The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (23 page)

When Soloviev assumed control, he immediately designated the investigation of the Romanov murders and the validation of the bones as a criminal case. This definition gave him greater powers. Now he could compel testimony; no Russian could refuse to answer his questions, and the people interrogated were accountable for their replies. Turning the matter into a criminal case also broadly extended the scope of Soloviev’s investigation. In addition to establishing the specific facts of the murder, he now was required to answer the question of responsibility: essentially, if these were murders, who were the murderers? “The criminal case was resurrected in order to determine whether a murder was committed in Ekaterinburg or a legal execution by a sentence of a lawful government,” Soloviev explained. “If a man commits a crime for which he receives a lawful death sentence,
then the executioners carrying out this sentence are not committing a crime. So, I must determine whether it was legal for the Ural Soviet in 1918 to pronounce the death penalty on the tsar and his family.” In this context, Soloviev had further questions: “Who was Yurovsky? Who was Sverdlov? Who was Lenin? Legally, how were they connected to these executions? Were they criminals or were they respectable people?”

Soloviev was aware that questions of this nature transformed his criminal investigation into a probing of the highest and most sensitive political and historical issues. “Yes,” he said, “I have much more to do than simply establish the identity of a skull or several skulls. That is difficult enough, but the real questions are about something else. Beneath the surface, there is a gigantic iceberg.”

Agreeing that these questions have great political and historical impact, Soloviev nodded and smiled ruefully. “Yes, but my bosses, thank the Lord, do not yet know this,” he said. “I am leading the investigation, and now, thank God, no one is stopping me from doing my job. Actually, it interests the Office of the Public Prosecutor very little. My bosses have other, more pressing problems. Their heads hurt because in Russia we have finally caught up with and surpassed America in the murder rate.”

Soloviev began as any criminal investigator anywhere in the world would begin: by retrieving and examining the weapons said to have been used in the killings. He took the pistols, which had been given to museums, and had ballistic experts fire them to see whether the newly fired bullets had characteristics similar to those of the bullets found in the grave. Unfortunately, the bullets from the grave were badly corroded, and the tiny details studied to establish identification had been obliterated. In addition, Soloviev had noted grimly, these particular pistols had been fired many times over many years and any unique characteristics of their barrels had disappeared. Nevertheless, he said, “While there was no proof that these bullets
were
fired from these guns, there also was no contradiction. These bullets
could
have been fired from these pistols.”

Next, Soloviev tried to provide the commission with final verification of the identities of the skeletal remains. Although he, personally, accepts the universal verdict of Russian, English, German, and American scientists that these are the Romanovs, he discovered that some senior officials of the Russian Orthodox Church—both the Patriarchal Church in Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad—still had doubts. Both churches continued to be bothered by the heteroplasmy found by Gill and Ivanov in Nicholas II’s DNA. Subsequently, Soloviev and the Russian government commission were told unofficially that Dr. King and Dr. Ginther in Berkeley, using the teeth brought to America by Dr. Maples, had confirmed the findings of Gill and Ivanov in England, including the heteroplasmy. But, officially, the commission has received no report from Berkeley. Therefore, the Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church, which is considering the canonization of the Imperial family, insisted on further testing and hinted that it would withdraw its representative, Metropolitan Euvenaly, from the government commission unless its request was granted. The commission relented. Investigator Soloviev thereupon reactivated Pavel Ivanov’s earlier proposal that the remains of Nicholas II’s younger brother Grand Duke George be exhumed from the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg and the DNA of the two brothers be compared.

George’s exhumation took place between July 6 and July 13, 1994. There was difficulty lifting the marble plate over the coffin, but once that was done, the body inside was found undisturbed. The upper part of the body was still dressed in superbly preserved clothing; the lower part lay in six inches of water (a reminder that St. Petersburg was built on a swamp where water is never far beneath the surface of the ground). The scientists removed a piece of the top of the grand duke’s skull and a part of a leg bone for DNA testing. Originally, Soloviev had intended to send these fragments to Dr. Gill in England, but when word of this plan leaked out, there was, in Soloviev’s words, “a lot of yelling and screaming in our Russian newspapers that Gill had falsified something.” The result was a protracted series of negotiations with the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which eventually agreed to perform the tests without charge. “So, now we can say that
we are handing this examination over to people who are totally independent of us,” Soloviev said. “Although our specialist Dr. Ivanov will be there, too.”

Pavel Ivanov arrived at the gleaming new Armed Forces Institute of Pathology DNA laboratory in Rockville, Maryland, on June 5, 1995, bringing with him a section of the femur of Grand Duke George. His mission was to reinforce the certainty that Body No. 4 in the Ekaterinburg morgue belonged to Nicholas II. “In Peter Gill’s laboratory two years ago, we obtained a probability of 98.5 percent,” Ivanov explained. “Now, in this new laboratory, using new approaches and more advanced technology, we may be able to go to 99.5 percent or 99.7 percent. In order to make it easier for our Russian government commission to make its decision, we want to get as close as possible to 100 percent.”

Ivanov also brought with him from Moscow two other potentially useful pieces of evidence. One was the bloodstained handkerchief originally obtained in Japan and from which no usable DNA could be extracted in Gill’s laboratory. In the AFIP laboratories, with their special air locks and air-purifying systems designed to reduce laboratory contamination to a minimum, and with the latest equipment for enhancing degraded DNA, Ivanov intended to try again. He also brought with him a strand of Nicholas II’s hair, cut when the tsar was a child of three, preserved in a locket in a St. Petersburg palace, discovered there by Soloviev and given by him to Ivanov. “There is no follicle attached and cut hair has very little DNA,” Ivanov said, “but AFIP has enormously powerful amplification equipment. We will do our best.”

These DNA tests—on Nicholas II’s brother, Nicholas II’s blood, and Nicholas II’s hair—were to be completed in the autumn of 1995.

The whereabouts of the remains of the two children missing from the grave also baffled the investigator and the commission. Avdonin, attending every meeting, continually urged on his fellow members, “If we could find these two bodies, then everything would be clear, everything would be concluded, the story would be complete.”
Soloviev agreed. “Unless we find them,” the investigator said—and here he supplied a Russian proverb: “In the depths of every soul exists a snake”—“then in the hearts of the scientists and all of us connected with the investigation, there always will be doubt.”

The task of finding the missing bodies was immensely complicated when, in the spring of 1993—that is, before the Moscow public prosecutor had taken control of the investigation—an Ekaterinburg academic, Professor V. V. Alekseyev of the Urals Institute of History and Archeology, descended with tractors and agricultural plows on the area around the open grave site. A bitter enemy of Avdonin, Alekseyev hoped to locate the missing bodies in time to present his findings to the July 1993 conference in Ekaterinburg. Alekseyev found nothing, but when he left, the earth was churned into large, rough furrows. Dr. William Maples, arriving in Ekaterinburg that summer, was incensed by what Alekseyev had done. Maples had arranged to bring to Ekaterinburg a sensitive, mobile machine the size of a lawn mower which sends sound waves into the ground and records any disturbance in the normal pattern of the upper layers of the earth. Maples had seen this used to locate buried bodies in America, and he thought it had promise for finding the missing Romanov children. When he saw what Alekseyev had done, his face darkened. “There’s no hope now,” he said. “It’s absolutely ruined!”

Soloviev admits that hope of finding the two bodies is growing dim. “Too much time has passed,” he said. “The soil has been moved. A cable has been laid through the area.” Nevertheless, he believes that a faint chance still exists. “Yurovsky says that two bodies were burned,” he said. “Sokolov found a place where there were fires. He found bones and congealed fat. Sokolov believed that all the bodies were burned on this spot. Sokolov also wrote that, in his day, no methods existed to establish whether these were human or animal bones. Now, these methods exist. If only we could find these bones.”

Ryabov, like Soloviev, believed in Yurovsky’s note and, therefore, that the remains of two bodies were buried under a bonfire. If they were there, and still are there, they can be found, but the search would cost, by Ryabov’s estimate, somewhere between $5 million and $20 million. Even then, Soloviev worried that the bones, being near the
surface, might be in much worse condition than the remains found in the protective clay of the mass grave. The missing bones might be there, he feared, but still not have survived.

In his effort to locate the two missing bodies or, at least, to determine what had happened to them, Soloviev would dearly love to get his hands on one collection of evidence which so far has been denied to him. This is the contents of the box brought from Ekaterinburg to Europe in 1920 by Investigator Nicholas Sokolov in the wake of the White Army defeat in Siberia.

Fleeing the victorious Bolsheviks, Sokolov traveled across Siberia, clinging to this box, whose contents he referred to as the “Great National Sacred Relics.” From Vladivostok, he and his wife sailed for Europe with a White officer, Colonel Cyril Naryshkine, and Naryshkine’s wife aboard the French ship
André le Bon
. During the voyage, the box traveled eight thousand miles under Mme. Naryshkina’s shipboard bunk. The connection between Sokolov and the Naryshkines was long-standing. Before the First World War, Sokolov had been a magistrate in the town of Penza, west of Moscow, where he became a friend of General Sergei Rozanov, commander of the local army regiment. Frequently, Rozanov and Sokolov hunted together on Rozanov’s estate. When the Russian Civil War began, Rozanov became chief of staff to Admiral Kolchak, the White “Supreme Ruler” in Siberia. When Ekaterinburg fell to the Whites, Rozanov and his future son-in-law Naryshkine were the first two White officers to rush to the Ipatiev House, break through the surrounding palisade, and enter the deserted mansion. A few months later, Nicholas Sokolov appeared at Kolchak’s headquarters, having made his way through the Bolshevik lines on foot. It was on Rozanov’s recommendation that Sokolov was appointed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Romanovs.