Found Bones of Last Czar, Family, Soviet Writer Says

The skull and bones of Russia’s last czar, previously believed to have been destroyed by acid in an attempt to prevent his veneration by loyal subjects, were found a decade ago by a Soviet writer who did not dare disclose the discovery until now, the weekly Moscow News reported Wednesday.

Czar Nicholas II was summarily executed along with his wife, Alexandra, their five children and four servants by the Bolsheviks in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg, now called Sverdlosk, on July 16, 1918, but their bodies were never found.

Geli Ryabov, a writer of popular detective stories, who was intrigued by the mystery surrounding the deaths, told the avant-garde newspaper that he found the czar’s skeleton and the remains of the other victims in an unmarked burial mound in a swamp outside Sverdlovsk in 1979.

Although Ryabov in his interview with Moscow News did not directly address the recurrent speculation that one or more of the czar’s children somehow escaped and fled into exile, he spoke of finding the number of bodies in the grave that he had expected, clearly implying that they included all four daughters and one son.

There was no official confirmation of Ryabov’s claims, but he has a reputation for integrity in Soviet literary circles. He said he has written a two-part series on the case that will be published in the next issues of a new Soviet magazine Rodina (Motherland), a popular historical journal put out by the Communist Party newspaper Pravda and a publication unlikely to accept claims on so sensitive a subject without rigorous checking.

Even 70 years later, the killings of the royal family seem certain to have a profound impact on the way the Soviet Union views its history and the political lessons to be drawn from it.

“Great efforts were taken in 1918 to conceal the identity and location of the bodies,” Ryabov told Moscow News, “because, even then, the moral dubiousness of the execution was obvious. And they wanted to prevent the tomb from possibly becoming a place of pilgrimage.”

This episode, like other sensitive points in Soviet history, had to be fully explored and understood, Ryabov said.

“There must be no blank spots and no black spots in our history,” he said. “Throwing light on them is our repentance before history itself. These events happened, and people should know about them.”

Refusing to accept the long-established theory that the bodies of the czar, his wife, the servants and even the children had been dismembered, thrown into a mine and drenched with sulfuric acid to ensure that they could never be found, Ryabov searched for three years before he found the burial mound outside Sverdlovsk.

“Even for me,” Ryabov said, “it was not difficult to identify them--the number of bodies, the character of the wounds, false teeth that had been described many times in foreign publications and the remnants of smashed ceramic pots of sulfuric acid around them.”

But the murder of the czar and his family was still so sensitive--more than 60 years later--that Ryabov felt he could say nothing.

“I could not publish what I had found--times were different then--and no (specialist) would agree to identify the skulls formally,” he said.

In 1977, the old Sverdlovsk house where the czar and his family were held after the Bolshevik Revolution was blown up by local authorities who were concerned that many visitors regarded it as almost a religious shrine.

And even today, despite the political liberalization under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Ryabov said he is not certain that he will share his discovery with others.

“I am prepared to show the remains that I found, as well as the grave itself, to any panel of experts,” he told Moscow News, “but only on the condition that permission is given for a decent burial befitting human beings and Christians.”

After searching closed state archives, as well as the archives of the Interior Ministry and apparently the KGB, as the Soviet security police are now known, Ryabov says flatly that the execution was ordered by the Central Executive Committee, then the highest body of the young Soviet state, and not, as official histories have said, by the Ural regional government, which feared he was about to be freed by advancing armies of the anti-Communist White Guard.

Although V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, had warned the Central Executive Committee that “the murder of children would leave stain on the Russian Revolution and strongly compromise it in the eyes of the world,” Ryabov said that archives show the committee “voted for the execution.”

Western historians have long contended that the czar’s death was ordered by Moscow, probably by Lenin himself, but until now, virtually all evidence that might support such an argument has been suppressed here.

With help from the son and daughter of Yakov Yurovsky, the Bolshevik leader who commanded the execution squad from the Cheka political police, with the report of the White Guard officer who initially investigated the murders and with unprecedented access to state and police archives, Ryabov said he was able not only to find the grave but piece together the czar’s last days.

After killing Nicholas, his family, the servants and even the children’s pets in a cellar in Ekaterinburg, the Cheka squad loaded the bodies onto a Fiat truck and took them to a mine shaft.

Ryabov said, however, that, after they arrived at the mine, the squad commander decided it was not suitable. Clothes, jewelry, a pet dog and a finger cut from the czar’s hand were left there, apparently as a decoy, and the bodies were loaded back on the truck.

But the vehicle got stuck in a swamp, and the squad commander decided to dump the bodies there. The victims’ faces were smashed with rifle butts to prevent identification and sulfuric acid was poured over them to hasten decomposition so that not even their skeletons would be left.

“The acid was absorbed by the soil,” Ryabov said, “and most parts of the bones remained untouched.”

Most historians dealing with these events based their assessments on the report of the White Guard officer who methodically investigated the evidence, and concluded that the bodies had rapidly decomposed after being doused with the acid.

But the failure to find the corpses led to the years of speculation that the czar or members of his family had escaped into exile. Over the years, numerous claimants surfaced. Most claimed to be grand duchesses, daughters of the czar.

The most credible and controversial was Anna Anderson, whom some still believe to have been the czar’s youngest daughter, Anastasia. A nameless woman who was fished half-dead from a Berlin canal almost a year and a half after the Romanovs disappeared, Anderson was questioned by surviving Romanovs and by Russian court officials. Some staked their reputations on “Anastasia,” while others dismissed her as a fraud and a lunatic. Ingrid Bergman played a fictionalized version of her life in an Oscar-winning film.

A mercurial, enigmatic woman to the end, she died in 1984 in Charlottesville, Va., the wife of a college professor she had met in the 1960s.

Times staff writer Patt Morrison, in Los Angeles, contributed to this report.