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

fragments of the story leaked out to the editor of the liberal weekly
Moscow News
. The editor pursued Ryabov. On April 10, 1989, an astonishing interview appeared in that paper. The next day, every major Western newspaper carried the story that, ten years earlier, Soviet filmmaker Geli Ryabov had found the bones of the Imperial family in a swamp near Sverdlovsk.
    Ryabov is a short, slender man with a narrow, deeply tanned face, dark brown eyes, white hair, and a white mustache. His manner is nervous; his fingers drum when someone else is talking. Unlike Avdonin, whose stare is hard and voice implacable, Ryabov frequently looks away, speaks softly, and never interrupts. Appearing on television, he told his audience, “I am a typical proletarian. My father was a commissar in the Red Army during the Civil War, and therefore his hands were steeped in blood. My mother was a simple peasant woman. I am now a believer and a monarchist.” He said that he had unearthed three skulls and showed photographs of the skulls and of the excavation site. His effort to find them, Ryabov said, had taken three years. “Great efforts were made in 1918 to conceal the identity and location of the bodies,” he continued, “because, even then, the moral dubiousness of the execution was obvious.” Nevertheless, he said that he wasconvinced of the authenticity of his findings. “Even for me,” Ryabov said, “it was not difficult to identify them.” Despite Gorbachev and
glasnost
, he said he was not ready to share his discovery with others, and he did not reveal the exact location of the burial site. “I am prepared to show the remains that I found, as well as the grave itself, to any panel of experts,” he told the
Moscow News
, “but only on condition that permission is given for a decent burial befitting human beings and Christians.”
    The announcement created an international furor. Ryabov was believed and disbelieved, praised and denounced. But one curious aspect of his revelation was that at no point in these interviews, or in a subsequent long article he wrote for
Rodina
(Motherland), did Ryabov mention the name of Alexander Avdonin.

    “My reaction was horror,” Avdonin said, remembering how he felt when he learned that Ryabov had broken his vow. “It is true that in 1989 change had arrived in our country. And I understood that Ryabov is a writer and couldn’t pour out his heart in meaningless articles and letters. Before he gave his interview and published his story, I visited him. He told me that he was writing about this, and he showed it to me. I liked it; I told him it was good. But I also told him that he should hold on to his article for a while and not publish it just yet. We should wait and see which direction our politics would go.”
    When Ryabov decided to go ahead, did he ask Avdonin’s permission? “No,” said Avdonin, “and his announcement didn’t even mention that other people were involved. To this day I still don’t understand why he did that.”
    Ryabov’s response was that Avdonin did not want to be mentioned because his wife was working as an English professor at an MVD academy in Ekaterinburg. “It still was dangerous for him,” Ryabov explained. “He didn’t want publicity. He thought it was still a bad time to release this information.” Ryabov, therefore, in deciding to go ahead, resolved to take all of the risk—and all of the credit.
    In one respect, Ryabov did follow advice Avdonin had given him long before. Ryabov’s article in
Rodina
, appearing three months afterhis
Moscow News
interview, indicated the location of the burial site. However, as Avdonin had suggested, his description pinpointed a spot half a mile away from the actual site. One day after copies of this magazine appeared in Sverdlovsk, heavy machinery arrived in the forest, dug up the earth around the false site, and carried away all the soil. “KGB,” according to Avdonin.
    Avdonin and Ryabov no longer speak to each