The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (24 page)

When the
André le Bon
arrived in Venice, Sokolov and Naryshkine went together to the French Riviera to present the box to Nicholas II’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, former commander in chief of the Russian Imperial Army, whom most Russians in emigration
regarded as the most suitable successor to the Russian throne. To Sokolov’s dismay, the grand duke, not wishing to offend the Dowager Empress Marie, who still believed her son and his family were alive, refused to accept the box. Sokolov and Rozanov then traveled to England and attempted to present the box to Nicholas II’s first cousin King George V. The king also did not want it. Eventually, Sokolov gave the box for safekeeping to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.

For many years, the Church Abroad has guarded the box. Until the exhumation of the bones near Ekaterinburg, the box was believed to contain the only surviving relics of the vanished Imperial family. Still deeply suspicious of the Russian government, bitterly antagonistic to the Moscow Patriarchal Church, whose patriarch and senior clergy they accuse of being former agents of the KGB, the metropolitan and bishops of the Church Abroad refuse to release the box to anyone for examination and testing of its contents. Even the location of the box is a secret, although everyone knows that it is kept in the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Job in Memory of the Martyred Tsar Nicholas II and His Family in Brussels. The contents of the box have been described by witnesses, but the church will not endorse their reports.

What makes the church’s refusal to permit examination of the box particularly frustrating is reports as to what it contains. Prince Alexis Scherbatow, the octogenarian president of the Russian Nobility Association in America, visited Brussels in the summer of 1994 and, thanks to family connections with important members of the clergy, was told that the box contained the scooped-up remnants of a fire in which bodies were consumed: “little pieces of bone, a lot of earth full of blood, two little bottles of [congealed] fat from the bodies, and several bullets.” And—Prince Scherbatow was unwilling to say who told him this or how anyone would know—but he added, “Yes, yes, absolutely. It was from two bodies.”

Nevertheless, in April 1995, the Church Abroad continued to adamantly refuse to release the box. Neither Soloviev nor any qualified Western investigator may examine its contents to help determine what happened to the two missing children. Soloviev can do nothing but wait. “If someday this box appears,” he said, “I think many questions
will be solved. If there are whole bones, then a scientist like Maples might be able to tell whether they came from a young woman or a fourteen-year-old boy. A DNA test could match the bones with the DNA of the mother and daughters already found. DNA cannot tell which of the daughters it is, but we would know that this was the fourth daughter. We would not know which was which, but all four would be accounted for.”

In the West as well as in Russia, the findings of Avdonin and Ryabov, and the investigative efforts of Soloviev, were aggressively challenged. The Russian emigre community contains men and women who have spent a lifetime hating the doctrines, personalities, and administrative paraphernalia of the Communist state. Their hostility goes deeper than ideology; members of their families were slaughtered in one of the Red Terrors; their possessions were stripped away and redesignated as property of the state. For seventy-five years, they watched Soviet historians lie about the past and Soviet politicians, newspapers, radio, and television lie about the present. During this time, they developed suspicions not easily eradicated. Therefore, in 1989, when Geli Ryabov announced to the world that he had located the bones of the Imperial family, many Russians in emigration were skeptical. One group, calling itself the Expert Commission of Russians Abroad, appointed itself to monitor everything said and done inside Russia in connection with the remains. The chairman of this group was a Connecticut engineer named Peter Koltypin. The vice chairman was Prince Alexis Scherbatow. The secretary was a former CIA officer named Eugene Magerovsky. In the collective view of this commission, Ryabov’s story was bogus and the discovery of the remains in the grave a clever hoax arranged by a still-active KGB.

Alexander Avdonin first encountered Koltypin and Scherbatow in March 1992 in St. Petersburg at the burial of Grand Duke Vladimir, the pretender to the Russian throne. Avdonin, by then, was well known among Russian emigres for his role in the discovery of the grave in Ekaterinburg. After the service, people wanted to ask him questions, and he suggested gathering so he could speak to everyone
simultaneously. He spoke for an hour, after which most of the audience applauded. Then he was questioned by Koltypin and Scherbatow. “I understood that they did not believe me, not for one minute,” Avdonin says. “What they were really saying with their provocative questions was that the murder of the tsar had been thoroughly investigated by Sokolov and that they deemed his investigation sufficient. They believed that the heads were cut off and taken away and the rest of the bodies burned. They believed that everything I was telling them had been set up by the KGB.” When Avdonin told them that Russian and Ukrainian scientists were testing the remains, Koltypin and Scherbatow declared that no one would believe these scientists. When Avdonin said that American scientists had been invited to participate, Koltypin and Scherbatow laughed: “So you have sold yourself to the Americans.” “Then,” Avdonin proposed, “
you
choose competent people and send them to us.” “No,” Koltypin said, “you will still cheat.” “In that case”—Avdonin shrugged—“we will never be able to prove the truth to you.” “No, there is one way,” Koltypin said. “It is DNA. But you in Russia don’t know how to do it.” Avdonin asked who did know. “In England,” Koltypin replied.

The next meeting between Avdonin and the emigre Expert Commission took place in February 1993, in Nyack, New York. Avdonin and his wife had flown to Boston as guests of William Maples so that Avdonin could present a paper on finding the Romanovs at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Avdonin gave another talk in Nyack and afterward retreated into a library for private discussions. Koltypin and Scherbatow were there, joined this time by Magerovsky. As in St. Petersburg, the emigres attacked Avdonin. “I may be an old White Russian so-and-so,” Magerovsky told him, “but I just don’t believe you.” “I don’t like Avdonin,” Scherbatow said later. “He was lying. He’s a real, old Communist.”

The attack from outside Russia became formal on December 25, 1993, when the Expert Commission of Russians Abroad wrote to Yuri Yarov, deputy premier of Russia and chairman of the Russian government commission examining evidence on the Romanov remains. The emigre commissioners began by warning Yarov to beware of information coming from anyone ever connected with “the Communist
Party, the KGB, or the Procurator’s Office [i.e., Soloviev].” They declared that “some facts of Geli Ryabov’s biography are rather doubtful … he was connected with the KGB … his getting acquainted with A. N. Avdonin causes suspicion.” The Expert Commission rejected the authenticity of the Yurovsky note, declaring that “it is a known fact that the head of the last emperor was brought to Moscow.” Therefore, the commission hypothesized, if it was Nicholas II’s skull that Ryabov found in the Ekaterinburg grave, the skull must have been put there later “under someone else’s direction.” Finally, the emigre commissioners announced, “We suppose the other bones were put there in 1979 so that it was possible to fake the recovery of the remains in July 1991.”

Vladimir Soloviev read the emigre letter and vigorously refuted the charges against Ryabov and Avdonin. “There is talk, especially abroad, that this grave was not the grave of the tsar’s family; that this burial was ‘fixed’ or arranged by the KGB or the Cheka or one of the other ‘organs’ of olden days,” he said. “They say that Ryabov was and is an agent of the KGB. The fact is that we now have access to the KGB files, and I have officially checked this allegation against both Avdonin and Ryabov. Prior to 1989, there are no documents on either man in the KGB records. Once Ryabov published his interview and article in
Moscow News
and
Rodina
, surveillance on both Ryabov and Avdonin was established. And the KGB began trying to find out where the grave site was. In fact, there was a thick file on previous KGB efforts to find this grave. So, all of the rumors that this discovery was an action of the KGB or other special organs is ridiculous. I give you my word of honor, knowing those times and those circumstances, that if this grave site had been known to either the KGB or the Party, it would have existed for exactly the amount of time necessary to gather up a crowd of soldiers and get them to that site.”

In dealing with their attack, Soloviev has tried to understand the emigre point of view. “You know, people have stereotypes,” he said. “As they get older, it is difficult to change them. For many years, they had no reason to trust what was said here. But now, the investigations we have done and the conclusions we have produced in this case would be sufficient for any other criminal case. There would be no
doubts of any kind, not in the courtroom, not from anyone. But in this case, we must do five or six times more than has already been done. So there will be no doubts. They [Koltypin, Scherbatow, and Magerovsky] do not believe anything we say. In their view, I am a scoundrel, Ryabov and Avdonin are scoundrels, everyone is a scoundrel. Only Koltypin knows the truth. He should come here himself and see everything. But he has not done that.”

Soloviev was talking about the absence of any serious research by the emigre Expert Commission. “When I come into the archives,” he said, “I see the list of documents pulled and I see the names of those who have looked at them. There is the signature of Avdonin, there is Geli Ryabov, there is a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on. With this circle of people, I can have discussions. These are people who have actually familiarized themselves with firsthand sources and are able to say something meaningful. Whereas, the others do not want to see anything, do not want to learn anything, do not want to know anything.”

The emigres, Soloviev believed, attacked him because they had pinned all of their faith on Sokolov’s findings of seventy-five years ago. “It is often written,” Soloviev said, “that I am leading the investigation without knowing Sokolov’s material, am not interested in it, and do not accept Sokolov as a prominent investigator. This is not true. The fact is that Sokolov made a mistake, but this mistake could have been made by any investigator in his place. His mistake was to believe that the corpses were totally burned and destroyed. At that time, the evidence supported that theory. Now, we have more evidence. However, in my opinion, this was Sokolov’s only mistake.”

One charge made by Koltypin’s Expert Commission was true: it was that not every Russian archive had been completely opened. Soloviev admitted this, saying that he had been given access to all the archives “except the Presidential Archive,” the archive of the Politburo. Naturally, this restriction inflamed the suspicions of Russian emigres that important facts still were being hidden. One able to help in this matter was Edvard Radzinsky, who was a member of the government commission and, independently, was writing a biography of Stalin. “It is true that Soloviev can’t get permission to work in the
Presidential Archive,” Radzinsky said, “but I have permission. The chief of administration of the Office of the President personally permitted me to work there on materials concerning Stalin. When I became a member of the government commission, I asked to expand my research to the Romanovs. Now I have a special pass to check all papers regarding the Imperial family in the Presidential Archive. Everyone agrees that it makes sense for me to do this work.”

Radzinsky believed, based on his experience, that the reason no materials on the Romanovs were turning up was not that they had been deliberately concealed or withheld but that they were unfindable. The Presidential Archive, he explained, was still active; it contained secret diplomatic documents not only of the Soviet Union but of the current Russian state. “When I started working there,” Radzinsky said, “I realized that it is impossible for them, at this stage, to separate historical documents from active state secrets. They said to me, ‘We will show you the papers from this period to this period. We can’t let you just go in and rummage around.’ Also, everything is mixed up. They have only just begun to sort and classify documents. Files are mislabeled or unlabeled. In my book, I printed material from the archives which they didn’t know they had. When they read it in my book, they asked me, ‘Where in our archive did you find this?’ ”

Radzinsky did find one document that offered additional proof of Lenin’s cynical mendacity in regard to the survival of the empress and her daughters. It was the memoirs of Adolf Ioffe, a Soviet diplomat serving in Berlin at the time of the murders. Curious about the official story that only Nicholas had been killed, Ioffe later asked Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky admitted that the entire family was dead, adding that Lenin had categorically forbidden that Ioffe be told. “Better if Ioffe knows nothing,” Lenin had said. “It will be easier for him to lie.”