The Mammoth Book of New Csi (54 page)

Also found in the mine were two bullets from a Nagant revolver; the steel jacket from such a bullet; twenty-four pieces of lead thought to be other bullets that had melted; a well-manicured human finger thought to have come from a middle-aged woman, cut off with a sharp instrument; two pieces of human skin thought to be from a hand; and the corpse of a female. A hole found in its skull was thought to have been the cause of death. The Romanovs English tutor Sidney Gibbs identified it as belonging to the Grand Duchess Anastasia. The valuables and remains had been covered with a thin layer of earth. Burnt splinters of bone from a mammal and greasy masses mixed with earth, possibly animal fat, were also found. But the fall of Admiral Kochak’s government prevented Sokolov conducting any scientific experiments on them.

Sokolov concluded that the bodies of the imperial family and their retainers had been brought from the Ipatiev House to the mine on the morning of 17 July. Their clothes had been stripped from them, torn away and cut with knives. Several of the buttons were destroyed in the process and the hooks and eyes stretched. The concealed jewels fell out, but some remained unnoticed after being trampled into the ground. Some were smashed when hit by bullets or other hard objects. The corpses were then cut up. The pieces were put on bonfires, doused with gasoline and burnt. The bullets melted and human fat soaked into the ground. What remained of the bodies was destroyed with sulphuric acid. Their clothes were also burnt and whatever remained was thrown down the mine, which was half-full of water, and covered with earth.

But some anomalies remained. On 25 June 1919, Sokolov took a picture of the carcass of what he took to be Tatiana or Anastasia’s dog. However, Professor Keith Simpson, pathologist of the British Home Ministry, said: “If you look at the picture with a magnifier, you see very little loss of fur. It is impossible that this carcass at first has been in the water for two or three months. No dog could have had so much fur after being in cold water for two of three months. After the frost period the dog would have been in the water for another two months, and this picture doesn’t show that at all.”

Sokolov entrusted the evidence he had gathered to General Pierre Janin, head of the French military mission to Siberia, who was returning to France. In his book,
Ma mission en Sibérie
, published in Paris in 1933, Janin wrote: “He [Sokolov] had gathered about thirty charred bone fragments, as well as some human tissue which was found in the stake, human hairs, a cut finger, which the experts recognized as a ring finger of the Tsarina, some small icons, the buckle of a belt that belonged to the Tsarevich, bullets of a revolver, etcetera.”

At the end of June 1920, Janin wrote to Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich Romanov, who was considered the spokesman of the Russian emigrants, asking what he should do with the items Sokolov had collected. The jewellery and other personal objects of the victims were given to Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, who divided them among members of the imperial family. The human remains were also entrusted to the Romanovs. Nobody has seen anything of them since. Sokolov himself turned up in Paris in 1921, after the end of the Russian Civil War, but seems to have made no effort to have the evidence examined scientifically. Nevertheless, he set about publishing his report of the investigation into the murder of the Romanovs. In it, he concludes that the corpses of the Romanovs had been completely destroyed by sulphuric acid and fire.

Yermakov confirmed this. He told Richard Halliburton that the bodies had then been burnt and the ashes thrown to the wind.

“We built a funeral pyre of cut logs big enough to hold bodies two layers deep,” Peter Yermakov said. “We poured five tins of gasoline over the corpses and two buckets of sulphuric 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 burning a long time to burn up the skulls.’

He went on: “We didn’t leave the smallest pinch of ash on the ground . . . I put tins of ashes in the wagon again and ordered the driver to take me towards 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.”

But in his book,
Poslednie dni Romanovykh
(
Last Days of the Romanovs
), Bykov told a different story. Expanding on Sokolov’s work, he gave some intriguing clues as to where the bodies could be found: “Much has been said about the missing corpses, despite the intensive search . . . 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 other words, the remains had survived the fires. They had been buried quite far from the mines in a swampy place where Sokolov had not searched.

In
File on the Tsar
, Summers and Mangold challenged Sokolov’s conclusion that, in two days, even with a plentiful supply of gasoline and sulphuric acid, the executioners had been able to destroy “more than half a ton of flesh and bone” as Yermakov claimed. Home Office forensic pathologist Professor Francis Camps told Summers and Mangold that it was extremely difficult to burn a human body, saying that, “the corpse first chars, and the charring itself prevents the rest of the body from being destroyed”. In modern-day cremation, corpses are put in closed gas-fired ovens that are heated to 1,800°F to 2,000°F (982°C to 1,093°C). Even then it takes one and a half to two hours to reduce a body to ashes. However, this equipment was not available in the Siberian forest in 1918.

Sulphuric acid performs little better. According to Dr Edward Rich, an expert from West Point, with “eleven fully grown and partly grown bodies . . . merely pouring acid on them would not do too much damage other than disfigure the surface. If there is enough acid, and a large enough vat to contain them, similar to a cannibal’s pot, perhaps they could dissolve them. But you can’t do it in three days.” Both Professor Camps and Dr Rich agreed that teeth are virtually indestructible, but none had been found.

From 1924 to 1991, Yekaterinburg was called Sverdlovsk, after Yakov Sverdlov, Lenin’s closest ally and the nominal head of state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, who officially authorized the execution of the Romanovs on behalf of the Central Committee. In 1976, the crime writer and former policeman Gely Ryabov was an official researcher and filmmaker for the Soviet Interior Ministry. When sent to Sverdlovsk to work on a script for a film about the Soviet militia, he asked to be taken to the Ipatiev House.

As early as 1923, it had been dubbed “the last palace of the last Tsar”. It then became a branch of the Ural Revolution Museum, or the Museum of the People’s Vengeance. After this it was an agricultural college, and then, in 1938, became an antireligious museum.

Ryabov was not the only one who wanted to see the crime scene. Party apparatchiks would arrive in large tour groups to pose before the bullet-damaged wall of the basement where the tsar and his family had been killed. In 1946, the house was taken over by the local Communist Party and used as administrative offices. Then in 1974, it was formally listed as a “historical revolutionary monument”. However, to the embarrassment of the Soviet government, it gradually became a place of pilgrimage for people who wanted to honour the imperial family.

According to Ryabov, his visit had a profound effect on him.

“I felt that I, too, was responsible for all the cruelty which cannot be erased in my country’s history,” he said, “for everything that came with the great cataclysms which shook Russia. I decided it was my duty to discover the truth about the execution and the burial of the Romanovs and to tell people.”

It was only just in time. In 1977, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, convinced President Leonid Brezhnev that the Ipatiev House had become a site of pilgrimage for covert monarchists. So, as the sixtieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution approached, the Politburo declared that the house was not of “sufficient historical significance”, and ordered its demolition. The task fell to the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Communist Party, one Boris Yeltsin. The house was demolished that July. Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that “sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism”. After the fall of the Soviet State, the Church on the Blood was built on the site, now a major place of pilgrimage.

But by the time the Ipatiev House was demolished, Ryabov had already teamed up with Alexander Avdonin, a retired geologist and expert on the executions. They were joined by Michael Kochurov, another geologist. While the two geologists began covert fieldwork, Ryabov began searching the archives for material. He came across Sokolov’s book and wondered whether it might offer up some clues. During his research, Sokolov had learnt that on 18 July 1918, two days after the murders, a truck left Yekaterinburg and went down the Koptyaki Road. At 4.30 the following morning, the truck got stuck in the mud. The railway guard at a small guard box where the road crossed the tracks said that men came to him, told him their truck was stuck and asked for railroad sleepers to make a bridge across the mud. They made the bridge and the truck left. By 9 a.m., it was back in its garage in Yekaterinburg. Sokolov had thoughtfully provided a picture of the bridge and Avdonin and Kochurov set out to find the spot where the truck had stopped.

The chief executioner Yakov Yurovsky was long dead, but Ryabov contacted his son Alexander, a recently retired admiral. He had a report that his father had originally submitted to the Soviet government describing the execution of the Romanovs and the disposal of their bodies. The report stated that after the execution the town’s people had very quickly found out where they had been dumped, so they went to retrieve them from the Four Brothers mine.

“At about 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 19 July, the vehicle got permanently stuck,”Yurovsky had written. “All we could do was either bury them or burn them . . . We wanted to burn Alexei and Alexandra Feodorovna, but instead of the last with Alexei we burned the Freilina [Demidova]. We buried the remains right under the fire, then shovelled clay on the remains, and made another bonfire on the grave, and then scattered the ashes and the embers in order to cover up completely any trace of digging. Meanwhile, a common grave was dug for the rest. At about seven in the morning, a pit 6 ft (1.8 m) deep and 8 ft (2.4 m) square was ready. The bodies were put in the hole and all the bodies generally doused with sulphuric acid, both so they couldn’t be recognized and to prevent the stench from them rotting (the hole was not deep). We scattered them with lime, put boards on top, and drove over it several times – no traces remained. The secret was kept – the Whites never found it.” At the end of his report, Yurovsky wrote the precise location of the grave. It was the spot where Avdonin and Kochurov had bored into the old roadbed and found beneath the surface traces of wood from the temporary bridge.

On 30 May 1979, Avdonin’s team dug up the site and found human bones. They removed three skulls. When cleaned with water, they were grey and black and areas appeared etched with acid. The central facial bones of all the skulls were missing and some skulls had large round holes in them that could have been caused by bullets.

Because of the political repression in the Soviet Union at the time, their investigation into the murder of the Romanovs put them in danger, so after secret tests had been done on them in Moscow they decided to keep quiet about their find until the political circumstances changed. They reburied the skulls. When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist party and de facto ruler of the Soviet Union, he announced the policy of
glasnost
– “openness”. In the new atmosphere, Ryabov wrote to Gorbachev in 1989 to ask for his help on a government level “so that all of this could be handled properly”.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved and the new prime minister of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, called for an official investigation. In the meantime, the grave had been disturbed by the laying of a power cable. After three days of digging, investigators had unearthed around a thousand bones. It seems that a truck was run over the grave to pack down the earth, fracturing the bones. When a preliminary assembly was made – ironically in the shooting gallery of the local police headquarters – it appeared that they found the skeletons of four males and five females. On 17 July, it was announced that the bones in all probability belonged to Tsar Nicholas, his family and their servants. The male skeletons were all adults, so the body of the Tsarevich Alexei, who was thirteen at the time of his death, was missing, along with one of his sisters. Controversy surrounded which one. For years, rumours had circulated that the tsar’s youngest daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, had survived. In the 1920s, a young woman tried to commit suicide in Berlin. She had no papers and refused to identify herself. She was taken to a mental asylum where one of the other patients recognized her as a daughter of the tsar, the Grand Duchess Tatiana. But by 1922, several Russian émigrés began to believe that she was Anastasia. After leaving the asylum, she called herself Anna Tschaikovsky, later registering with the Berlin Aliens Office as Anastasia Tschaikovsky. In the United States in 1928, she began calling herself Anna Anderson to avoid the press. After the death of the tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, twelve of the surviving members of the Romanov family denounced her as an impostor. From 1938 to 1970, she fought to establish her claim to be Anastasia in the longest-running case to be heard in the German courts. The final judgment was that she did not have sufficient proof to claim that she was the grand duchess. She died in 1984.

In February 1992, US Secretary of State James Baker visited Yekaterinburg and Governor Edward Rossel asked him to send Western forensic experts to confirm the identification of the Romanov corpses. Dr William Maples from the University of Florida led a team of forensic specialists who visited Yekaterinburg in July 1992 and quickly determined that the bones belonged to the imperial family. It was then up to DNA to confirm their findings.