Uncovering Past

UNCOVERING RUSSIA'S PAST

BBC / February 3, 1998

A government commission has recommended to President Yeltsin that the remains of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas the Second, and his family, be buried in the former imperial capital, Saint Petersburg. The proposal came after the commission confirmed that the remains, unearthed near Yekaterinburg in the late 1970s, were those of the Imperial family. The commission recommended that the burial should take place in July, on the 80th anniversary of the execution of the Romanov family by the Bolsheviks, after the Russian revolution of 1917. Allan Little has just visited Yekaterinburg:

I have been to a forest of exquisite beauty where the snow lies still and deep for eight months of the year and where the fine Russian pine grow tall and straight and lovely in the breathless still of the clean, cold air and where the bark of the silver birch gleams brilliant white in the winter sun. And there is a clearing at the foot of a gentle incline where there stands a crude iron cross in the Eastern Orthodox style to mark the place where for 70 years the forest held its impenetrable secret, where the pine and the birch themselves stood as sentinels to keep fast the silence.

On this spot lay the lost remains of the murdered royal family, the last of the Imperial Romanov dynasty. And for all the years that they lay hidden in that lonely frozen grave, so too did the truth about Russia's past and its present also lie hidden. So too did the crimes and atrocities of Soviet rule lie hidden, closed to public scrutiny, closed to philosophical dispute or political contention, frozen beneath the ice of an impenetrable political orthodoxy.

Alexander Avdonin leads us to the place where he first uncovered the truth about the Romanovs. "I began searching here in the 1970s," he says, "it was quite illegal, but I had documents allowing me to carry out geological research. We prayed to God we wouldn't find anything, it was too frightening but we did find them. We didn't know for sure that these were the bones of the Imperial family but they had to be, the emotional impact on us was enormous. Some of us began to run around shouting 'we've found them, we've found them' but after that I was ill for two months."

That was in 1979. Avdonin and his friends swore a secrecy pact and reburied the remains in the same place. For 12 more years the forest guarded the secret it shared now only with them. It was not until 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that Avdonin led archaeologists of a State Commission to the place now marked by the iron cross. And that is when the formal exhumation, not only of the Tsar's remains but of so much of Russia's troubled past truly began.

A single bored policeman scarcely out of his teens stands guard at the door of the room where the remains now lie in the Yekaterinburg morgue. As we enter, the bones of the Tsarina, the Empress Alexandra who was raised in fin de siecle England by her grandmother Queen Victoria, and who spoke to her husband Nicholas only in English because her Russian was so poor, are being laid out. First the skull, then the jaw and then one by one the vertebrae until a recognisable human skeleton is assembled. On an adjacent table, macabrely, the skull of the Emperor himself sightlessly surveys the scene.

Tsar Nicholas, his wife, their four daughters and the heir to the Imperial throne, the haemophiliac Prince Alexei - the youngest of their children - were murdered by a Bolshevik assassination squad in a house in Yekaterinburg where they were being held prisoner in July 1918. The Tsar had already abdicated. Before the November communist revolution and while escape was still possible he had appealed to his cousin George V to whom he bore a striking physical resemblance, for asylum in Britain. The British government refused, fearing to provoke working class agitation and revolutionary sentiment at home. The British Crown had already over hundreds of years accommodated itself to modernity. It had become a constitutional monarchy. The Mountbattens' Russian cousins had not.

Until the end Nicholas had insisted on the prerogatives of absolute autocracy but he lacked the personal qualities of a successful autocrat and so led Russia to catastrophe and lost his throne, his empire, his dynasty and his life. At the place where the murders took place there is a makeshift wooden shrine now where young couples come on their wedding day to lay flowers and drink champagne or vodka. Russia is reclaiming the past that was locked away for so long beneath the forest floor. The Bolsheviks called this place the Square of National Revenge. The house where the family died in a hail of noise and smoke and fleeting terror no longer stands.

In 1977 Leonid Brezhnev, concerned that it was becoming a pilgrimage site and a focus for anti-Soviet sympathy, ordered its demolition. The local Communist party first secretary signed the demolition order. His name was Boris Yeltsin.

Six years of scientific tests are over. The bones have been authenticated beyond scientific dispute. These are the remains of the Tsar, his wife, three of their daughters and four servants. The remains of one daughter and of the Imperial heir are still missing.

Nicholas's ancestors lie in the Peter and Paul fortress in the Tsarist capital, St Petersburg and it is likely that these five will find their last resting place there too. Eighty years after their deaths a Christian funeral is in preparation. The process of canonisation has informally begun. Nicholas has worked his way into the iconography of the Orthodox faith, the ultimate rehabilitation. Is Russia in danger in this lionisation of replacing one skewed version of the past with another? Maybe. The past is being recovered, exhumed, opening itself to scrutiny, to authentication like the bones themselves. In the battle for the new Russia, as in the battle between man and power, memory is a weapon.

Avdonin, who risked the gulag to find the lost truth about the last Romanov, stands on the crisp even snow beneath the lovely silver birch and the fine straight pine and he says: "We lost our memory, we lost our patriotic tradition, we lost our culture. This is not just about the bones, you know. It is about acknowledging a terrible crime, the crime of the cult of personality, of the repressions, of the 1939 pact between Stalin and Hitler. It is about remembering all of that, it is a kind of repentance. We must repent the crimes our ancestors committed. We must concede their guilt. If we do not remember our past then we will repeat its mistakes."