The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (4 page)

The British government, meanwhile, was receiving more ominous information. On August 31, British Military Intelligence received a report, passed to the War Cabinet and to King George V at Windsor Castle, that the Empress Alexandra and all five of her children probably had been murdered at the same time as the tsar. The king accepted the authenticity of this report and sat down to write to his cousin, Alexandra’s sister, Princess Victoria of Battenberg:

Despite the king’s dispatch of condolences, the Foreign Office decided to investigate the matter further. Sir Charles Eliot, the British high commissioner for Siberia, was sent from Vladivostok to Ekaterinburg, and on October 15, his confidential report, addressed directly to Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, arrived in London. Eliot’s dispatch seemed to offer hope. “On July 17,” he wrote, “a train with the blinds down left Ekaterinburg for an unknown destination and it is believed that the surviving members of the Imperial family were in
it.… It is the general opinion in Ekaterinburg that the empress, her son and daughters were not murdered.”

Thereafter, the survivors—if there were survivors—seemed to disappear. Four years later, at an international conference in Genoa, a foreign journalist asked Chicherin whether the Bolshevik government had killed the tsar’s four daughters. Chicherin replied, “The fate of the four young daughters is unknown to me. I have read in the press that they are now in America.”

In 1924, the mystery appeared solved when the White investigator Nicholas Sokolov, then living in Paris, presented his findings and conclusions in a book published first in French and then in Russian. The book,
Judicial Enquiry into the Assassination of the Russian Imperial Family
, provided the world with an eyewitness description of eleven bodies lying in pools of blood on the floor of the Ipatiev House cellar. Sokolov also printed photographs of the bones, severed finger, jewelry, corset stays, false teeth, and other articles and objects he had gathered from the Four Brothers mine shaft. He gave not only a brutal description of the actual massacre but a detailed, seemingly plausible account of the destruction of the bodies by acid and fire: “The bodies were chopped in pieces with cutting instruments … the bodies were destroyed with sulfuric acid and by burning on the bonfires with the aid of gasoline.… The fatty matter in the corpses melted and spread over the ground where it became mixed with the earth.” Evidence that the entire family was dead appeared overwhelming.

Sokolov’s path had not been smooth. He had been forced to give up his work in Ekaterinburg when the Red Army approached and recaptured the city in July 1919. Traveling east on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, he took with him, along with his box of charred bones and other physical evidence, seven fat folios of written material. In the West, Sokolov continually added to these volumes, endlessly interviewing emigres who had escaped the revolution and who might know something—anything—about the death and disappearance of the Imperial family. He received little assistance. His appearance and manner were not in his favor. Small with dark, thinning hair, he possessed a cracked glass eye that gazed disconcertingly from an intensely nervous face. While talking, he swayed from side to side, continually rubbing
his hands or tugging at his stringy mustache. But his appearance and tics had nothing to do with the rebuff he received from the most important of all Russian emigres: Nicholas’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. Although Marie had made a financial contribution to Sokolov’s work when he was in Siberia, once she learned that he believed the entire family was dead, she refused to see him or to receive his dossier or box of relics. Until the day of her death in October 1928, Marie insisted that her son and his family remained alive.

Obsessed, Sokolov continued interviewing and writing. For a while, he was supported by Prince Nicholas Orlov, who moved the investigator and his papers from the Hotel du Bon La Fontaine in Paris to an apartment in Fontainebleau. Here, Sokolov finally completed his book. A few months after its publication, he suffered a heart attack and died, still only forty-two. Sokolov’s reward was posthumous: for six and a half decades, until 1989, his work was the accepted historical explanation of how the Russian Imperial family had died and what had happened to their bodies.

Publication and worldwide acceptance of Sokolov’s book forced the Soviet government to change its story about the fate of the empress and her children. By 1926, after eight years of denying any knowledge as to their whereabouts, Moscow’s credibility on the subject had been unraveled by the details and photographs in Sokolov’s book. In addition, times had changed: German concern for a former German princess no longer existed; Lenin was dead; Stalin, his successor, possessed an even greater appreciation of the tonic nature of ruthlessness. Accordingly, a Soviet version of Sokolov’s book,
The Last Days of Tsardom
, was authorized. Written by Pavel M. Bykov, a new chairman of the Ural Soviet, and largely plagiarized from Sokolov’s work, it admitted that Alexandra, with her son and daughters, had been murdered along with Nicholas.

Now Reds and Whites agreed that the entire Imperial family was dead. But to Sokolov’s description of the destruction of the bodies, Bykov added what seemed a minor editorial variation:

In a single sentence, Bykov had offered five fresh clues: There were
remains which had survived the fires;
these
remains had been buried;
they had been buried
“quite far away from the mines”; “in a swampy place”; “in an area where the volunteers and investigators did not excavate.”
In other words, something had been hidden, but it was nowhere near the Four Brothers site where Sokolov had searched.

Bolshevism’s grip on Russia intensified, and the revolution appeared permanent. Famous cities were renamed after its heroes: St. Petersburg became Leningrad, Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad, Ekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk. Lesser men sought recognition of their revolutionary heroism in recording their personal participation in the massacre in the cellar. In 1920, Yakov Yurovsky gave the Soviet historian Michael Pokrovsky a detailed account of what he had done in Ekaterinburg in July 1918 “so history would know.” In 1927, he presented his two revolvers, the Colt and the Mauser, to the Museum of the Revolution on Red Square. Peter Ermakov, the local Ural commissar, sometimes challenged Yurovsky for “the honor of having executed the last tsar” and gave his revolver, also a Mauser, to the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution. In the early 1930s, near Sverdlovsk, Ermakov liked to appear before groups of boys gathered around campfires on summer nights. His enthusiasm fueled by a bottle of vodka, he would describe how he had killed the tsar. “I was twelve or thirteen,” recalled one of these listeners, a member of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Pioneer Camp in 1933. “He was presented to us as a hero. He was given flowers. I watched him with envy. He ended his lecture by saying, ‘I personally shot the tsar.’ ”

Sometimes, Ermakov modified his story. In 1935, the journalist Richard Halliburton visited Ermakov, supposedly dying of throat
cancer, in his Sverdlovsk apartment: “On a low, crude Russian bed … piled with red cotton quilts … a huge … fat man of fifty three [was] turning restlessly in his feverish efforts to breathe.… His mouth hung open and from one corner there was a trickle of blood.… Two bloodshot and delirious black eyes gleamed at me.” During a three-hour conversation, Ermakov admitted to Halliburton that it was Yurovsky who had killed Nicholas. His own victim, he said, was Alexandra: “I fired my Mauser at the tsarina—only six feet away—couldn’t miss. Got her in the mouth. In two seconds she was dead.”

Ermakov’s account of the destruction of the bodies buttressed Sokolov’s assumptions: “We built a funeral pyre of cut logs big enough to hold the bodies, two layers deep. We poured five tins of gasoline over the corpses and two buckets of sulfuric 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 fire burning a long time to burn up the skulls.” Ultimately, Ermakov said, “we didn’t leave the smallest pinch of ash on the ground.… I put the tins of ashes in the wagon again and ordered the driver to take me back toward 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.” Back in New York, Halliburton published his interview as Ermakov’s deathbed confession; in Sverdlovsk, however, Ermakov arose from his red quilts and lived another seventeen years.

In 1976, forty-one years after Halliburton’s book appeared, two journalists working for BBC Television asked new questions about the disappearance of the Romanovs. In their book
The File on the Tsar
, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold challenged Sokolov’s conclusion that, in two days, even with a plentiful supply of gasoline and sulfuric acid, the executioners had been able to destroy “more than half a ton of flesh and bone” and, as Ermakov had claimed, “[pitch] the ashes into the air.” Professor Francis Camps, a British Home Office forensic pathologist with thirty years’ experience, explained to the authors how difficult it was to burn a human body. Fires char bodies, he said, “and the charring itself prevents the rest of the body being destroyed.”
Professional cremation, performed in closed, gas-fired ovens at temperatures up to two thousand degrees, can reduce a body to ashes, but this technique and equipment were not available in the Siberian forest. As for sulfuric acid, Dr. Edward Rich, an American expert from West Point, told the authors that with “eleven fully-grown or partly-grown bodies … merely pouring acid on them would not do too much damage other than disfigure the surface.”

The most glaring forensic discrepancy in Sokolov’s findings, both the Home Office and the West Point experts agreed, was the total absence of human teeth. “Teeth are the only components of the human body which are virtually indestructible,” wrote Summers and Mangold. “If the eleven members of the Romanov household were really taken to the mine, there are about 350 missing teeth.” The West Point expert told them that he had once left several teeth completely immersed in a beaker of sulfuric acid, not for two days but for three weeks. They emerged as teeth.
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