Page 34 - All About History - Issue 33-15

Murder In The House Of Romanov

THE

LAST

SECRET

The final resting place of the
Romanovs remained unconfirmed
formorethan70years
Talk of the Romanov murders was a taboo subject in the
Soviet Union. Still, in 1976, movie producer Geli Ryabov
and the ethnographer Alexander Avdonin set out to find
the graves. They had spoken to Yakov Yurovsky’s son,
Alexander, who passed on an essay that his father had
written on his execution of the family and the subsequent
disposal of the bodies. They had also read the findings of
Nicholas Sokolov, who was commissioned to investigate
the Romanovs’ fate in 1919, and a diary written by a local
Bolshevik official, Pavel Bykov, published in 1926 under
the title The Last Days Of Tsardom.
In May 1979, Ryabov and Avdonin found human bones
in the Koptyaki forest, near the Isetsk factory, about 12
miles from Ekaterinburg. They removed three skulls.
Fearing the consequences of their discovery, however,
they kept their findings quiet and in the following year Striking workers in Saint
they re-interred the skulls. Ryabov eventually admitted Petersburg on the first day of
their secret in 1989. the February Revolution, 1917
Two years later, with the support of Boris Yeltsin,
a group of archaeologists began working on the site
and nine bodies were exhumed. The archaeologist Dr This torrent became a flood, and by the start
Koryakova had exhumed bodies from many sites but, she of March, 170,000 soldiers were mingling with
told the Sunday Times, she had never seen remains ”so
badly damaged, so violated.” The executioners had used the insurgents and clamouring for change. The
acid on the bodies to try and hide their identities. revolution was in full swing. The members of the
There should have been 11 bodies, however, but only duma, the elected legislature, then established a
nine were found, and forensic investigations concluded
that Alexei and Maria’s bodies were missing. For a while, temporary government having already persuaded
some argued that the missing female was Anastasia, the army generals that the tsar must abdicate.
fuelling rumours of her survival. In July 2007, the final two He duly obliged. Two forces brought about his
bodies were discovered 70 metres away from the mass downfall: the mass mobilisation of the workers and
grave, and DNA testing concluded that they were indeed
Alexei and Maria. soldiers, and the political machinations of a middle-
The Russian Orthodox Church never recognised the class parliamentary opposition.
remains as those of the royal family, and when they were “The collapse of the autocracy,” says
buried in Saint Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Cathedral
in 1998, the priest avoided speaking their names as historian Steve Smith, “was rooted in a crisis of
he read the funeral rites. In September 2015, Russia’s modernisation.” During the latter half of the 19th
investigative committee reopened the murder case after century, the Russian state worked tirelessly to keep
the church demanded further testing of the remains. The
reasons for the church’s scepticism remain a perennial up with the military and economic development of
source of debate. the western powers. “The government hoped that
it could carry out modernisation while maintaining
tight control over society,” writes Smith. “Yet the
effect of industrialisation, urbanisation, internal
migration and the emergence of new social classes
was to set in train forces that served to erode the
foundations of the autocratic state.”
This erosion was concentrated in the emergence
of an industrial proletariat “snatched from the
plough and hurled into the factory furnace,” in
Trotsky’s famous words. Concentrated in large
numbers for the first time, they emerged as a
collective with considerable political clout.
As Smith points out, the workers’ new urban
lives offered them education and cultural diversity
while also exposing them to the “subversive
political ideas of Social Democrats and Socialist
Tsar Nicholas and Revolutionaries. The wretched conditions in
members of his family which workers lived, the drudgery of their work
shortly before their murder
and their pitiful wages heightened their sense of
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