The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (22 page)

Dr. Mary-Claire King
.

Dr. Peter Gill
.

Dr. Pavel Ivanov
.

CHAPTER 11
 
 INVESTIGATOR SOLOVIEV

The struggle between Moscow and Ekaterinburg for control of the Romanov bones began as the remains were exhumed. Indeed, from the moment in 1989 when Geli Ryabov revealed what he and Alexander Avdonin had discovered, Ekaterinburg regarded the bones as belonging to it. The exhumation in 1991 was ordered by the Sverdlovsk regional governor, Edvard Rossel, and his deputy, Alexander Blokhin. The actual digging was supervised by Deputy Investigator Volkov of the Sverdlovsk Region Office of the Public Prosecutor. With the bones laid out in the morgue, Volkov began the investigation into their identity. It was Volkov who forbade Moscow forensic expert Sergei Abramov from taking pictures of the skeletons and who, once pictures had been taken, demanded that all film and written notes be left behind in Ekaterinburg. It was Rossel who asked Secretary of State Baker for American scientific help.

Throughout this period, the Russian government never accepted the argument that the murder of a Russian emperor and the discovery of his bones was a local issue. But at the time of these events, the government’s
political position was weak. President Yeltsin survived one coup attempt by Old Guard Communists and another by the leader of the elected Parliament and his own vice president. During this battle for survival in Moscow, the only central government officials concerned with the Romanov investigation were in the relatively low-level Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in the Ministry of Health. In addition, the Ekaterinburg authorities were certain that what they were doing had the unofficial support of their native son, President Yeltsin.

This belief was publicly articulated by Sverdlovsk Deputy Governor Blokhin at the July 1992 conference in Ekaterinburg. His statement came in response to a pointed question from Vladimir Soloviev of the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Russia, who was present as an observer. During the press conference, Soloviev asked: “At present, the Sverdlovsk administration has decided to appropriate the remains of the Imperial family. This discovery belongs to Russia. Has the question of burying the remains been posed to the Russian government?” Blokhin calmly replied that the regional government did not consider what it had done as “appropriation.” Sverdlovsk Region had not officially asked the Russian government for permission, but—he said to Soloviev—“you, apparently, are informed that prior to starting any investigative or exhumation work, the head of the administration phoned the Russian president Boris Nicholaevich [Yeltsin] and reported to him the fact that such work was being contemplated by the region.” Soloviev was rebuffed but not defeated. To him, it continued to seem absurd that a provincial capital should attempt to seize and profit from a significant event in Russian history. Besides, he had observed and been disgusted by the fledgling efforts to market the bones that had accompanied the 1992 scientific conference.

In August 1993, the Ekaterinburg monopoly abruptly ended, and the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Russia assumed control of the Romanov investigation. Vladimir Soloviev was assigned as chief investigating official. A Russian government commission was appointed to sit in Moscow.
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Its assignment was to receive from the Russian public
prosecutor all available evidence as to the validity of the bones, weigh this evidence, and then inform the government of its conclusions. If the commission ruled that the remains were legitimate, it was to make further recommendations as to where, when, and by what ritual they should be buried.

The commission worked on an ad hoc basis. There were no regularly scheduled meetings; members were summoned when there was new evidence to receive and discuss. Few members attended regularly. Edvard Rossel, still nominally on the commission, never came. Veniamin Alekseyev appeared only rarely. From Ekaterinburg, that left only Alexander Avdonin, who came to every meeting at his own expense. Sometimes, people were invited to join and then not informed about meetings. Bishop Basil Rodzianko, who is eighty and is respected throughout Russia for his twenty-five years of religious radio broadcasts from London and Washington, D.C., was officially asked by Anatoly Sobchak, said that he would be happy to come to a meeting, and then never heard from anyone again.

Vladimir Soloviev, although not a member of the commission, quietly became the pivotal figure in its work. He was the representative of the Public Prosecutor’s Office assigned to provide the commission with evidence. His task was to track down scientists, historians, and archivists, locate documents, authorize tests, and gather results. He attended most of the commission’s meetings in order to answer questions or to receive requests for additional information.
He had been given broad powers. When, in the summer of 1994, Alexander Avdonin asked on my behalf whether I could see the remains in Ekaterinburg, the first answer of the local authorities was no. Soon, a fax arrived from Soloviev in Moscow instructing that I was to be shown “everything.”

Vladimir Nicholaevich Soloviev is a short, balding, barrel-chested man with light brown eyes and a brown beard finely trimmed in exactly the style of the beard of Nicholas II. In his deep voice, Soloviev said that when as part of his work he visited the Imperial palaces at Tsarskoe Selo outside St. Petersburg to examine the uniforms, dresses, helmets, and hats worn by the Imperial family, he found that the tsar’s measurements and his own were identical. Out of curiosity, he tried on one of Nicholas’s now-faded military tunics. It fit perfectly. Soloviev’s own day-to-day uniform was a simple brown semi-military shirt with epaulets but no insignia.

Vladimir Soloviev was born in 1950, the son of a lawyer, in the Stavropolsk region of the Russian Caucasus, near the resort towns of Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk—“Lermontov places,” he called them. He finished high school at eighteen, did odd jobs for a year, spent two years in the army, then entered the Moscow University Department of Law. When he graduated in 1976, he was sent to Taldom, a town sixty miles from Moscow, where he worked in the Prokuratura (Office of the Public Prosecutor) as one of two regional investigators. His primary duty was investigating murders, which, he recalled, “unfortunately, at that time, were quite numerous … peasants burning bodies in a stove inside a small hut … that kind of thing.” Transferred after two years to the Office of the Public Prosecutor of the Moscow Region, he worked in a branch overseeing the work of the militia, then moved on to the Moscow Region Transportation Prokuratura, where he investigated cases of violence connected with transportation: airplane crashes, train accidents and, again, “many murders, aboard trains, for example, or near railroad tracks.” Next, Soloviev returned to Moscow University as supervisor in charge of the laboratory of the Criminology Department, training students in criminological procedures.
In 1990, he transferred to the Office of the General Procurator of Russia, where his title became procurator criminologist of the Office of the General Procurator of the Russian Federation. Here, too, his specialty was murder. Throughout his career, Soloviev had nothing to do with the KGB. “The Office of the Public Prosecutor does not get involved with political matters,” he said. “The two organizations have different purposes.”

Soloviev always has been interested in history and archeology. When Geli Ryabov first announced that he had found the Romanov remains in Siberia, Soloviev didn’t totally believe him, but he was interested. Once the remains were exhumed, Soloviev—because of his familiarity with the major government archive (formerly the Central Archive of the October Revolution, recently renamed the State Archive of the Russian Federation)—was asked to assist Sverdlovsk Deputy Investigator Volkov. In the archives, Soloviev located much useful material: four volumes of Sokolov’s work, photographs of Kharitonov and Trupp, materials on Yurovsky and on Grand Duke George Alexandrovich (Nicholas II’s younger brother). In doing this work, Soloviev found his interest in the Imperial family sharpened. In August 1993, his superiors handed him responsibility for conducting the Romanov investigation on behalf of the Russian government.