The Romanovs: The Final Chapter by Robert K. Massie Read Free Book Online

some of them went to church and asked the priest to say a
panikhida
, a special service of prayer for the Imperial family and for themselves. (Not wholly trusting the priest, they worked the names Nicholas, Alexandra, Alexis, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia into a much longer list, hoping the priest would assume these were their own aunts, uncles, and cousins.) The service did not greatly calm Avdonin, who, for two months afterward, felt ill.
    In the days following, the skulls were cleaned with water and examined. They were gray and black; in areas, etched traces of sulfuric acid were evident. The central facial bones of all three skulls weremissing. In the left temple of one of the skulls, there was a large, round hole, as if made by a bullet. The left lower jaw of another skull held an extensive bridge of gold teeth. Ryabov knew that Nicholas II had had bad teeth, and he assumed that this skull had belonged to the tsar. (Later, it turned out to be that of the servant Anna Demidova.) He suggested that one of the other skulls belonged to Alexis, and the third to one of the four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, or Anastasia.
    Facing the question of what to do with the skulls, they decided to divide them up. Avdonin kept the skull presumed to be that of the tsar, and Ryabov remembers how this dialogue proceeded: “Avdonin said that, considering the fact that he, a resident of Ekaterinburg, was the organizer of this expedition, he had the right to keep the emperor’s skull with him.” Ryabov took the other two back to Moscow, hoping to use his connections with the Interior Ministry to carry out discreet, unofficial testing at the Forensic Service of the Ministry of Health. He was rebuffed. For a year, he kept the skulls in his apartment in Moscow, then, having failed to find any scientist or laboratory which would help him, he brought them back to Ekaterinburg. Avdonin had done nothing with the skull he had kept; it had spent the year hidden under his bed.
    In the summer of 1980, Avdonin and Ryabov, frustrated and still afraid of the consequences of their discovery, decided to return the three skulls to the grave. They were placed in a wooden box with a copper icon and returned to the site. The men dug again into the grave. This time, they uncovered a new skull, which they briefly brought to the surface. This skull had teeth made of white metal; Ryabov assumed it must be that of Demidova, whose false teeth might well have been made of inexpensive steel. (Later, he learned that the skull belonged to the empress and that the “cheap, white metal” he had seen was platinum.)
    Before returning the box and its three skulls to the earth, Avdonin and Ryabov again discussed at length what they should do with the information they had discovered. They could not tell anyone; it was not a time in Soviet history conducive to interest in—let alone sensational news about—the Romanovs. Three years before, the Ipatiev House had been bulldozed. “We swore an oath that we would nevertalk about this until circumstances in our country had changed,” Avdonin said. “And, if these changes did not happen, we would pass along all of our materials and information to the next generation. We could only leave it to our heirs. Ryabov didn’t have any children. That meant there were only my children. Therefore, we decided that this history would pass to the next generation through my oldest son.”

    In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died, followed quickly to the grave by his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and gradually began the policies of
glasnost
(openness) and
perestroika
(reform). At the beginning of 1989, Geli Ryabov, believing that the time had come to reveal the historical secrets he and Avdonin were keeping, attempted to contact Gorbachev “to ask for his help on a government level so that all of this could be properly handled.” Gorbachev did not reply, but