The Romanov Conspiracy (2 page)

—GREGORY ANTONOV, ON ANNA ANDERSON, ONCE REPUTED TO BE THE TSAR’S YOUNGEST DAUGHTER, ANASTASIA, WHO ALLEGEDLY SURVIVED EXECUTION AT THE HANDS OF HER CAPTORS

1

EKATERINBURG, RUSSIA

I believe that the greatest secrets lie buried and only the dead speak the truth.

And in a way that was how I came to be in the woods that morning when we found the bodies. It was raining in the City of Dead Souls, a heavy downpour that drenched the summer streets.

“Traffic isn’t bad this morning. Thirty minutes, no more,” my Russian driver said as our Land Rover skirted imposing granite buildings, the remnants of a grander civilization long since past.

I sat back and watched the old imperial city flash by. Named in honor of Catherine the Great in 1723, Ekaterinburg lies in the shadow of the Ural Mountains. The landscape resembles the rugged beauty of Alaska—thick woods filled with wolves and bears, deep ravines and snowcapped peaks. Rich ore mines contain the greatest treasures in the world: platinum and emeralds, gold and diamonds honeycomb the soaring mountain ranges that lie beyond this sprawling Siberian city.

As my Land Rover left Ekaterinburg and drove past heavily forested birch slopes, I snapped open the leather briefcase on my lap and plucked out a file. The label on the blue cover said:

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS: EKATERINBURG FORENSIC ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG DR. LAURA PAVLOV, FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST, JOINT DIRECTOR

I reviewed the thick clutch of pages, the results of my work for the last three months. This was my first visit to Ekaterinburg and our team
came from all over: forensic archaeologists, scientists, and students from America, Britain, Germany, and Italy; and of course our host, Russia. The brief of our cooperative venture was simple—to dig in the forests for evidence of mass executions during the Russian Revolution’s Red Terror.

Many thousands perished, not least the Romanovs, the Russian royal family—the tsar and tsarina, and their four pretty daughters and their youngest son, thirteen-year-old Alexei—shot and bayoneted to death, their skulls smashed by rifle butts and their corpses doused in sulfuric acid.

The Ipatiev House, where they were held captive, was known locally as the House of Dead Souls. But the Reds executed so many victims, their bodies dumped in mine shafts and unmarked graves in the vast forests outside Ekaterinburg, that the locals coined their city a new name: the City of Dead Souls.

What I hadn’t counted on was the heat and the mosquitoes. Siberia is an icebox in winter but during its brief, hot summer the temperatures can soar. The forest comes alive with flies and mosquitoes. The heat makes the trees drip with sweet-smelling resin and the fragrant perfume drenches the air.

The rain stopped as my driver turned onto a narrow, worn track, rutted and muddy from the movement of heavy vehicles. The Land Rover headed toward a collection of temporary huts and heavy canvas walk-in tents erected in the middle of a clearing in a birch forest. A painted wooden sign said in English and Russian:

THIS SITE IS

PRIVATE PROPERTY

NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY

Something else I hadn’t counted on that summer’s morning as we pulled up beside one of the tents. I came to these resin-scented woods to exhume the ghosts of the past. Yet absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the bizarre secret that I was to stumble upon when the frozen Siberian earth offered up its dead.

For with the dead came truth.

And with truth came the first whispers of the most incredible story I have ever heard.

I stepped out of the car and tore open the entrance flap into my tent. I went to sit behind my work desk as my dig supervisor, Roy Moran, came in. “Hey, baby.”

Memphis Roy we call him, and he always called me
baby
. In Memphis, everyone calls everyone else
baby
. The fact that a woman was in charge of the dig didn’t make any difference—if I’d been a man, Roy still would have called me
baby
.

Roy’s a big, bony, no-nonsense guy and one of the best in the business. I tore open my briefcase, ready to attack some paperwork, and said, “I thought you were supposed to be digging shaft number seven this morning.”

“Baby, I sure am.” Roy stood there, hands on his hips and a little out of breath. The look on his face was a cross between excitement and puzzlement. He raised the grimy Tigers baseball cap he always wore, wiped sweat from his forehead, and grinned. “Turns out seven may just be our lucky number.”

“Spit it out.”

“We went down as far as we could and hit a peaty layer of near permafrost. But we’ve found something, Laura. I mean
seriously
found something.”

I threw down my pen. Roy wasn’t a man to get wound up about anything. But at that moment he seemed energized, delight bubbling from him like an excited twelve-year-old. “Tell me,” I said.

“Hey, baby, you really need to see this for yourself.”

I followed Roy through the scented woods. He walked slowly, his muscled legs picking a way through a path of rain-drenched ferns and old fallen trees. He said, “The shaft mouth goes down about sixty feet. It’s pretty deep.”

The entire clearing was crammed with mining equipment, wooden staves, and scaffolding, and dotted with a bunch of trucks and SUVs.
“Why do I feel an
and
coming on? You still haven’t told me what you’ve found.”

Roy grinned, not changing his pace, his excitement infectious. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead and his eyes sparked. “Baby, it’s a woman. We believe there may be another body down there, too, but it’s too deeply buried to see what we’ve got. Who knows? There might even be more.”

I felt excited as we moved between clumps of silver birch trees and halted at the mouth of a mine shaft. I smelled the rich, earthy brown scent of peat. The shaft was a hole in the ground, about eight feet square, the sides buttressed with thick wooden planks. One of several mines we explored during the dig, looking for any evidence we could find of artifacts from the Romanov era, when much of this region was a killing ground.

On the night of July 16–17, 1918, in Ekaterinburg, the Romanov family—then the world’s wealthiest royals—vanished. Eyewitness accounts suggested that the entire family was massacred.

But for whatever reasons the Bolsheviks chose not to confirm their deaths and rumors persisted that some if not all of the family had escaped execution. There were even suggestions of secret plots to rescue them from their imprisonment in Ekaterinburg. Reports flourished for years that one or more of the tsar’s daughters and their brother, Alexei, had escaped death.

The family had sewn precious stones—diamonds and other gems—into their underclothing, in the hope that such valuables would come in useful in the event of their escape. It was believed those same precious stones had impeded or prolonged their deaths.

Such stories had held me spellbound in childhood. No matter what the truth, like so many others fascinated by the mystery I
wanted
to believe Anastasia and Alexei escaped.

The mystery deepened and decades later on separate occasions, digs outside the city uncovered the remains of six adults. Among them was believed to be the tsar, his wife, and two of his daughters. DNA tests affirmed the likely identities by a possible blood connection to the British royal family.

But the discovery was shrouded in some controversy. Many experts believed the bones belonged to the Romanovs. But just as many didn’t, citing among other reasons the fact that countless royal relatives were executed in the region and that the bones could have been theirs.

A later dig in a forest pit west of Ekaterinburg discovered two more sets of human remains. DNA tests suggested that they belonged to the tsar’s missing daughter and son, Anastasia and Alexei. But one of the sets of remains was never completely proven to be those of Anastasia—a
probability
existed, but it couldn’t go beyond all doubt. And so the tests were branded as being inconclusive by some scientists and hardened doubters within the Russian Orthodox Church. It left a nagging feeling that the mystery persisted, that the puzzle was somehow still unsolved.

Above the shaft mouth our engineers had rigged up a motorized winch with an old harness chair, driven by an electric generator. The scent of peat wafted up. I said to Roy, “You mean bones, or a complete skeleton?”

“I mean a woman. She’s complete, mummified in the permafrost, and she’s perfectly preserved by the bog peat and the cold.”

I felt a raw tingle of anticipation down my spine. I leaned my hand against one of the silver birch trees, the bark bleached white by the sun. “How old?”

“At an educated guess and from the way she’s dressed, we’re talking the Romanov period.”

Roy went down first. He descended with a wave of his hand as the motorized harness whirred him down into the dark pit. A few minutes later the harness returned empty. I climbed aboard and strapped myself in.

For the last month working at Ekaterinburg we’d unearthed a bunch of material: rust-covered Mosin-Nagant rifles, green-corroded copper coins, spent ammunition cases, a pair of eyeglasses, even several caches of silver and gold tsarist ingots, along with personal effects and jewelry. So many wealthy families with tsarist connections had fled here during the revolution, hoping to escape the bloodshed, but the Reds caught up with them.

Not all the victims were wealthy. My own past lies buried in these woods. Long before I saw Ekaterinburg I knew about this city by the snaking, broad banks of the Iset River, where my grandmother Mariana lived as a young girl. She was eleven when the October Revolution’s Red Guards invaded her city. Her family were hardy
mujik
s
—
tough Russian peasants—who worked backbreaking hours digging ore from the icy permafrost, the rock-hard peaty Siberian earth that remains frozen even in summer.

Three of Mariana’s brothers were executed in the forests beyond the town, including her beloved Pieter, barely fifteen. Their crime? They protested when the Reds seized their small mining company, a ragged enterprise that barely fed their family of twelve. Lenin didn’t believe in personal ownership.