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By Root 2156 0

when they came across the planking Yurovsky wrote about. Then came bones and entire skeletons, a skull with bullet holes and traces of rifle butt blows … fragments from the containers for the sulfuric acid that was supposed to disfigure the bodies beyond the point of recognition, and pieces from the rope used to raise the bodies out of the first mine shaft.… Then they hastily brought out the remains in carbine cases. A hole was left at the grave site, which quickly filled with rain. A muddy pool. Then the soldiers threw dirt and turf over it. In the local hospital, in the morgue, in the so-called soil room, where disfigured corpses go, they placed the tsar’s family. Forensic medical experts cleaned the dirt off the bones and skulls, dried them, and assigned inventory numbers. The martyrs were transformed into an archeological find.”

“You mean you think this was really the tsar’s grave?”

“I think they discovered the grave Yurovsky wrote about. Were the remains of the tsar and his family in it? Or had the remains been burned and was this only a false grave?

“If, however, it is proved that this is the tsar’s family, then the first expert opinions published recently become very interesting: of the eleven people shot, only nine skeletons were found in the grave.

i1.42. Diagram of the grave near the village of Koptyaki presumed to contain the remains of the tsar’s murdered family. The plan shows the disposition of the corpses, fragments of the jars that contained the sulfuric acid, and segments of the rope that had been wound around the corpses. The diagram was drawn by participants in the 1991 grave opening.

“The remains of Alexei and one female skeleton are missing.”

After this visit I started receiving astonishing “presents” from him. Although the entire Ekaterinburg investigation was cloaked in strictest secrecy, he sent me a detailed sketch of the corpses’ placement in the grave. Later, photographs of their skulls turned up on my desk. This skull with the bullet hole—is this the enchanting Olga? And this one with the gap where the nose had been—is this our hero, the last Russian tsar?

My guest phoned me one last time. “The excavations are still ongoing. They’re searching for the missing pair. The experts figure he couldn’t have burned the two bodies without leaving any trace at all. That would have taken too much wood, too much gasoline, and too much time, none of which Yurovsky had. Despite all that, they have yet to find them.” He laughed. “They’re still missing.”

“But what if they are found?”

“That would mean the rescued pair did not survive for long. We can only assume they died from their wounds after all and then were left by their rescuers in the surrounding woods, only to be discovered later by my friend Peter Ermakov, who had been so unnerved by their disappearance. Then he really may have burned them, or just buried them due to lack of time.”

I heard him laugh once again. “Although knowing what this glorious Chekist was like, we have to consider another possibility: When he didn’t find them he may have burned two similar bodies, just to be safe. In those years the Cheka had a wide assortment of bodies on hand. So those experts will have to do a painstaking job.”

Enough! Enough puzzles, enough of these endless mysteries and resurrections!

But again from nonbeing—the specter of the Ipatiev house, and the grand duchesses on their knees by the wall, and the hands holding revolvers poking through the doorway, and the sovereign’s forage cap rolling away toward the wall, and he himself keeling over backward. Lord have mercy!

Will I never finish this book?

Finally! After all those years of vain attempts to storm the Central Party Archives without ever being allowed to work there! Still, with help from my readers, I did manage to find out what was in the documents I needed.

Take this intriguingly empty envelope, for instance….

In 1989, after my first article appeared in Ogonyok, I received an exceedingly curious letter from an unidentified reader:

“In the days when I was working in the Lenin archive