Eight Pieces of Empire (29 page)

The scene before my eyes in Yekaterinburg, in those days before the czar’s bones were reinterred, resembled a sort of morbid circus.

The local governor in Yekaterinburg has hastily convened a press conference, emphasizing that he has always and steadfastly argued that
the remains should be put to rest right here. The pugnacious mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, perhaps smelling tourist dollars, has made his own heavy-handed pitch for them to be buried in Moscow. Finally, there is Boris Yeltsin, the unpredictable, sometimes playful, sometimes self-destructive president of the reborn Russian Federation. Over the course of weeks, the Kremlin makes contradictory statements about whether or not he will attend the reinterment. Yeltsin will come, he’ll send a representative. He will, he won’t, he will, he won’t.

DR. NIKOLAI NIVOLIN
, chief coroner of the city of Yekaterinburg, is a man of relatively few words. He is a scientist through and through, and the ecclesiastical and political bickering over the remains of the last czar clearly tests his nerves. Nivolin has spent eight years on this work. Yes, he is a scientific man, and yes, this is a forensic exercise. But for him it is also undoubtedly an emotional one. In fact, he cannot hide the livid scorn with which he regards the tawdry debates about the authenticity of the bones.

“How dare people with no competence in these matters call the results of our investigation into question!” he sputters.

Across town, in a simple cafeteria-style watering hole near the center of Yekaterinburg, I meet up with Alexander Avdonin, the ethnographer who has spent half his sixty-odd years first pondering, plotting, and then secretly excavating the czar’s remains. The small bespectacled man slumps back in his chair as if he’d just completed a long journey through the muggy central Russian July heat. His eyes are weary, and he is drinking a cold beer to mask his impatience and boredom with my questions. Many of my inquiries seem sophomoric to him, and his bored facial expressions let me know that. I try to apologize by saying that I have been spending most of my time in the Caucasus Mountains, covering contemporary killings in places like Chechnya and Abkhazia, rather than investigating slightly older murders, such as took place here in 1918. With this he relaxes. Two of his historian companions pull up chairs, and I listen while they rehash technical details dealing with the work Avdonin
has undertaken so far, and theoretical questions about the whereabouts of Anastasia and Alexei. Avdonin says he is more than confident in the information he has that will eventually lead to the uncovering of those remains as well. (Years later, they were recovered.)

IN 1976, FIFTY-EIGHT
years after the Romanov regicides, Avdonin was approached by an unlikely partner in the hunt for Russia’s royal bones. Gueli Ryabov was not only a well-known Soviet film producer, but a Communist Party member as well. More to the point, he was a man with access to secret archives about the extermination of the imperial family. A sense of intrigue that transforms itself into an obsession soon bonds the two—find the bones! They know the basics: The Romanov bodies were burned and doused with sulfuric acid and thrown into a temporary pit before being moved to another hole some distance away, a mass grave that was then covered with earth and railroad ties. But what if the burning and sulfuric acid destroyed all of the evidence? What if there are buildings on the site? And what if the Soviet government has at some stage secretly reexcavated the site and removed the remains in order to leave absolutely no trace that could ever serve as a shrine?

But Ryabov has stumbled onto what he believes is the key to unearthing the remains: a lengthy, highly detailed account of the burial given to him by the son of Yakov Yurovsky, the Bolshevik functionary who served as the chief executioner of the imperial family. Written in 1922, it would not be published until 1993, three-quarters of a century after the murders. The following is a slightly redacted version to give a sense of time and early-Soviet-era grammar and style:

On 16 July 1918, about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, comrade Filipp came to the house and presented me with the resolution from the Executive Committee to execute Nikolai.… He further stated that during the night, a comrade would arrive with the password “chimneysweep,” to whom the corpses must be given, which he would bury and liquidate the job.…

Yurovsky then goes on in excruciating detail about how he vetted the executioners; how some had qualms about shooting the girls; how others wanted to use their bayonets to finish the job, but how the blades would not penetrate the blouses because diamonds had been sewn inside; how some soldiers tried to steal the gems once discovered; how he had to get the stones out of the soldiers’ pockets; how their transport got stuck in a swamp on the way to a mine shaft to dump the bodies, until finally a second mine shaft is selected:

Exhausted. Without sleep. Began to get agitated: Any minute we expected the Czechoslovaks to seize Ekaterinburg … [so] I decided to make use of the swamp. And burn some of the corpses. Unharnessed the horses. Unloaded the corpses. Opened the barrels. Placed one corpse to test how it would burn. The corpse charred relatively quickly. Then I ordered the burning of Alexei. At this time [the men] were digging a pit in the swamp where the cross ties were layered. [It was] about 2½
arshins
deep, three
arshins
square. It was just before morning [and] burning the rest of the corpses was not possible because the peasants had begun coming out for work, and for that reason we had to bury the corpses in the pit. Laying the corpses in the pit, [we] doused them with sulphuric acid, and with this ended the funeral for Nikolai and his family and all the rest.… The initial burial spot, as pointed out earlier, was 16
versts
from Ekaterinburg, and 2
versts
from Koptyaki, the latter place being located approximately 8–8?
versts
from Ekaterinburg, and 1?
versts
approximately from the railroad line.

Yakov Yurovsky,
April–May 1922, Moscow

Despite Gueli Ryabov’s ministerial pedigree and Soviet-era filmmaker fame, the work he and ethnographer Alexander Avdonin have cut out for themselves is highly sensitive, even dangerous. And it is conducted secretly, by the crudest of means. First, they use a sniper-rifle telescope (small enough to conceal in a coat pocket so as to minimize attention) to calculate the coordinates of the presumed location of the Romanov
mass grave site. (The area of the abandoned mine is little changed from decades ago—a wooden fence still surrounds the mine shaft.) Next the stealthy crew begins probing the earth with a metal pipe until their sod soundings finally reach a blackened portion of earth in the terra-firma test tube. Avdonin and the other scientists immediately recognize this as organic matter that has been exposed to sulfuric acid. Then they excavate farther to see what will emerge. What the illegal team discovers is a wicked, blackened time capsule created by Comrade Yurovsky. First, a pelvis; next a couple of skulls. Forensic testing will eventually determine that these were once the heads of the Czar Nikolai II and Czarina Alexandra, while the pelvis belonged to the czar.

Ryabov takes the bones back to Moscow.

The year 1979 in the USSR under Comrade Brezhnev was not exactly the time to lug a couple of skulls into a lab for analysis, and especially not skulls belonging to the czar and czarina. But Ryabov manages to make molds of the skulls for the sake of history. A year later, Ryabov returns to Yekaterinburg so that he and Avdonin can reinter the bones in the original (that is, second) mass Romanov grave.

A decade passes, and it is now 1989 and the era of Gorbachev, Perestroika, and Glasnost. Ryabov, ever the showman, wants to go public. Avdonin, the empiricist, the academic, thinks it is too early. The former trumps the latter and gives a series of newspaper articles and a long interview to Soviet television, replete with details about the Romanov mass grave, but he deliberately gives false coordinates that are off by about five hundred yards from the real burial site.

The trickery is fortuitous, because within days of Ryabov’s media circus, earthmoving equipment suddenly arrives at the announced location to dig enormous holes and pile the excavated earth into huge trucks, which are driven off to an unknown destination. Even if that destination might have been a top-secret forensics lab, one can only imagine the befuddlement of those tasked with finding the remains of the last czar and his family in the small mountain of late-Soviet dirt and rock. (Because that is precisely what their sifting yields, dirt and rock and nothing more.) Ironically, it would be only in early 1991—just months before the
demise of the Soviet Empire—that the Kremlin would come up with the funds to begin the “official” exhumation of the Romanovs.

IT IS NOW
less than forty-eight hours before the bones are to be put in caskets and moved to St. Petersburg, and I make my way back to the morgue again. Coroner Nivolin stands outside, feigning interest as he fields stock questions from journalists from everywhere: Moscow, Japan, Germany, Greece, England, and of course the gaggle of wannabe Romanov royalist hacks from my homeland, the United States. Since when did we become czarists? Is it the lingering fascination with events whose details are now being discovered eighty years later,
two
dead empires later, the Russian and now Soviet?

Nivolin looks on in barely disguised disgust as conscript soldiers hurriedly drive steamrollers to and fro, laying asphalt along the pitted road leading to his morgue. Another unit practices carrying mock coffins along the side of the same road.

“They can’t rehearse and lay asphalt at the same time, so they have to take turns,” he cynically tells me. “They killed him [the czar] in an inhuman way, and now he’s being buried in an inhuman way.”

The night before the transfer of the remains to St. Petersburg, the deceivingly soft-spoken but always determined Reuters TV producer Nino Ivanishvili manages to coax exclusive TV pictures out of one government official connected to the forensic investigation. The footage reveals that some of the bones from the czar’s entourage have been kept in a cardboard box used to ship a computer printer. In exchange for the TV pictures, shot on an amateur camera, the uniformed man nervously agrees on five hundred dollars as his price for “sharing” such information, muttering a comment to Nino about supposedly using the money to buy embroidered cloths to cover some of the coffins.

The appointed time arrives and the coffins are carried out, one by one. The poorly rehearsed soldiers tilt the czarina’s coffin into a precarious position, nearly dropping it, which elicits gasps. The czar’s funerary motorcade makes its way to Yekaterinburg’s main cathedral. The crowd
is relatively small, and includes the man who took the five hundred bucks for the pictures of the bones being unpacked from the cardboard box. Tears slowly well up in his eyes. Then the Yekaterinburg duties are done, and it is time to move on to St. Petersburg.

There, things go far more smoothly. Boris Yeltsin decides to attend the reburial and delivers an eloquent speech about repentance and the need to close the door on a “bloody century.”

For some of those watching, it might have seemed like bookending the birth and death of the Soviet Empire. Myself, I find succor in remembering Coroner Nivolin’s words: “He [the czar] was killed in an inhuman way, and now he is being buried in an inhuman way.…”

But gradually the prevarications cease. The bones are finally universally acknowledged as his, and with that, reflection and closure finally becomes a possibility.…

A KGB CHURCH AND LATTER-DAY SAINTS

I
t is a late-winter
evening, 2002, and Russia’s patriarch, His Holiness Alexius II, stands in front of the assemblage of icons (iconostasis). Drifting into what for most Russians is the semicomprehensible Old Church Slavonic, he leads a prayer consecrating a small cathedral in central Moscow. It has just reopened after being closed during the Soviet era and used as a warehouse.

Consecrations keep His Holiness Alexius II very busy these days. There are many churches reopening, or being newly built, to accommodate the resurgence of Orthodoxy, or at least the practice of attending services.

But this is no ordinary cathedral. After the sanctification rites are delivered for the Church of Sophia the Divine Wisdom, men dressed in long dark overcoats join His Holiness in front of the iconostasis for a photograph. They are high-ranking members of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the renamed version of the Soviet KGB, which is itself the renamed version of Stalin’s NKVD, which grew out of Lenin’s Chekha, or Bolshevik Party enforcers. Among the men posing with the patriarch is the chief of the ex-KGB, Nikolai Patrushev. His Holiness and the KGB chief exchange gifts.

Was the organization that did the grunt work for the party—carrying out purges, killing millions with a shot to the back of the head, littering the country with mass graves—finding God?

Perhaps, but His Holiness the Patriarch makes it clear that even if there is an element of repentance, there is also something else: He says
he hopes that the Church of Sophia the Divine Wisdom will help Russia’s intelligence services “carry out the difficult work of ensuring the country’s security in the face of external and internal ill-wishers, if not enemies.” A partnership, in other words. The Kremlin will support the church. The church will support the Kremlin. If this is not clear enough, a plaque is placed at the entrance to St. Sophia:

THE CHURCH OF SOPHIA THE DIVINE WISDOM WAS RE-CREATED UPON THE BLESSING OF THE PATRIARCH OF MOSCOW AND ALL RUSSIA AND BY THE ZEAL OF THE FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE

Regardless of the fact that the Soviet state repressed religion and infiltrated the clergy with informers, there is now a new motivation for a church-state union: Unhealthy “sects” are making inroads into Russia all too quickly. The month after St. Sophia’s sanctification, the heads of Russia’s four Catholic dioceses—all foreigners—were effectively deported when they appeared on an FSB blacklist: Russia’s intelligence services even hinted that one was a “spy.” At about the same time, the late Pope John Paul II hosted a live closed-circuit television hookup between the Vatican and worshippers in one of Moscow’s few Catholic churches. (Following the split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy a millennium ago, popes have not been welcome in Russia, or Rus’—the pre-Russian former Slavic incarnations that included present-day Ukraine and Belarus, among other lands.) The metropolitan of Moscow, Kirill (later to become Russia’s patriarch), lambasted the electronic event and even compared it to a sixteenth-century Polish Catholic invasion of Russia.