Read The Romanovs: The Final Chapter Online
Authors: Robert K. Massie
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #War, #Biography, #Politics
The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (5 page)
During the Second World War, Sverdlovsk grew from a town to a large city. As the German Army rolled eastward across Russia and the Ukraine, whole factories and thousands of workers were moved behind
the Urals. By the end of the war, Sverdlovsk produced tanks and battlefield Katyusha rockets. After the war, once the Soviet Union acquired the knowledge to build an atomic bomb, secret new towns, ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers, mushroomed near Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk to the south. Both of these cities and the entire region were declared off-limits to foreigners, and a generation grew up in the Urals without ever meeting anyone from another country. It was to probe the secrets of Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk that CIA pilot Gary Powers flew his U-2 spy plane over these cities in 1960.
During these years, the Ipatiev House became a museum of the revolution, an antireligious museum, the home of the Council of Atheists Society, the Regional Party Archive, and the Rector’s Office of the Ural-Siberian Communist University. Pictures of Bolshevik leaders lined the walls; if they had been natives of the Urals, their hats, coats, and medals were displayed in glass cases. Posters and diagrams proclaimed the glories of Communism, showing how many more tractors, airplanes, tons of steel, and suits of underwear were made under Stalin than under the tsar. An upstairs room was devoted to the Romanovs. There were selections from Nicholas’s diary, pages of Alexis’s diary, and the front page of an Ekaterinburg newspaper with these headlines: E
XECUTION OF
N
ICHOLAS, THE
B
LOODY
C
ROWNED
M
URDERER—
S
HOT
W
ITHOUT
B
OURGEOIS
F
ORMALITIES BUT IN
A
CCORDANCE
WITH
O
UR
N
EW
D
EMOCRATIC
P
RINCIPLES
. The cellar room was not part of the museum; piled to the ceiling with old packing cases, it became a storeroom.
Visitors to the Ipatiev House, perforce Soviet citizens, stared at the pictures, posters, and diaries, and then shuffled out into the Square of the People’s Revenge. They displayed no particular sympathy for the Romanovs; the Imperial family was a part of history, condemned, its diaries placed in glass cases, no longer relevant. But the Party and the KGB never forgot. In 1977, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov convinced aging President Leonid Brezhnev that the Ipatiev House had become a site of pilgrimage for covert monarchists. An order flashed from the Kremlin to the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Region, a native Siberian named Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was commanded to destroy the Ipatiev House within three days. On the night of July 27, 1977, a giant ball wrecker accompanied by bulldozers arrived in front of the house. By morning, the building, reduced to bricks and stones, had been carried off to the city dump. Subsequently, although Brezhnev and Andropov gave the orders, Yeltsin was blamed for carrying them out. In his autobiography,
Against the Grain
, he accepted his share of responsibility: “I can well imagine that sooner or later we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism.”
*
Although
The File on the Tsar
attracted wide attention, it also drew strong criticism onto itself and its authors. In part, this was because of its style, which breathlessly announced the discovery of “new evidence … deliberately suppressed at the time … [which] has lain hidden for nearly sixty years.” The villain in this thesis was Sokolov, who, the authors charged, “meticulously included all evidence that supported his premise that the entire family had been massacred at the Ipatiev House, but omitted evidence that hinted or stated categorically that something else had happened.” This “something else” was that the empress and her daughters had been taken to Perm, been imprisoned there from July to November, and then disappeared. Authority for this was a woman in Perm who had said, “In the poor candle light I could make out the former Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and her four daughters.… They slept on pallets on the floor without sheets or bedding. The weak light of a tallow candle was the only illumination.” Sokolov had read this statement, along with reports of numerous other Romanov “sightings,” during his investigation. He did not include it in his conclusions because he believed it to be false. But he did keep it in his papers. Summers and Mangold found it, not hidden or suppressed, in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
When the book appeared, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was asked, “What about the Romanov rescue and those sensational documents?” Inimitably, the secretary replied, “That whole story is a lot of crap.” Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard, reviewing the book in
The New York Times
, was so indignant at Summers and Mangold’s claim to have discovered fresh evidence and so scornful of a claim of identification in Perm by “the weak light of a tallow candle,” that he applied Kissinger’s statement to the book as a whole.
Nevertheless, the two authors did perform a service by asking questions of the Home Office’s Professor Camps and West Point’s Dr. Rich. One did not have to think Sokolov dishonest or believe in the woman in Perm to wonder what had happened to the bones and teeth, which are difficult to destroy with acid or fire.
LET ME FIND NOTHINGI had never imagined that I would find the remains of the Romanovs. I was not planning to get involved with this whole thing in any way. All of it somehow happened by itself.”
Alexander Avdonin was speaking truthfully and, at the same time, telling only part of the truth. It is true that fifty years ago, when he set out on the journey that would lead to his remarkable historical discovery, he did not know where this journey would end. But the finding of nine skeletons in a shallow grave four and a half miles from the Four Brothers mine shaft did not happen by itself. It was a purposeful enterprise, carried out over many years, successful in spite of towering obstacles. It was a team effort, but the team was small, and Alexander Avdonin was its leader and motive force.
Avdonin, now sixty-four, is an intense, silver-haired man of average height, with light blue eyes which gaze out through thick, steel-framed glasses. His tanned skin and sturdy, resilient body are not surprising: he was a geologist—he is now retired—and most of his life has been spent outdoors, tramping the meadowlands and forests near
his native city. He was born and grew up in Ekaterinburg, then called Sverdlovsk. As an adolescent in school, he was drawn to the natural sciences—geology and biology—and also to the history and folklore of this rolling country east of the Urals. There were dark strands woven into this history: rumors that the floor of the forest was filled with the bodies of people shot by the Cheka; legends about the Romanovs; tales about the execution, about Sokolov, about pretenders reappearing. As a boy, Avdonin saw Ermakov walking about the town. Curious, young Avdonin went to the Ipatiev House, visited other museums, and read what he could about the Romanovs. “Whenever I heard anything, I would somehow accumulate it, just for my own knowledge, not for any other purpose. But as I collected information and documents, material evidence and other historical facts, my thoughts began to change. Our Soviet history was so restricted and boring that I began to think of restoring unknown spots in the history of our region, not for use at that time, but for the future.”
Because the subject was forbidden, most of what Avdonin learned came by word of mouth. He spoke to a niece of one of the guards at the Ipatiev House, to the wife of a member of the Ural Soviet who had voted to shoot the Romanovs, to the son of one of the executioners, and to a reporter for the newspaper
The Urals Worker
who, as a teenager, had participated in Sokolov’s investigations. In 1919, this man, Gennady Lissine, had been one of twenty children and adolescents whom Sokolov gathered and brought to the woods at the Four Brothers. He lined them up six feet apart and sent them walking in a row through the woods, picking up everything they found. Near Ganin’s Pit, they found a button, the remains of a small scarf, and another rag. More important to Sokolov, they found nothing anywhere else; for this reason the investigator concentrated his work near Ganin’s Pit and the Open Shaft. In 1919, Lissine was fifteen; in 1964, when he was sixty, he took Avdonin to the Four Brothers and told him what he remembered about Sokolov and his work. Neither man had ever seen Sokolov’s book, which was banned. Avdonin read Bykov’s book, which said that there had been remains that had been burned, but not completely burned, and that had been taken some distance from the Four Brothers and buried in “a swampy place.”
Over time, Alexander Avdonin became known in Sverdlovsk for his particular interest and knowledge, but his work was stymied. “It was not simple to gather information in the sixties and seventies,” Avdonin said, looking back from the vantage of the mid-1990s. “There were no tape recorders, it was all word of mouth. And people were afraid to talk.”
Then, out of the blue, Avdonin found a powerful ally. Geli Ryabov was an important man in Moscow, a famous filmmaker and writer of detective thrillers. One of his films, a well-known ten-part series,
The Birth of the Revolution
, was about the MVD, the ordinary Soviet police, or militia, who handle nonpolitical crime (as opposed to the more sinister KGB, the Office of State Security, responsible for dealing with political dissent). In 1976, Ryabov came to Sverdlovsk to show his film. Out of “pure human curiosity,” he went to the Ipatiev House, then closed to visitors (and only a year away from destruction). He persuaded the police to let him in. He went down to the cellar room. When he came out, Ryabov remembered, “I decided that I must get involved with this story. I felt a moral obligation, a mission, that will stay with me until I die, to write about all that happened to those people.”
Ryabov needed somewhere to start. He asked the local MVD chief whether anyone in the city knew anything about the Romanovs. He was told, “If anyone, Avdonin.” A year later, the two men were introduced. Avdonin’s first reaction was dismissive (he says “cautious”). He told Ryabov that it would be impossible to find anything; looking would be a waste of time; houses and a factory had been built over the places where everything had happened. In time, Avdonin—whose first reaction to newcomers remains a strained politeness—began to mellow. He said he found Ryabov “a very intelligent and interesting person. I liked him.”
They talked at length about their motives: why should they look for the remains? “We both had only honorable goals,” Avdonin recalled. “We wanted to do this in order to restore one of the pages of our history. In principle, the question of the tsar’s remains should have been handled by the government. But the government had just knocked down the Ipatiev House. We thought it was possible that they would liquidate the remains as well. We didn’t know where they were,
but we thought that if we didn’t find them, they could easily be destroyed. We decided that we
had
to look for them.”
There was another consideration to be discussed. “This is very dangerous,” Avdonin told Ryabov. “If anyone finds out about this, if it reaches ‘the organs’ [the KGB], this will end up being very lamentable for me. I have a family and two sons. Ryabov told me that he worked for Sholokhov, the minister of internal affairs, and so, what do I have to worry about? ‘I will always cover for you,’ he said. So I said, ‘Under those conditions, let’s start. You supply me with materials from the archives and I will search for the spot.’ ”
Ryabov returned to Moscow and told Sholokhov that in order to continue writing his history of the Soviet militia, he needed greater access to secret archives for books, memoirs, and documents. Sholokhov wrote a letter of permission and “thereafter”—Ryabov smiled—“everything I needed was given to me.” One of the books acquired was Sokolov’s, which Ryabov brought, to Sverdlovsk. Avdonin took Ryabov to the Four Brothers mine shafts, which, according to Avdonin, made a tremendous impression on the filmmaker. Together, the two men found more objects—buttons, a coin, wires, glass, a bullet—which Avdonin gave to Ryabov. “We treated Ryabov with great respect, as an older person, a well-educated person, a writer,” Avdonin remembers.
