Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg (40 page)

Ackerman, hundreds of miles away in Siberia, was not to know that he had been duped, but the redoubtable Herman Bernstein was a lot more circumspect. He was a highly experienced Russia correspondent and was not fooled by Bolshevik lies and duplicity. Arriving in Siberia in October 1918, he headed for Ekaterinburg and straight for Judge Sergeev’s office in search of the truth. By now Bernstein had heard six different versions of the Tsar’s fate: he had been burned to death in the forest; killed by a bomb on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg; shot in the Ipatiev House; murdered in a secret passage leading from the house as he tried to escape; spirited away by Russian officers to Germany; or had escaped with his family in disguise as poor refugees and was now living in hiding in the Ural mountains. Bernstein reported back at length in a leader story for the
Washington Post
and the
New York Herald
in February 1919, but could come to no solid conclusions about the fate of the family except to state that the citizens of Ekaterinburg were largely indifferent to the Tsar’s fate. As one cab driver observed to him, ‘Who cares about the Czar? I am better off than he is now, dead or alive.’ Bernstein came away frustrated by the mystery in which the whole story had become shrouded but convinced that either way it was the end of the monarchy. A liberal Russian officer had put it to him best:

The Tsar is dead – whether he is dead or alive . . . Russia is a land of accident. Russia freed herself by accident. Russia lost her freedom by accident. Russia may regain it by accident. But of one thing I am certain, Whether the Tsar was killed or not, the Tsar business is dead in Russia.

It may well have been so in Russia, but in the West the ‘Tsar business’
was far from over. On 12 September 1918, the
Daily Express
in London claimed to have ‘unquestionable information’ that the Tsaritsa and her four daughters had been murdered, a story confirmed by other sources in December. Nevertheless, over the next four years the Soviets persisted in denying that they were dead, killed on the same night as Nicholas. As late as April 1922, Soviet Foreign Minister Chicherin was still giving out the official line to the
Chicago Tribune
, in a story reproduced in the London
Times,
that Lenin’s government was not entirely clear about the fate of the Tsar’s family, blaming it on the Czechoslovak occupation of the city which had prevented the immediate ‘circumstances of the case’ from being cleared up. As far as Chicherin was concerned, ‘The Tsar was executed by a local soviet without the previous knowledge of the Central Government.’ As for the girls, he had read in the papers somewhere ‘that they are now in America’.

Meanwhile, in Berlin in 1920, the Anastasia cause célèbre had broken and would keep the press and the Romanov family exercised for many decades to come. Claims of Anastasia’s miraculous survival and the promotion across Europe of the mysterious ‘Anna Anderson’ were a gift horse for the Soviets. They were only too happy for the émigré Russian community to be at each other’s throats as they split into two camps for and against Anderson’s claim and squabbled over the few pathetic charred remnants found by Sokolov’s investigation at the mineshaft at the Four Brothers: tiny fragments of bone, part of a severed female finger, Dr Botkin’s upper dentures and glasses, corset stays, insignias and belt buckles, shoes, keys, pearls and diamonds and a few spent bullets. As the Anastasia claim gathered pace in the courts and in the émigré enclaves of Europe and America, the hunt for the Romanovs’ bodies went cold. By 1924 and the death of Lenin, all hopes of a proper investigation vanished as Ekaterinburg, renamed Sverdlovsk, entered a new, tougher era.

In August that year, the American dancer Isadora Duncan, down on her luck and past her best, undertook a tour of the Russian provinces. Finding herself lumbered with a week’s engagement in Ekaterinburg, she immediately sent an impassioned plea to her agent to get her out of there as quickly as she could. ‘You have no idea what a living nightmare is until you see this town’, she wrote. ‘Perhaps the killing here of a
certain
family in a cellar has cast a sort of Edgar Allen Poe gloom over the place – or perhaps it was always like that. The melancholy church bells ring every hour, fearful to hear.’ Even six years on, the Romanov murders cast a pall over the city – ‘Its psychosis seems to pervade the atmosphere’, wrote Duncan. Under the Soviets, Sverdlovsk became a dirty, tough place of heavy industry, munitions and scientific technology, a city with iron in its soul, dominated by the vast Uralmash machine plant. For the best part
of 70 years it remained a closed city, its one brief claim to fame coming in 1962 when the American U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down here during a spying mission. In the post-Imperial era, its tsarist statuary was replaced by Bolshevik heroes; its magnificent eighteenth-century Ekaterininsky Cathedral was torn down in 1930. Imposing Stalinist civic buildings rose up in its place – notably the government offices that today house the Ekaterinburg Duma. Meanwhile, many of historic Ekaterinburg’s fine old neoclassical mansions were allowed to fall into disrepair and large swathes of its traditional wooden houses were demolished wholesale to make way for grim new Soviet apartment blocks.

As for the Ipatiev House itself, after the Bolsheviks recaptured Ekaterinburg in 1919 it was used as a Red Army officers’ mess, a notice over the door proclaiming the triumph of Soviet enlightenment over the dark hegemony of the tsars. In 1927 it was converted to a Museum of the Revolution, then in the early thirties it became an agricultural school. In 1938 it was deemed an appropriate venue for an Antireligious Museum, to which apparatchiks came in coachloads, posing for their photographs in front of the bullet-damaged wall in the cellar where the Romanovs were shot and stabbed to death. And then suddenly, in 1938, Stalin issued a clampdown on all discussion of the Romanov murders. In 1946 the Sverdlovsk party archives took the house over and finally, in 1974, it was listed as a Historical Revolutionary Monument.

By now, stories had been getting back to Moscow about the increasing numbers of pilgrims arriving in Ekaterinburg to pay homage at the Ipatiev House to the murdered Imperial Family. In 1975, with the sixtieth anniversary of the Romanov murders due in 1978, Leonid Brezhnev’s Politburo decided to take action. A closed session agreed that the Ipatiev House was not of ‘sufficient historical significance’ and ordered its destruction. A secret directive was passed down the line to the local party chair, Boris Eltsin. Finally, in September 1977, the house was demolished and its site covered with asphalt. In his memoirs, published in 1990, Eltsin admitted that ‘sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism’. Even so, the pilgrims kept coming, albeit surreptitiously, conducting their own private moments of remembrance on the mournful, barren site.

In 1979 the Koptyaki Forest finally began to yield up its secrets, when in May an Ekaterinburg-born amateur sleuth, Aleksandr Avdonin, after years of covert evidence-gathering and a study of the primary evidence, located the shallow grave under the rotting railway ties with the help of film-maker Geli Ryabov. Together they had secretly made a topographical survey of the Koptyaki Forest in order to define where
precisely the grave was located; a secret dig took place on 31 May at which they discovered three skulls and a selection of bones, which they yanked at random from the ground without keeping any kind of documentary or archaeological record. They later reburied the skulls, having taken plaster casts of them, but were forced to sit on their story for 10 years until the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev brought with it the era of
perestroika
, when Ryabov told his story to the
Moscow News.
The remains of the Romanovs and their servants were disinterred in a hasty ‘official exhumation’ that further trashed the site, destroying precious evidence. Then began the long, tortuous process of identification, at a time when DNA testing was in its infancy, as scientific experts in Britain and America began to squabble among themselves and the Anastasia camp continued, still, to talk of miraculous escapes.

Meanwhile, in Ekaterinburg after the collapse of Communism in 1991, a simple wooden cross was erected to mark the site of the Ipatiev House until funds could be raised to build a huge new cathedral there. By the time the Church on the Blood had its official opening in 2003, the Romanovs had been officially canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church and a monastery commemorating them had been founded out at the Four Brothers, now better known as Ganina Yama. On 17 July 1998, the eightieth anniversary of the murders, the remaining, scattered descendants of the dynasty gathered in St Petersburg for the solemn reburial of the remains of all but two of those murdered at the Ipatiev House. The bodies of Alexey and Maria had yet to be found, and still the controversy raged over whether the skeletal remains identified and interred in St Petersburg as Anastasia’s were really hers or in fact Maria’s.

It took another amateur group of local enthusiasts – members of Ekaterinburg’s Military Historical Club – to finally achieve, in the summer of 2007, what previous official investigators and a whole host of weekend amateur diggers had failed to do for 90 years – locate the lost remains of Alexey and Maria. The team based their search on a close study of the statements made by Yurovsky about the location of the final graves, under the aegis of Ekaterinburg’s Institute of History & Archaeology. On 29 July, a few shards of bone, nails, bullets and fragments of ceramic vessels (the jars that had contained the sulphuric acid) were located in two small bonfire sites not far from the main grave site on the Koptyaki Road.

Ekaterinburg today is becoming hostage to big business as it rushes headlong towards a market economy. More and more of its neglected historic buildings are being torn down to make way for offices and expensive apartment blocks. Gift shops, fast food and the most
fashionable of Western clothes are now available at shopping malls such as Vainer Street, where the ear is assaulted by tinny and obtrusive disco music. Here the foreign businessman can get an excellent three-course ‘
biznes lanch
’ for as little as 350 roubles (about £7). The Amerikanskaya Hotel is still there; dusty, tatty and disconsolate. But it’s not a hotel any more. Western travellers seeking the creature comforts they expect now head for the newly built Park Inn on Malysheva.

Out at Ganina Yama, where Yurovsky oversaw the hasty consignment of the bodies to the mineshaft that first night, the air in July is heavy with the rich, cloying smell of lilies. On the 17th, the anniversary of the murders at the Ipatiev House, the site is covered with huge ranks of these tall white flowers that sway gently in the humid air. In the traditional Russian iconography of mourning, they have been planted here to symbolise the restored innocence of the soul at death. This once lonely site is now the Monastery of the Holy Tsarist Passion Bearers. The actual grave site – a couple of miles away in the forest glade where Ryabov and Avdonin found the remains in 1979 – was until recently marked only by a simple wooden cross and some plastic flowers. Some 60 metres beyond it lie the two small pits where the last pathetically few burnt remains of Maria and Alexey were found.

Standing in front of the bank of lilies at Ganina Yama – a quiet, atmospheric spot where the pilgrims tread softly and unobtrusively – one gets an overwhelming sense of the emotional dynamic of a story that, for the faithful, has now been set in stone as a national tragedy encapsulating everything that Russia has lost. Elsewhere on the site there is a strangely unreal quality about the fairytale architectural ensemble of seven picturesque churches built Russian-style of pine wood without a single nail. With their dainty curves and arches, their malachite green roofs and delicate golden cupolas and spires, each church is the personal shrine for a member of the Romanov family. But their beauty seems somehow too contrived, too new, too perfect, making the overall effect uncannily that of a Disney-style Russian theme park.

The politics behind the creation of this – the Russian Orthodox Church’s official commemoration of the Romanovs – are complex. Its construction is also in fundamental conflict with considerable ongoing dissent within the Church itself about whether or not the bones actually discovered in the forest are those of the Romanovs at all, for which reason, when they were interred in St Petersburg in 1998, they were referred to by the priest conducting the service as being of ‘Christian victims of the Revolution’ rather than the Imperial Family. Perhaps now with the final discovery of the remains of Maria and Alexey (at the time of writing, still pending the results of DNA tests) that omission will be
rectified. Be that as it may, the Russian Orthodox Church now has an overriding control over Ganina Yama’s burgeoning tourist industry, its influx of pilgrims, its gift shop full of garish icons, and its official tour guides, just as it does at that other major place of Romanov pilgrimage, Ekaterinburg’s Church on the Blood. In the summer of 2007 the All-Russia Conference of Tourism laid down plans for the inception of an official ‘Romanovs Royal Tourist Route’, taking in the cities of Tobolsk, Tyumen, Ekaterinburg, St Petersburg and Kazan. The inevitable commercialisation of the Imperial Family as a valuable asset in Russia’s burgeoning market economy is now at hand. And with it the possibility of defending the truth of their story from an onslaught of inaccuracy, sentiment and hagiography rapidly recedes. As the Romanov gifts and souvenirs proliferate, so too the unstoppable and growing interest in the Romanov legend at home and in the West becomes ever more covered in a coat of saccharine. The mushrooming of the Romanov tourist industry has done little to throw new light on the events of July 1918, merely adding further obscuring layers, like varnish, over time, to an old icon.

It is only in the dappled shadows of the still rough opening in the ground where the scent of the lilies overwhelms the senses that something intangible on the heavy summer air brings with it a moment of epiphany. In breathing in the sickly aroma, one catches the sense of an enduring romantic tragedy that transcends – if not defies – all the logic of political and historical argument. Here there is an eerie silence, broken only by the occasional softly spoken prayer of the faithful, who stand and look, and sometimes weep. With the sunlight gently filtering down through the birch trees and catching the gold of their great long stamens, the lilies stand like dozens of living white headstones, memorials to innocent young lives cut short.