The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (19 page)

Pavel Ivanov, as Gill’s principal colleague in the Aldermaston testing and as the only Russian scientist involved, deeply resented Maples’ criticism. A part of Ivanov’s indignation was directed at Maples and a part at the Ekaterinburg authorities, who, as Ivanov sees it, abetted Maples’ illegal—or at least improper—removal of the Romanov teeth from Russia.

“Maples was never officially invited by the Russian government,” Ivanov said. “He was invited by the local authorities. There is great jealousy there. It is not a good story, not good at all. It is very much Russia. You know”—Ivanov grew angrier as he spoke—“this is an official investigation. It is a criminal case. This is under the jurisdiction of Russian law. Then Maples arrives, and the local authorities write the law by themselves, for themselves. They just took some bone samples and teeth and gave them to Maples. And he put them in his pocket and carried them through the border. I am a Russian scientist and must have official permission from the general prosecutor to take bone samples to England. But, for Maples, it is different. Plaksin doesn’t know. Nobody knows.

“It was a sad story. For me and for Russia. Because, before I went to England, the English said, ‘Yes, we will pay for Dr. Ivanov’s visit. We
will pay for all of the analysis.’ It was very expensive. And the only request they made to Dr. Plaksin, our chief coordinator, was that there not be any competition, that no one be allowed to perform parallel tests until we had a result. Plaksin said, ‘Yes, I agree. Dr. Ivanov will be our official representative according to Russian law. He will come to England, and, until you give your opinion, we will never recheck you.’ Then the British learned from their own channels that Maples had taken samples from Russia to perform tests in Mary-Claire King’s laboratory. The British didn’t know or care who gave Maples these samples. I called Plaksin and said, ‘Why? Why? I am in Britain in a terrible situation. The British authorities have said to me, ‘We know that some samples have gone to America. Why?’ And I had to tell them truthfully, ‘I don’t know anything about this.’ There was an official inquiry from England to Plaksin. Plaksin was very uncomfortable because he had to say, ‘I don’t know why this was done. It is beyond my control. It is over my head.’ This seemed very strange to the British, because he is the chief forensic expert of Russia. The reason is that this is Russia. But the British are not Russian, and they do not understand.

“I thought that I might find out from Maples what was happening, so I called and asked him. He said, ‘I’m sorry, but they have asked me not to talk about this until Mary-Claire King has done her analysis.’ I wrote two letters to Mary-Claire King asking for her results for discussion. She did not answer. Later, in the autumn of 1993, when I was in Arizona, I telephoned Maples again and asked him to arrange a meeting with Mary-Claire King. There was no answer, so I had no possibility of seeing her. But Maples did tell me, ‘You know, it is not so interesting. She has done her analysis and confirmed your result.’ I thought that this was a very strange comment for a scientist to make. If she used one method and we used another and we both got the same results, that is very interesting.”

Ivanov is furious that Maples ascribed the heteroplasmy found in the tsar’s mitochondrial DNA to laboratory contamination. “It is very strange that Maples should say this, because he is not a specialist in this field. He doesn’t know these things. Our article in
Nature Genetics
was reviewed by specialists. He should have waited to read it before he attacked our work.” Ivanov is particularly unhappy that Maples’
attack followed soon after their lunch in Aldermaston. “He came to us, we had a good conversation, and we explained our methods to him. Then he made his announcement that we had contaminated the bones. He understood nothing. It is the same as if I said, ‘Maples made a mistake because he doesn’t know his cartilage.’ ”

Did Ivanov believe that this kind of competition was normal between scientists when a high-visibility, high-prestige case was involved? “Not to such an extent,” he replied. “Of course, everyone would like to be first. But not to such an extent. Maples is a bad example. I can’t speak of Dr. King. I never reached her.”

The strangest part of the story of William Maples, Mary-Claire King, and the teeth that went to California for DNA testing is that no report has ever been released. In November 1993, when Maples signed his Virginia court affidavit, he declared that Dr. King and her associates had been working for five months extracting and sequencing mitochondrial DNA. In her research, Maples told the court, Dr. King had found no heteroplasmy in the tsar’s mitochondrial DNA (as Gill and Ivanov had done), and therefore she “needed no speculation about rare genetic conditions [a mutation] to establish family relationships to a very high degree of scientific certainty.” King was in the process of preparing her report, Maples declared, which had to go to the Sverdlovsk government before she or he could make a general announcement.

In December 1993, Dr. Levine said that King would “put out a final report within the next month.” In January 1994, Dr. Maples said that he expected to receive King’s report “within a month or two.” In February, Maples anticipated an imminent press conference in Berkeley. In the middle of April, Levine said, “Yes, we are hoping.” At the end of that month, Maples revealed that Dr. King herself had not done the DNA testing; he said it had been performed in her laboratory by her associate, Dr. Charles Ginther. Ginther, Maples was told, had written a report in technical language decipherable only by an expert. Dr. King was not pleased with the report and therefore was holding it until such time as she herself was able to write it in a form
suitable for the Sverdlovsk authorities and for general release. In fact, at this point, Maples was “totally upset” with King. He had just been invited back to Moscow to testify before a Russian government commission, and he was eager to take her findings with him. “I am sending her a fax,” he said, “telling her that her report is desperately needed because, if we can’t produce the results now, it will seriously damage our entire credibility.”

Dr. Maples’ fax produced no result, and, in June 1994, one year after Dr. King had received the teeth and bone fragments, she still had not released her report. Maples’ trip to Moscow was postponed; he continued calling her and receiving no reply. Ultimately, King did return his call and told him that her findings were ready and that, if he wished, she would accompany him to Moscow to testify before the Russian government commission. At that point, however, Maples’ Moscow invitation had evaporated.

In June 1994, although Maples had not seen King’s final report, he did pass along startling information: “Dr. King and Dr. Gill,” he said, “both have difficulty in the same area of Tsar Nicholas’s mitochondrial DNA.” King, Maples reported, still needed to resolve whether this difficulty “is a problem of contamination or whether the tsar had an unusual genetic anomaly (that is, a heteroplasmy) or whether there was a mutation.” The possibility of heteroplasmy and a mutation, of course, was precisely what Peter Gill and Pavel Ivanov had reported eleven months before and what William Maples and his American colleagues had vehemently attacked.

CHAPTER 10
 
 EKATERINBURG CONFRONTS ITS PAST

Peter the Great, tall, visionary, and impatient, founded two of the preeminent cities of modern Russia. One was St. Petersburg, which he named after his patron saint; its purpose was to give Russia access to the sea. The other was Ekaterinburg, named after his wife, Ekaterina (Catherine), who became his successor and Russia’s first sovereign empress. This town in the Urals, just thirty miles east of the border between Europe and Asia, was constructed because of the region’s immense mineral wealth. The first ore brought out of the ground was iron; in the eighteenth century, four fifths of the iron produced in Russia was mined and smelted here. Later, the earth also yielded coal, gold, silver, and other metals in such profusion that the town became rich, famous, and proud.

In the 1990s, the city of 1.4 million is one of the preeminent industrial centers of modern Russia. The massive, belching defense factories that long epitomized Soviet power are being converted to production of civilian goods. Heavy machinery, electrical equipment, metallurgical and chemical plants encircle the city. Civic pride continues
strong. In June 1991, 91 percent of the city’s voters cast ballots for their native son, Boris Yeltsin. At the time of the August 1991 coup, Sverdlovsk was chosen as the alternative headquarters of the Russian government should the president be forced to leave Moscow. On September 4, 1991, the city changed its name from Sverdlovsk back to Ekaterinburg.

Unhappily, all these good things—wealth, fame, civic pride—continue to be shadowed by a single grim event. During this same momentous summer of 1991, the exhumation of the Romanovs occurred. When this happened and the world turned to look, the city was forced to confront the fact that it is and always will be famous throughout the world not for its minerals or its industry but for what happened there on the night of July 16–17, 1918.