If the information is verified and the DNA tests are conclusive as expected, this ends the mystery once and for all. The Czar and his family were all murdered on that July night in1918. Anastasia did not survive and escape into the West, and the DNA tests on the genetic material of Anna Anderson that proved she wasn’t Anastasia is further confirmed.
I will note one thing here and it is an outgrowth of the tabloid mentality that was so prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. These supermarket newspapers often made claims that couldn’t be verified, naming experts in foreign lands and providing those experts with degrees from equally vague universities. And this is not to mention the nonsense that circulates on the Internet.
Here we’re dealing with a man living in the region with a name that looks like it was invented for the humor it provides. I believe that this mystery has been solved and I believe it was solved with the DNA tests conducted on Anna Anderson and with the discoveries in the Russia archives and in the Russian fields in the 1990s.
So, there is really little doubt. Anna Anderson kept the story going during her life and though many thought we would never learn the whole truth, science, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and amateur archaeologists have given us the answer. Anna Anderson wasn’t Anastasia. The Czar and his family were all murdered and then buried in two graves that were hidden to prevent them from becoming a rallying point for opponents of the Communists. Another of the mysteries of the 20thCentury didn’t survive very long into the 21st.
In Search of… Anastasia — Part 3
YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Nov. 25) — On the outskirts of this burly industrial center, off a road like any other, on a nowhere scrap of land — here unfolded the final act of one of the last century’s most momentous events.
A short way through a clearing, toward a cluster of birch trees, the killers deposited their victims’ bodies, which had been mutilated, burned and doused with acid to mask their origins. It would be 73 more years, in 1991, before the remains would be reclaimed and the announcement would ring out: the grave of the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, and his family had been found. But the story does not end there.
Russia's Czar Nicholas II and his family (seen here) were detained and killed almost 90 years ago during the Russian Revolution. In 1991, the family's remains were found with the exception of two people.
Eleven people were said to have been killed that day in July 1918 on Lenin’s orders. Just nine sets of remains were dug up here and then authenticated using DNA. The remains of the czar’s son and heir, Aleksei, and one daughter, whose identity is still not absolutely clear, were missing. Did their bones lie elsewhere, or could it actually be that they had escaped execution, as rumor had it for so long?
Only in the past few months have these questions dating from the Russian Revolution in 1917 apparently been resolved here, and only by a group of amateur sleuths who spent their weekends plumbing the case. In fact, it appears that the clues to what happened to the two children were always there, waiting to be found. All that was needed was to listen closely to the boastful voices of the killers.
Their accounts are in secret reports in Soviet-era archives, one of which offered the most tantalizing hint: a single phrase in the recollection of the chief killer that seemed to suggest where the two bodies might have been deposited (Anastasia seen here).
“All of them wanted to leave a trace in history, for they considered that this was a kind of heroic deed,” said Vitaly Shitov, who lives in the area and undertook a review of the testimony to hunt for the remains. “They wanted to promote their roles.”
Following that wisp of a clue that summer, Mr. Shitov and other amateur investigators went to where the other remains had been found — and they kept walking. Away from the road, about 70 yards from the first burial ground, is a slightly elevated area among the trees.
It is there that the bodies of Aleksei, 13, and his sister were apparently consigned by the assassins.
The amateurs found the bones, many of them charred by fire, scattered among bullets and pieces of jars that held acid used to disfigure the bodies. These fragments appeared similar to those from the first grave.
So it seems that for all the years since the first discovery, even as people made pilgrimages to the site and wondered what had happened to Aleksei and his sister, their remains were hidden in the trees only a short stroll away.
Scientists in Russia and the United States are testing the new finds extensively. The sister is believed to be Maria, 19, though that is not entirely settled.
Others long conjectured that the sister was Anastasia, 17, a theory that fed a belief that she survived. (A woman named Anna Anderson was one of several who over the years claimed to be Anastasia, but DNA testing later disproved her.)
If, as expected, results of DNA tests on the two sets of remains are conclusive, they would put to rest many of the doubts that have arisen in Russia and worldwide about the inquiries into what had happened to the royal family.
Among the most skeptical has been the Russian Orthodox Church, which has never recognized the authenticity of any of the bones here, in part because it said that the missing remains raised questions about whether the nine sets were authentic.
Among some Russians and foreigners alike, the fate of Aleksei and his sister drew intenseinterest in recent years, as if the inability to find their remains and give them a proper burial was a final affront to the royal family by the Bolsheviks. People looked for bones all over Yekaterinburg, which is in the Russian heartland, 900 miles east of Moscow, on the divide between Europe and Asia.
They painstakingly went over the events of July 17, 1918, when the killers knifed and gunned down Nicholas II, his wife, five children, his doctor and three servants in the basement of a house where they were being held after Nicholas was forced to abdicate the throne. It was not easy determining what had occurred — the efforts to dispose of the bodies were poorly planned and completely inept. Subsequent recollections in the Russian archives are sometimes seen as contradictory.
The killers wanted to conceal the bodies so their graves would not become rallying points for the czar’s supporters. They first dumped them in a mine shaft, then moved them to the burial site off the road.
In recent years, the mine was searched for the missing two sets of remains. People also periodically hunted in the immediate area around the grave where the first set of bones was found.
Then Mr. Shitov and his colleagues decided to scrutinize a statement by the chief killer, Yakov Yurovsky, in the archives. Yurovsky related how he had set aside two corpses, believing that if they were burned and buried separately they would confuse royalists who later might be seeking 11 bodies, not nine.
But how separately? The amateur investigators focused on a Russian phrase that Yurovsky used to describe the sequence of events in the second burial. The phrase — “tut zhe” — can mean “nearby,” “right here” or “right now.” It had often been interpreted as indicating that the second grave was next to the first.
But now a different thought arose. From the context, the experts wondered whether Yurovsky meant that the grave was in the area, but not very close to the first. They also presumed that to burn the bodies he needed to find a place away from the wet ground near the road.
Working weekends this summer, they began searching away from the first grave and road, and first found the remnants of the bonfire that was apparently used to burn the two bodies.