. Soon he uncovered a pile of bone fragments. DNA tests run on them proved they were the remains of Alexei and one of his sisters. “
My heart leaped with joy,” Plotnikov said of his discovery. “I knew the Romanov children would finally be reunited with their family.”

But as of this writing, the remains of the last two Romanovs have yet to be buried. Instead, they lie in a cardboard box in Moscow’s State Archive of the Russian Federation, waiting for the day when all seven Romanovs will once again be together; as Nicholas called them, “a small family circle.”

Standing on a balcony of the Winter Palace the day he declared war in 1914, Nicholas bows his head emotionally as the crowd below bursts into the national anthem.

R
OMANOV
C
OLLECTION
, B
EINECKE
R
ARE
B
OOK AND
M
ANUSCRIPT
L
IBRARY
, Y
ALE
U
NIVERSITY

Russian troops stand in a trench on the Eastern Front, 1915. Since tsarist generals scorned trench warfare, they never learned the technological art of properly constructing them. Nothing more than holes in the ground, Russian trenches constantly filled with water while unsupported dirt walls crumbled under artillery bombardment. The primitive nature of these trenches was a major cause of Russia’s huge loss of life.

L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS

Raising his cross in blessing, a priest walks among the wounded in a Russian field hospital, 1915. While officers recuperated in mansions that had been converted into hospitals, ordinary soldiers were not so lucky. Recalled one war observer, “I went around several wards, rooms in vacated houses where the sick and wounded lay on the floor, on straw, dressed, unwashed and covered in blood.” Because of this, diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery decimated Russian troops even further.

L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS

Russian dead. The number of the country’s casualties was staggering—more than three million by 1917.

L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS

A peasant woman mourns the death of her soldier son, 1916.

C
OURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Olga (left) and Tatiana in their nurses’ uniforms, ministering to wounded officers.

R
OMANOV
C
OLLECTION
, B
EINECKE
R
ARE
B
OOK AND
M
ANUSCRIPT
L
IBRARY
, Y
ALE
U
NIVERSITY

Marie (left) and Anastasia pose with a group of recovering officers in their hospital, c. 1915.

R
OMANOV
C
OLLECTION
, B
EINECKE
R
ARE
B
OOK AND
M
ANUSCRIPT
L
IBRARY
, Y
ALE
U
NIVERSITY

Alexei (in uniform) presides over a military luncheon at Stavka in 1916. Third from the left sits Nicholas. Between him and Alexei is the deposed, but still consulted Nicholasha.

R
OMANOV
C
OLLECTION
, B
EINECKE
R
ARE
B
OOK AND
M
ANUSCRIPT
L
IBRARY
, Y
ALE
U
NIVERSITY

Rasputin at his full powers, looking both commanding and controlling, c. 1915.

L
OUISE
B
RYANT
P
APERS
(MS 1840). M
ANUSCRIPT AND
A
RCHIVES
, Y
ALE
U
NIVERSITY
L
IBRARY

This snapshot of an imperious Alexandra was taken in 1916 when the reins of government were firmly in her hands.