Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993 TAG: 9302070101
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAREY GOLDBERG LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
DNA SEARCH HELPING TO SOLVE 1918 SLAUGHTER OF CZAR, FAMILY
Innocently, they arranged themselves as if posing for a family picture: the czarina and the sickly young czarevich sitting, the czar and the four pretty grand duchesses arrayed around them with the family doctor and servants.Then the bullets flew.
Screams. Moans. Ricochets. The thrusts of bayonets and thumps of rifle butts. Eventual silence. Blood on the cellar room's walls and floor.
When Red guards slaughtered the imperial family of Czar Nicholas II in July 1918, the Bolshevik regime crossed what historians consider was a moral Rubicon, presaging the millions of deaths to come.
And, with the horrible resonance of their act, they created the makings of a mystery that captured imaginations around the world, a mystery that included such grisly clues as a severed finger, a decomposed dog and a plot of burnt earth saturated with human fat.
For decades, Westerners intrigued by the idea that some of the Romanovs, especially the Grand Duchess Anastasia, could have survived the massacre produced reams of speculation and partial evidence, from books to a classic Ingrid Bergman film.
But it took Russians - Russians angered by the collective crimes of their past, finally unleashed to explore a long-taboo subject - to find real answers.
So that only now, 75 years after the massacre in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, does a combination of good police work, competent archive searches and hard-core science promise to solve many of the last Romanov riddles.
"We are very close to the last part of this mystery, to one of the great mysteries of the 20th century, one of the great mysteries of my country, of Russia," forensic scientist Pavel Ivanov said.
This spring, Ivanov and British colleagues working with a technique known as DNA fingerprinting expect to be able to announce unequivocally that nine skeletons unearthed near Yekaterinburg in 1991 belonged to the Romanovs and their entourage.
If all goes as planned, the Romanov remains will be re-interred in the imperial crypts in St. Petersburg July 17, the anniversary of the killings.
Then, only one puzzle - the most fascinating of all, the fates of Anastasia and of Alexei, the heir - will remain, for the muddled collection of bones and skulls dug up in a swampy meadow near Yekaterinburg apparently did not include those of Anastasia and Alexei.
Ivanov and British Home Office genetic detectives are considering an attempt to apply DNA testing to hairs from Anna Anderson, an enigmatic, eccentric woman who claimed that she was Anastasia right up until her 1984 death in Virginia. She managed to convince several of the noble houses of Europe of her authenticity but lost marathon court battles that lasted, off and on, from 1938 until 1977.
They also plan to test tissue samples from an American, also now dead, who claimed to be Alexei.
But Russian film director Gely Ryabov, a key player in the uncovering of the Romanov remains, contends that such claims of amazing survival by Anastasia or other Romanovs garnered support only because the West failed to understand Russian communism.
"We have no instances of the Communists ever, anywhere, having mercy on anyone," Ryabov said. "If people understood that, it would not occur to anyone that Communists could let a member of the czar's family survive. It's simply impossible."
He is convinced that if the searches near Yekaterinburg continue, they will eventually turn up traces of the two youngest Romanovs.
It was Ryabov, a former police investigator and filmmaker for the Interior Ministry, who first found the Romanov remains in the late 1970s.
He had become obsessed with the 1918 killings during a business trip to Yekaterinburg, then known as Sverdlovsk. Returning to Moscow, he plowed into secret archives using his special Interior Ministry access, and even managed to track down the children of Yakov Yurovsky, the Bolshevik guard who oversaw the executions.
Yurovsky's son gave him a previously unknown note that included a description of the disposal of the bodies. With its help, Ryabov located the layer of logs shallowly covered with dirt that lay over the muddy spot where the Romanov remains were buried. A local historian helped him, along with a geologist who climbed high up into a pine tree to spot traces of the old road traveled by the truck that carried the corpses.
Ryabov was motivated at first by curiosity, then by a dawning sense that the Communist regime was evil, based on this original crime, the slaughter of a royal family. He knew that the authorities would surely stop his investigation as a pro-czarist act and punish him severely if they found out. So he dug at night to avoid discovery, and soon turned up the first bones.
"It was just mind-boggling," Ryabov recalled, now sitting in his office, a narrow room densely hung with large oil portraits of the Romanovs. "It was hard to believe, these black and green bones with signs of the burns from acid. One of the skulls had a bullet hole in it."
Ryabov had to keep quiet about his find in those years of Communist orthodoxy, when the guards who killed the czar were still revered as heroes.
It was only in 1988, when glasnost appeared likely to stick, that he went public, creating a sensation and exploding long-standing theories that the Romanov women had survived long after the czar was killed.
At about the same time, a renowned Soviet playwright and trained archivist, Edvard Radzinsky, was reaching the climax of 20 years of his own research into the Romanovs' last days and violent end.
He had found Nicholas' diary and the Czarina Alexandra's diary, and hunted down the same Yurovsky note that Ryabov had seen, finding a copy and publishing it in a popular Soviet magazine, Ogonyok, only in 1989.
"It was horror in every line," Radzinsky said of Yurovsky's descriptions of how the Romanovs were killed. "Revolution is madness, and he didn't understand what he wrote. For him, it was not the killing of people, it was the killing of tyrants and the daughters of tyrants."
Radzinsky, whose discoveries were published in America last year in the best-selling book "The Last Tsar," was deluged with letters from helpful Ogonyok readers. Several of them eventually led him to hitherto-unknown accounts - either in the form of notes or passed on orally to family members - by six of the dozen guards who did the shooting that night, all long dead.
The picture he put together is a hair-raising account of what happened in the cellar of the merchant Ipatiev's house in Yekaterinburg that late summer night:
The guards, armed with revolvers, crowded into the cellar room's doorway and fired copiously at the Romanovs and their servants, some of whom dashed around the room and somehow, almost superhumanly, refused to die, showing what Yurovsky called "strange vitality."
"Alexei, three of his sisters, the lady-in-waiting and [family doctor Yevgeny] Botkin were still alive" after a long round of shooting, Yurovsky wrote, according to Radzinsky. "They had to be finished off. This amazed the commandant, since we had aimed straight for the heart. It was also surprising that the bullets from the revolvers bounced off for some reason and ricocheted, jumping around the room like hail."
Radzinsky explains the "strange vitality" by quoting descriptions he found of the fortune in family jewels that the Romanov children were wearing sewn into their belts and corsets. The jewels and their frames acted as armor against the bullets, and it was this shielding, plus the confusion of the moment, that could conceivably have allowed Anastasia and Alexei to survive.
The bodies were loaded into a truck and brought to an abandoned mine shaft, where, according to Yurovsky, they were undressed and thrown in.
Yurovsky wrote that because exploded hand grenades did not cause the mine shaft to fall in, he worried that the bodies would be found, so he had them hoisted out and trucked to another spot, where two of them were burned and the rest buried.
That inexplicable decision - to burn two and bury the rest - also bolsters the theory on Anastasia's survival. Radzinsky speculated that Yurovsky may have said he burned two bodies because Anastasia and Alexei somehow disappeared before the truck first reached the mine.
"As a historian I don't believe this version," said Radzinsky, a twinkly man with thinning red hair. "But as a writer, I absolutely believe it because otherwise it's impossible to explain: Why did Yurovsky burn two bodies, and why did two sets of diamonds disappear?"
Anna Anderson, the mysterious claimant to be Anastasia, said she had been rescued by a soldier who later fled with her to Romania.
Alexei, a hemophiliac, could have died of his wounds. He could have somehow escaped to America. Or he could have grown up into a peculiar man Radzinsky heard about, a labor camp inmate with a tendency to psychosis who convinced his psychiatrists in the late 1940s that he was the czarevich.