Read The Romanovs: The Final Chapter Online

Authors: Robert K. Massie

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #War, #Biography, #Politics

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Facing the question of what to do with the skulls, they decided to divide them up. Avdonin kept the skull presumed to be that of the tsar, and Ryabov remembers how this dialogue proceeded: “Avdonin said that, considering the fact that he, a resident of Ekaterinburg, was the organizer of this expedition, he had the right to keep the emperor’s skull with him.” Ryabov took the other two back to Moscow, hoping to use his connections with the Interior Ministry to carry out discreet, unofficial testing at the Forensic Service of the Ministry of Health. He was rebuffed. For a year, he kept the skulls in his apartment in Moscow, then, having failed to find any scientist or laboratory which would help him, he brought them back to Ekaterinburg. Avdonin had done nothing with the skull he had kept; it had spent the year hidden under his bed.

In the summer of 1980, Avdonin and Ryabov, frustrated and still afraid of the consequences of their discovery, decided to return the three skulls to the grave. They were placed in a wooden box with a copper icon and returned to the site. The men dug again into the grave. This time, they uncovered a new skull, which they briefly brought to the surface. This skull had teeth made of white metal; Ryabov assumed it must be that of Demidova, whose false teeth might well have been made of inexpensive steel. (Later, he learned that the skull belonged to the empress and that the “cheap, white metal” he had seen was platinum.)

Before returning the box and its three skulls to the earth, Avdonin and Ryabov again discussed at length what they should do with the information they had discovered. They could not tell anyone; it was not a time in Soviet history conducive to interest in—let alone sensational news about—the Romanovs. Three years before, the Ipatiev House had been bulldozed. “We swore an oath that we would never
talk about this until circumstances in our country had changed,” Avdonin said. “And, if these changes did not happen, we would pass along all of our materials and information to the next generation. We could only leave it to our heirs. Ryabov didn’t have any children. That meant there were only my children. Therefore, we decided that this history would pass to the next generation through my oldest son.”

In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died, followed quickly to the grave by his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and gradually began the policies of
glasnost
(openness) and
perestroika
(reform). At the beginning of 1989, Geli Ryabov, believing that the time had come to reveal the historical secrets he and Avdonin were keeping, attempted to contact Gorbachev “to ask for his help on a government level so that all of this could be properly handled.” Gorbachev did not reply, but fragments of the story leaked out to the editor of the liberal weekly
Moscow News
. The editor pursued Ryabov. On April 10, 1989, an astonishing interview appeared in that paper. The next day, every major Western newspaper carried the story that, ten years earlier, Soviet filmmaker Geli Ryabov had found the bones of the Imperial family in a swamp near Sverdlovsk.

Ryabov is a short, slender man with a narrow, deeply tanned face, dark brown eyes, white hair, and a white mustache. His manner is nervous; his fingers drum when someone else is talking. Unlike Avdonin, whose stare is hard and voice implacable, Ryabov frequently looks away, speaks softly, and never interrupts. Appearing on television, he told his audience, “I am a typical proletarian. My father was a commissar in the Red Army during the Civil War, and therefore his hands were steeped in blood. My mother was a simple peasant woman. I am now a believer and a monarchist.” He said that he had unearthed three skulls and showed photographs of the skulls and of the excavation site. His effort to find them, Ryabov said, had taken three years. “Great efforts were made in 1918 to conceal the identity and location of the bodies,” he continued, “because, even then, the moral dubiousness of the execution was obvious.” Nevertheless, he said that he was
convinced of the authenticity of his findings. “Even for me,” Ryabov said, “it was not difficult to identify them.” Despite Gorbachev and
glasnost
, he said he was not ready to share his discovery with others, and he did not reveal the exact location of the burial site. “I am prepared to show the remains that I found, as well as the grave itself, to any panel of experts,” he told the
Moscow News
, “but only on condition that permission is given for a decent burial befitting human beings and Christians.”

The announcement created an international furor. Ryabov was believed and disbelieved, praised and denounced. But one curious aspect of his revelation was that at no point in these interviews, or in a subsequent long article he wrote for
Rodina
(Motherland), did Ryabov mention the name of Alexander Avdonin.

“My reaction was horror,” Avdonin said, remembering how he felt when he learned that Ryabov had broken his vow. “It is true that in 1989 change had arrived in our country. And I understood that Ryabov is a writer and couldn’t pour out his heart in meaningless articles and letters. Before he gave his interview and published his story, I visited him. He told me that he was writing about this, and he showed it to me. I liked it; I told him it was good. But I also told him that he should hold on to his article for a while and not publish it just yet. We should wait and see which direction our politics would go.”

When Ryabov decided to go ahead, did he ask Avdonin’s permission? “No,” said Avdonin, “and his announcement didn’t even mention that other people were involved. To this day I still don’t understand why he did that.”

Ryabov’s response was that Avdonin did not want to be mentioned because his wife was working as an English professor at an MVD academy in Ekaterinburg. “It still was dangerous for him,” Ryabov explained. “He didn’t want publicity. He thought it was still a bad time to release this information.” Ryabov, therefore, in deciding to go ahead, resolved to take all of the risk—and all of the credit.

In one respect, Ryabov did follow advice Avdonin had given him long before. Ryabov’s article in
Rodina
, appearing three months after
his
Moscow News
interview, indicated the location of the burial site. However, as Avdonin had suggested, his description pinpointed a spot half a mile away from the actual site. One day after copies of this magazine appeared in Sverdlovsk, heavy machinery arrived in the forest, dug up the earth around the false site, and carried away all the soil. “KGB,” according to Avdonin.

Avdonin and Ryabov no longer speak to each other. Employing his fame as a finder of the grave, Ryabov wrote to Queen Elizabeth II of England, a relative of the Romanovs, asking that she use her influence to ensure that they were buried in a Christian manner. The queen did not reply. In 1991, when Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s new leader, authorized a scientific opening of the burial site, Avdonin met Ryabov for the last time and said, spontaneously, “Come! We are going to exhume them.” Ryabov refused. “Maybe his conscience was bothering him,” Avdonin says. Ryabov cannot be drawn into criticism of Avdonin. On the contrary, he says, “There can be no question of the priceless role of Alexander Nicholaevich Avdonin in this story. No one has doubts about that. He played a monumental role. He was the one who dug up the remains.”

There it might rest. Except that, in the milky darkness of a Siberian summer night, Avdonin blurted out his true feelings: “betrayal, treachery—just like what happened with Ryabov.”

CHAPTER 4
 
 A CHARACTER FROM GOGOL

By the autumn of 1989, the physical disintegration of the Soviet empire was under way. On November 9, the Berlin Wall came down. A few weeks later, Václav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia. Within a year, Lech Walesa was president of Poland. Within two years, Communist governments had collapsed or been overthrown everywhere in Eastern Europe.

On June 12, 1991, the first nationwide election of a political leader in the thousand-year history of Russia took place. Boris Yeltsin, a native of Sverdlovsk, was elected president. When he was inaugurated in the Kremlin on July 10, Yeltsin stripped the ceremony of Communist symbolism. In place of the giant portrait of Lenin that for decades had loomed behind the speakers’ platform, he stretched the white, blue, and red banner given to Russia by Peter the Great. The patriarch of the Orthodox Church blessed Yeltsin with the sign of the cross, saying, “By the will of God and the choice of the Russian people, you are bestowed with the highest office in Russia.” Mikhail Gorbachev was present too, clinging to office as president of the Soviet
Union and general secretary of the Communist Party. One month later, Gorbachev survived in office only because Yeltsin climbed onto a tank in Moscow and faced down an attempted army-KGB coup. By December 1991, Gorbachev was gone. The Central Committee of the Communist Party was dissolved. Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Baltic states, and other former Soviet republics had proclaimed their independence. In relative peace, seventy-four years of Communist rule in Russia had come to an end.

During these years, turmoil and change affected every part of the Soviet Union, including Sverdlovsk. By 1990, the Communists had been expelled from the City Council. Soon after, the site of the Ipatiev House, now a vacant lot littered with a rubble of crushed bricks and stones, was turned over to the local Orthodox bishop. There was talk of erecting a chapel. The local Union for the Resurrection of Russia, a monarchist group, planted a wooden cross on the site. It was torn down by die-hard Communists. Eventually a six-foot metal cross, decorated with pictures of the tsar, the empress, and the tsarevich, was put in its place. Communists did not lose all their influence in the city once known as the “capital of the Red Urals.” The name of the city was changed back to Ekaterinburg, but the name of the region remained Sverdlovsk. The city’s main thoroughfare continued to be called Lenin Avenue, and, at a prominent intersection, there remained a statue of Yakov Sverdlov.
*

After the new president’s election, Ekaterinburg authorities acted quickly to carry out a request from Alexander Avdonin. The regional governor, Edvard Rossel, asked Yeltsin’s permission to exhume the Romanov bones. Yeltsin nodded yes. A delegation of senior officials went to see Dr. Ludmilla Koryakova, the leading professor of archeology at the Ural State University, and asked her to help in excavating “an unknown grave from the Soviet period.” They refused to be more
specific, but Koryakova guessed what was involved. She was reluctant, mostly on scientific grounds. “There was no time to prepare,” she later told the London
Sunday Times
. “There were no tools, no instruments, none of the things you really need for a proper excavation.” Nevertheless, under pressure from her superiors at the university, she agreed to help.

On July 11, 1991, the day after Boris Yeltsin’s inauguration in Moscow, a convoy of military trucks set out from Ekaterinburg. The trucks carried “two of everything—just like Noah’s Ark,” Dr. Koryakova said: “two police colonels, two detectives carrying cameras and video equipment, two forensic experts, two epidemiologists, the town procurator and his secretary, and two policemen, each with submachine guns.” And, of course, Alexander Avdonin.

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