The mystery of whether some of Tsar Nicolas II's children had survived
the family's massacre lasted for almost a hundred years. How were their bodies
finally discovered? And why is the discovery still causing controversy?
The Romanovs were the longtime royal family of Russia, with a lineage that dates all the way
back to 1613. But as the 20th century approached, their standing began to dip, and it did so rather
sharply. Tsar Alexander III left the country in an unstable state when he died, having embraced a
repressive ruling style. His son, Nicholas II, was then left to deal with a country that was
spiraling out of control, with people both angry about the past and incensed about the present.
The situation was ripe for revolution, and revolution did indeed arrive, once in 1905 and
then again in 1917. By the time the dust settled, the radical Bolshevik party had come out on top,
preaching the ideals of communism. But there was a problem: what to do with the royal family?
After Nicholas II stepped down from power, the family was effectively placed on house
arrest throughout much of 1917. By some accounts, that period of time actually wasn't too terrible
for the family, and they held out hope for the possibility of asylum or escape. But as
1918 rolled around, their requests for asylum were denied by foreign governments, and they
were instead shuttled around the country to a number of different residences. By April 1918,
the family ended up in the city of Yekaterinburg, essentially held prisoner in an old,
walled-off villa which Bolshevik officers rather ominously called the "House of Special Purpose."
Plans and preparations were actively being made by the Bolsheviks to permanently put
an end to the Romanov line. Still, that was all kept from the family, and on July 17,
1918, they were told that they'd be moving again, only to be taken to the basement,
where they were executed — a brutal and bloody 20-minute process that included guns, bayonets,
knives, and more. By the end, the Tsar was dead, along with his wife and five children.
The Bolsheviks didn't want the rest of the world to know exactly what happened
in that basement in Yekaterinburg. But that didn't mean that they went
on pretending like nothing happened. Instead, they decided on half truths.
Pravda, the party newspaper, announced that they had executed the Tsar. But they
failed to mention the deaths of his wife and young children when they declared,
"Nicholas Romanov was essentially a pitiful figure [...] the personification of the
barbarian landowner, of this ignoramus, dimwit, and bloodthirsty savage."
That decision ended up backfiring. The news was intended as a way to signal that the monarchy
was now in the past, almost like a rallying cry to drum up support for the Bolshevik cause. Instead,
the tsar's death became a huge piece of news on its own, and the revolutionary ideology got kind
of lost. Some people even started to miss the monarchy and wish for it back, possibly spurred
in part by the subsequent murders of more distant Romanov relatives and acquaintances.
If you've heard of the Romanov family, there's probably a chance you know of
them because of the popular myth about Anastasia Romanov — the theory that
the youngest daughter of Nicholas II somehow managed to survive the
brutal execution of her entire family. It even spawned a popular animated film.
"So many lives were destroyed that night. What had always been was now gone forever."
Almost immediately following the disappearance and secret murder of the royal family,
people began to pretend to be surviving members of the Romanov family — a trend that would continue
throughout the entire 20th century — with most of the imposters claiming to be one of
the tsar's two youngest children, either his son Alexei or Anastasia. These actors crafted
colorful tales to explain what had happened, and their stories actually kept peoples' hopes
for a real-life fairy tale to come true. It was all proven to be fiction in the end, but
some of these imposters, notably Anna Anderson, actually garnered sizable numbers of supporters.
Interestingly, as we will see, it would turn out that these rumors were based in part on fact,
suggesting that someone involved with the murders may have spilled the beans.
Following the deaths of the Romanovs in 1918,
years came and went with most people still unsure of the details of what happened and
where the Romanovs were actually laid to rest. But that didn't mean people weren't
looking. The search actually started the very same year that the Romanovs were killed,
but while investigators could piece together some of the events, no remains were found.
No progress was made until the 1970s, when a geologist named Alexander Avdonin started a
secret investigation of his own. Against the odds, while searching with his son in 1979,
he found the Romanovs' remains. He even began digging up the remains
before thinking better of it; the political situation of the Soviet
Union in the 1970s was still sticky, so he played it safe and reburied the bones.
"We swore an oath not to tell anyone what we had
found until the circumstances in our country were right."
But the political climate changed in the 1980s. An announcement was made in 1989,
and two years later, an official team recovered the remains of nine bodies — the tsar, his wife,
three of their daughters, and four of their servants and associates. But that
raised another important question: Where were the other two children?
Perhaps it's unsurprising that the discovery of a mass grave that was missing two of the Romanov
children would end up causing a resurgence of interest in the theory that members of
the royal family had survived. And that was only bolstered by the specification that it was Alexei
and one of the daughters who wasn't buried with the rest of the family. If they weren't there,
then maybe the theory that he or Anastasia had survived was true after all, right?
The theory would be soundly debunked in 2007, though, when searchers at the grave site uncovered
bone shards from the two missing bodies. It took little time after that for the experts to verify
the findings. These were, almost certainly, the remains of Alexei and his sister Maria Romanov,
buried in a second grave not far from the rest of their family, including Anastasia.
"Yes, we have really found the children. And all the experts
we asked to examine the remains confirmed it."
As it turned out, the gruesome journey of
the last members of the Romanov royal family hadn't ended with their death,
instead continuing along a fairly strange path as the Bolsheviks tried to deal with their remains.
The bodies of the Romanovs were taken out to the surrounding forests to be hidden away. They
were stripped of their clothes and jewelry and then disfigured with acid. From there,
they were unceremoniously thrown into a mine, which was to be blown up and subsequently sealed
via grenade blasts. For a while, that was actually where people believed they had been buried.
But as it turned out, the mine was especially shallow, so the grenades didn't really collapse
it in the way that the Bolsheviks had hoped. The bodies of the Romanovs hadn't been fully
buried in the process, and that led to the fear that passersby might be able to
easily stumble upon them. So just a couple hours after putting the bodies in the mine,
the Bolsheviks dug them out again and loaded them back onto the truck.
After the mine failed to collapse and adequately bury the bodies, they were loaded up to be taken
to a new burial location, but even getting to that new location ended up being a problem.
While in transit, the truck got stuck in mud. The solution that the Bolsheviks came up with
at that moment? They removed two of the bodies — Alexei and Maria — burned them,
and then threw them into a shallow grave so that the tuck could continue on with a lightened load.
The rest of the convoy didn't go all that much further, though. The remaining members
of the Romanov family were buried just off to the side of the road,
not all that far away from the two other children. A key clue that
helped searchers find the bodies? One of the proud murderers returned to pose on the spot.
In the 1990s, it was decided that the already discovered bodies would be buried in St. Catherine
Chapel in the city of St. Petersburg, the same place where generations of Russian
tsars had been buried. The official service took place in 1998. A couple of years later,
word also came out that all seven of the Romanovs — Tsar Nicholas II and his
immediate family — would be canonized as saints in the Russian Orthodox religion.
But all of that came with controversy, including questions as to where the bodies should be buried
and doubts about the authenticity of the remains. In fact, at no point during the ceremony did the
church ever explicitly recognize that these were the bodies of the Romanovs.
That controversy never really died down, and it just became all the more complicated with
the discovery of Alexei and Maria's remains a few years later. Once again, the church refused
to recognize them as the Romanovs, and they even refused to bury them with the rest of
the family. Rather, their remains languished in sealed boxes in the State Archives until 2015,
at which point the church did take them, but for analysis, not burial.
Despite the strong circumstantial evidence, some still doubted the remains belonged to
the Romanovs. But detailed analysis of the remains has provided irrefutable evidence.
"We covered everything up straight away but kept the skulls with us,
as we wanted to have them identified."
The remains were compared against the DNA of Nicholas II's brother, as well as a known DNA
sample of Nicholas II, himself, which was sourced from a bit of blood splattered on the tsar's shirt
and subsequently preserved. Further diggings into genetics also compared the DNA of the remains to
indirect descendants of the Romanov family, such as Britain's Prince Philip. If that wasn't enough,
then in 2015, a request from the church even allowed a team to disinter the body
of Nicholas II's father, Tsar Alexander III, just for the purpose of this genetic test.
By 2018, it could no longer be denied that the remains belonged to the Romanovs.
Despite scientific evidence proving that the remains belong to the Romanovs,
one group still denies that science: the church.
Pretty much from the start, the Russian Orthodox Church has refused to acknowledge the bodies
as those are of the Romanovs or to accept the widely recognized narrative of what happened to
them. But they have no alternative explanation. Instead, they have repeatedly stalled for time,
even embracing far-fetched conspiracy theories to avoid acknowledging the facts. At one time,
they even considered the notion that the tomb of Tsar Alexander III had been broken into
and his remains stolen, just to cheat the DNA testing — a theory that was swiftly debunked.
So what's the problem? Politics, unsurprisingly. Significant numbers of Russian Orthodox
practitioners want the Romanov remains officially recognized, and significant numbers want the exact
opposite. It's a lose-lose situation that's guaranteed to court controversy and potentially
prompt a schism; remaining in the gray area of uncertainty might be a way for them to avoid that.
At its heart, the controversy ultimately stems from what to do about Nicholas II's
reputation. On one hand, it's hard to deny the family's deaths were horrific.
The violence in the execution is something that just can't be ignored. Boris Yeltsin,
the president of Russia at the time, summed it up in a speech, saying,
"The Yekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful episodes in our history. By
burying the remains of innocent victims, we want to atone for the sins of our ancestors."
But at the same time, you also can't turn a blind eye to the central role that the
Romanov dynasty played in the Russian Revolution. Nicholas II was far from an effective leader,
his political missteps pushing the country toward growing unrest.
He wasn't an especially popular leader, either, both at the time and in hindsight.
The bad decisions made by the Romanov leaders set the stage for the Bolsheviks to take power,
leading to the rise of the Soviet Union. Weighing that unfortunate
legacy against his murder and the horrifying murders of his wife and
five innocent children is a complicated equation that has no simple solution.