Blood Will Tell
By Joseph Finder
Oct. 22, 1995
IT's remarkable, if you stop to think about it, that the fate of Russia's last tsar and his family, brutally massacred by the Bolsheviks in 1918, is still being chronicled in the pages of today's newspapers. Just a few weeks ago, on Sept. 26, it was announced that the remains of tsar Nicholas II and his family-which now lie on metal tables in a small room in a morgue in Ekaterinburg-would at last be interred in the traditional resting place of the Romanovs, the imperial family vault in St. Petersburg, in the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, next February.
Behind this declaration lies a tangled, extraordinary tale of intrigue. It is the subject of a masterful and enthralling new book, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, by Robert Massie, the writer and historian whose bestselling Nicholas and Alexandra (1967) was largely responsible for (or guilty of, some say) introducing the West to the faded glamour and doomed-romantic mystique of the last reigning Romanovs.
Shortly after midnight on July 17, 1918, tsar Nicholas II, his wife, the empress Alexandra, their son, four daughters and four family retainers-all of whom were being held prisoner by the Bolsheviks in a private home in Ekaterinburg in the Urals-were awakened, told to dress quickly and ordered to go down to the basement of the house. There the family was arranged in two rows-for a photograph, they were told, to quell rumors that the family had escaped. Suddenly, 11 men armed with revolvers burst in and began firing. The entire operation, from the first shot to heaping the corpses onto the back of a truck, took 20 minutes.
What happened next? . . . Well, here, as they say, the plot thickens. For decades the accepted version was this: The Bolshevik executioners set out for an abandoned mine shaft in the woods 14 miles from Ekaterinburg, where in the waning hours of darkness they carefully dismembered the bodies, burned them in a great bonfire fueled by gasoline, and dissolved the remaining bones with sulfuric acid.
It was hard to believe that 11 bodies-a half-ton of flesh and bone-could have been obliterated so utterly, leaving no traces, not even teeth, which are virtually indestructible. Yet no bodies were found. The mystery was compounded by the Soviet government's peculiar reluctance to admit the truth. The Kremlin confessed that the tsar had been executed, but made no mention of his family, even going so far as to reassure foreign governments that the rest of the family was safe and might even be granted freedom.
Were it not for the thawing of the Cold War, the truth might have remained hidden in the murk of the Soviet past. In 1976, two Russians in Ekaterinburg began to search for the missing bones and were amazed to dig up three skulls. Only in July 1991, amid a changed political atmosphere, were nine skeletons at last excavated from a shallow grave.
In chronicling what ensued, Robert Massie has constructed a narrative as gripping as a well-wrought murder mystery, told in vividly realized, densely atmospheric scenes, rich with moments of grim fascination. We see one forensic scientist, for instance, handling Nicholas II's skull and hearing something rattling around inside; he peers in to discover a shrunken object the size of a pear: the desiccated brain of the tsar.
Establishing that the bones really did belong to the Romanovs was a matter not just of high-tech DNA analysis but of sensitive diplomacy. The Russians shrewdly calculated that by handing the samples to the British for analysis they'd ensure the cooperation of the British royal family: They needed a vial of blood from Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II's husband, who is the grandnephew of Empress Alexandra. Prince Philip's blood enabled the scientists to match the mitochondrial DNA of Alexandra and her daughters (mitochondrial DNA is passed down unchanged from mother to daughter). The prince was happy to comply; it was thought in Buckingham Palace that this gesture might be a way to make amends to the Russian people and the surviving Romanovs. (In 1917, King George V had refused to admit his cousin, Nicholas II, and his family, into England, for fear that the unpopularity of the Russian tsar would tarnish the British monarchy-a crude political calculation that cost the Romanovs their lives.)
Identifying Nicholas's remains proved even more difficult. A distant relative of the tsar was located, living in Toronto, but he refused to contribute a sample of his blood to the British scientists because of what England had done to the tsar's family. Finally, in July 1994, the tsar's younger brother, Grand Duke George, was exhumed, enabling DNA tests to confirm the identity of the tsar. Curiously, two bodies remain missing. One belongs to the tsarevich, Alexei; the other is one of the daughters-some say Anastasia, some say Marie. Yet the evidence demonstrates that there were no survivors.
MASSIE calls his account the "final chapter," which may be a bit hasty: Not all of the important questions have been settled. One is the question of whether the execution of the imperial family was personally ordered by Lenin, as most serious students of Russian history have long assumed. It's not merely an academic quibble. In his monumental 1990 history of the Russian Revolution, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes argued that the Ekaterinburg massacre was "uniquely odious" and a deeply symbolic prelude to 20th-century mass murder and deliberate genocide. In a purely strategic sense it seems oddly pointless, since if it were done to instill terror in the newly minted Soviet masses, why didn't the Bolsheviks proclaim what they had done for all the world to hear-rather than denying it for years? Pipes believes that Lenin's regime instead committed the massacre in order to bind the wavering Bolshevik rank and file in "a bond of collective guilt"-sort of the way you're not a "made man" in the Mafia until you've rubbed someone out.
Until the late 1980s, the official Soviet version was that the provincial Ural authorities made the decision to execute the family-and told Moscow, after the fact, what had happened. Robert Massie, however, bluntly states that the execution of the Romanovs was, from the beginning, "approved by Moscow." He may well be right, but he sidesteps the debate. Far more useful here is a new collection of documents, annotated with lucid analysis by the Yale historian Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev of the Russian Federation's State Archive. The Fall of the Romanovs contains several important, never-before-published accounts of the assassination. In it, Steinberg and Khrustalev argue quite persuasively that even the most recently released evidence is "circumstantial" and "indirect at best." They hesitantly conclude that it's likely that Lenin did not give the order.
But there may be more to come. In his 1992 book, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, the Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky discloses an intriguing account by a member of the Kremlin guard who recalled personally carrying to the telegraph office a message from Lenin-ordering the assassination. So where is this telegram, if indeed it exists? Somewhere in still-sealed Soviet archives, this smoking gun may yet be buried, and with it the solution to at least one remaining mystery of the Romanovs.
Joseph Finder writes often about Russia. He is the author of "The Moscow Club," "Extraordinary Powers," and the forthcoming "The Zero Hour."
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