The Missing Bodies

[Elisabeth]

I would like to hear people's theories about what happened to the two bodies missing from the mass grave found in Pig's Meadow. (N.B. As to the identity of the missing bodies, I find the American forensic experts' arguments the most persuasive - that they belonged to Anastasia and Alexei.)

In the years after 1918, Yurovsky made several conflicting statements that one or two bodies had been burned and the remains buried in a separate, smaller grave. This grave has never been found, despite repeated searches. FOTR suggests that it may never in fact have existed: "Almost certainly, the answer to this conundrum [conflicting and contradictory evidence] is what is most obvious: the remains of Alexei and Anastasia - despite the continued efforts of the Russians to insist on her presence in the Koptyaki grave - cannot be found because they were never there, never burned" (p. 469). The authors do not, however, speculate as to where the missing bodies might have gone.

Do you agree with this conclusion, and if so, what do you think happened to the missing bodies? I am interested in theories that fit the existing facts (and common sense!).
 
One theory that has been offered, in this forum and elsewhere, is that these two bodies simply fell off the Fiat truck during the drive to the Four Brothers and were never recovered. I find this hard to believe, for a variety of reasons:

According to FOTR, there were at least three men from the Ipatiev House in the back of the truck during the drive. I think they would have noticed if two bodies fell out.

According to Helen of Serbia (see FOTR), the Bolsheviks were already searching for a missing grand duchess approximately four hours after the truck carrying the bodies left the Ipatiev House. Surely the first thing they would have done is to retrace their route!
 
Furthermore, it seems somewhat unlikely that anyone else could have come across the bodies in the meantime (for who else would have been awake in the early hours before dawn on July 17, and wandering along Koptyaki Road?). Even if this had happened, the person in question would not have had sufficient time (much less the right equipment along with him!) to bury the bodies right then and there.  
 
Finally, if the bodies were simply left there, undiscovered - the Whites took Ekaterinburg only eight days later, and would surely have found them (or traces of them) during the course of their investigation.  

[rskkiya]

WOW
  Thanks for creating his thread...well I am still under the impression that the bodies were burned - not cremated mind you -but seriously damaged by a  bonfire after the execution. (I read FOTR and sadly I don't remember the section in which they rejected Yurovsky's testimony)
   For my part all of the "testimonies" of Yurovsky that I have read do not differ that significantly from one another-- so I am still pretty persuated by it. I will reread FOTR asap so that I can clarify this all for myself.
    I am not convinced that anyone escaped however.

rskkiya

[LisaDavidson]

It's strange - the more I study this case, the less I feel I know.

For example, I have no opinion as to which sister is missing. It seems most logical to me that it is Anastasia, and only because such a legend about her survival exists. Perhaps those who knew the grave was short a daughter are the source of the legend. It seems to me we will only know for sure who is missing once we find the missing sister and work our way back.

What seems most probable is that on the night of the murders, two bodies went missing - Alexis and one of his sisters. I think the brutality of the murders argues against any sort of long term survival. But, this limited conclusions means the bodies could very well have ended up elsewhere - and not in Pig's Meadow.

[Belochka]

I am curious as to why there appears to be no continuing excavations to locate the two missing skeletons. Could it due to lack of finances, lack of interest or a combination of both?

IMHO I believe that Marie is the daughter who is yet to be found. It is inconceivable to suggest that Alexei could ever have survived. With all the bullets and bayonets flying around in chaotic madness, the trauma that his body would have sustained would result in extensive uncontrolled blood loss which would have been fatal. In life he experienced medical emergencies, but those  events pale to what his body would have sustained in that cellar.

More than likely the two missing skeletons still remain safely in-situ without having their intergrity disturbed by subsequent human interference.

Perhaps one other positive consequence will be that when the remains are found they will yield valuable forensic information.

It must be said that such a finding would completely dispel all mythological claimant intentions.

[Belochka]

why do we have such a hard time accepting the posibility as a fact?
Jeremy

Jeremy, with respect a possibility cannot be a fact!  

[Elisabeth]

I actually have some trouble with the conclusion in FOTR that the burning of two corpses and their burial in a second grave never occurred. It was the only place in the entire book where I found myself in disagreement with Greg King and Penny Wilson. But I thought it was an interesting and intellectually challenging idea, not unsupported by some of the evidence.

I've divided this posting into 2 sections because it is so lengthy.

Part I

To summarize King and Wilson’s presentation of the many conflicts and contradictions in the witness statements about the second grave (of course this can only be a brief summary, and any mistakes are my own):

In his 1920 and 1934 accounts of the murders, Yurovsky states that the bodies of Demidova and Alexei were burnt and buried separately from those of the other victims; in his 1922 account he states that it was only Alexei.

Medvedev-Kudrin and Rodzinsky were not even present at the Pig’s Meadow burial, but repeat in their statements very garbled versions of what they had supposedly heard from others who may or may not have participated.

Ermakov is, as always, a completely unreliable witness whose testimony can be dismissed out of hand. Voikov, like Ermakov, states that ALL of the corpses were burned, a patent falsehood, which again, throws into question whether he was actually present at the second burial in Pig’s Meadow.

Sukhorukov states that the bodies of Alexei and Anastasia were burned, but also states that certain people were present at the burial who demonstrably were not, again calling into question his own actual presence at Pig’s Meadow on the morning of July 19.

What I gather from the above is that, of this entire group of people, we are basically left only with the word of Yakov Yurovsky that two bodies were burned and buried separately from the others. So it seems to me that we have to look at Yurovsky’s track record as a witness. How reliable has he been, up to this point? It would seem, to me at least, that he has been a very reliable witness.

There is independently existing evidence that confirms many of the claims he makes in his 1920 statement.  He says that Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia were wearing "some kind of special corsets" containing jewels; we know from the testimony of others that the girls whilst in Tobolsk sewed family jewels into specially altered brassieres. He does not lie about his failure to conduct the executions in a quick and organized manner. He does not lie about the many problems he encountered in the disposal of the corpses, largely the result of poor planning (mainly Ermakov’s, but by implication, also partly his own). He gives a detailed description of the events on the Koptyaki Road and in the Koptyaki Forest. He gives the correct location of the mass grave in Pig’s Meadow.  I would say that he is an unusually credible witness.

[Elisabeth]

Part II

Can even credible and reliable witnesses make mistakes? Yes. In his 1920 statement, Yurovsky actually gets the number of victims wrong, claiming that there were twelve (!) people, not eleven, shot in the Ipatiev House on the night of July 16-17: Nicholas, Alexandra, Alexei, the four daughters, Botkin, Trupp, a cook named Tikhomorov (sic, Kharitonov), another cook (sic), and a lady-in-waiting (sic, Anna Demidova, the maid). Note that he is so uninterested in the servants that he gets various facts about them completely wrong. He misnames Kharitonov, even though, according to Alexandra’s diary, he had had an altercation with Kharitonov only days before, which had left K. very upset. He assumes that Anna Demidova is a lady-in-waiting, i.e., a noblewoman. He even adds an extra servant, a cook, to the tally of victims.

I actually find it quite believable that Yurovsky, exhausted from having no sleep for a minimum of seventy-two hours, could have mistaken the corpse of Anastasia for that of the empress or Demidova. In his 1920 statement, he writes: "We wanted to burn [Alexei] and A.F., but by mistake the lady-in-waiting [sic] was burnt instead." If he fails to mention burning the corpse of Demidova in his 1922 statement, it could be that he fails to recall her at all, or, vice versa, considers her so unimportant as not to be worth mentioning – not a member of the imperial family, and at any rate, someone he had had burnt "by mistake." In 1934 he does mention the burning of her corpse again, if only in passing. Thus I see no major discrepancy in his three accounts.

The other argument against Yurovsky’s claim is that the corpses were in such a good state of preservation that they should still have been recognizable as individuals by the morning of July 19. Medvedev-Kudrin states that on the morning of July 18, all the corpses at the Four Brothers were in a state of good preservation and easily recognizable, because they had spent the night immersed in the freezing cold water in the mineshaft. They were so well-preserved, according to Kudrin, that all of them appeared as if still "living," their faces even flushed with color. The latter statement strikes me as an obvious exaggeration. (In my opinion, Kudrin’s 1963 account, made forty-five years after the fact, suffers from many such obvious embellishments.) We know from Yurovsky’s 1920 statement that the water in the shaft was only deep enough to cover the first few corpses. Moreover, we know that many of the victims had suffered headshots and could not have appeared "living," even if the water in the mineshaft had washed away all the blood as Kudrin claimed. Olga’s jaw had been broken by a gunshot. According to various witnesses, Maria and Anastasia were both beaten with riflebutts and stabbed with bayonets in the Ipatiev House. Much of the extensive damage to the skull now identified by the Americans as belonging to Maria could only have occurred at the Ipatiev House, because there is no evidence of a gunshot wound to her head.

Finally, we forget that people not as familiar with the family as ourselves often mistake OTMA for each other, and that even more glaring mistakes in identification have been made by the most reputable scholars, people who have made the last Romanovs their area of specialization. In the first edition of "The Fall of the Romanovs," Steinberg and Khrustalev, two very reputable historians, actually mistake OTMA for their much older mother in several photographs.

But, you say, Yurovsky spent sixteen days in the Ipatiev House observing his future victims. I honestly don’t think Yurovsky did anything more than feign a polite interest in his prisoners. I think if he had taken any real interest in them, it would have interfered with the job he had been assigned to do – to kill them. As Dr. Maples once said, in order to commit such mass killings, perpetrators must first dehumanize the intended victims, eradicating their individual traits as human beings and focusing instead on what superficial characteristics they may have in common (social class, race, religion, etc.).

But of course, there still remains the problem of the missing second grave!
 

[Karentje]

Part II

Finally, we forget that people not as familiar with the family as ourselves often mistake OTMA for each other, and that even more glaring mistakes in identification have been made by the most reputable scholars, people who have made the last Romanovs their area of specialization. In "The Fall of the Romanovs," Steinberg and Khrustalev, two very reputable historians, actually mistake OTMA for their much older mother in several photographs.
 

Hi Elizabeth

I just purchased "The Fall of the Romanovs". Which photographs are you referring to? I haven't noticed any mistakes myself, are there different editions or did I mistake OTMA for their mother too:-[?


Karentje

[LisaDavidson]

Karentje: I believe the book that Elisabeth is discussing is "Fate of the Romanovs" and not "Fall of the Romanovs". "Fate" is an exhaustive study of the murders at Ekaterinburg". "Fall" is a study of the fall of the dynasty.

Elisabeth: We might consider Yurovsky a good witness only in a limited sense. He was never (so far as we know) cross examined about the inconsistencies in his collective testimony. He seems good when the physical evidence agrees with his statements - such as the location of the second grave.

However, he has been shown to be a less than reliable witness in the search for the two missing bodies. There have been extensive searches of the Koptyaki Forest and Pigs Meadow locations and to my knowledge, the only thing that has been found is a few trinkets. IOW, we have found little physical evidence to support Yurovsky's testimony about the two missing bodies but for the fact that there were two bodies missing from the Koptyaki Forest grave.

Belochka: My dear, there have been excavations taking place nearly every summer since perhaps 1991, many undertaken (no pun intented) by the organization SEARCH under the direction of Peter Saradanaki (hope I got his name right). There have been American university teams some years. A great deal of time, effort, and money has been spent over the past 13 years on the basis of the Yurovsky note. Few if any results have materialized, but they keep on going.

Whether this is due to Yurovsky lying or due to removal of the remains in the intervening years, we don't know

[ChristineM]

Horrible, nasty subject, but the burning of human remains is virtually impossible unless in very special, supervised circumstances.   Even in the confines of crematoria, the femurs are not completely reduced in the intense, regulated heat.   It is, I am told, virtually impossible to destroy teeth.   The remains require to be ground down. This is in the 21st century and in controlled conditions.   (I once was regaled with the workings of crematoria - during research for a documentary, I was unable to sleep for about three nights...  the delights of the life of a journalist).   I only raise this now because it is pertinent to this subject.  

Hindu funeral pyres in India take hour upon hour of constant tending by numerous people - and this is only to reduce one human body.
 
I once thought the two younger bodies were 'disposed of' first, simply because they were the youngest, therefore the smallest.   But I was wrong.   Alexei grew considerably in height whilst in Tobolsk - he was taller than his father.   Alexandra F also wrote remarking on how fat Anastastia had grown - just like Marie before her.

I'm with Lisa, the more one studies this case, the less one knows.

tsaria

[Pravoslavnaya]

A gruesome but intriguing post, tsaria; thank you for your insights.  So Alexei was in fact taller than his father by the time of the murders?  Where did you find this out?

[Elisabeth]

I started this thread because I wanted to examine the issue of the missing bodies from every angle. I would agree with Lisa: "The more I study this case, the less I feel I know."

Especially since Greg King and Penny Wilson's book is so thoroughly researched and convincing on so many points, I felt (and feel) somewhat dismayed to disagree with them about the non-existence of a second grave. I think this theory is plausible only if you overlook Yurovsky's lack of motive for lying about a second grave and the fact that we have no way of knowing if a second grave was tampered with or destroyed all together in the intervening seventy odd years between 1918 and 1991. There is also the fact that no other plausible explanation has yet been offered for what happened to the two missing bodies (or people).

Regarding Yurovsky: I don't think he had any motive for lying about the second grave, because he seems completely unconcerned in his 1920 Note about any so-called missing bodies. If he was worried about two missing bodies, it's decidedly odd that he would write in this note that he had shot twelve people, instead of eleven. Instead of adding an extra victim who didn't exist, why didn't he subtract one who did?

If Stalin had the first, mass grave opened in 1928, as has been mentioned as a possibility elsewhere in this forum, then it's likely he had the second grave opened and/or destroyed at the same time. Given Stalin's penchant for malicious mischief-making (such as redrawing all the boundaries of various Soviet republics so that ethnic conflicts there would simmer in perpetuity), I wouldn't put it past him to have ordered the remains of Alexei and Anastasia to be destroyed or buried elsewhere. Especially since the Anna Anderson case was making such a stir in the West in the 1920s, Stalin might very well have decided to satisfy his own curiosity whilst leaving an enduring historical mystery for future generations. Certainly the Anastasia/Anna Anderson controversy continues to be divisive to this day.

The issue of the missing second grave, and the whole saga of the Romanov remains, reminds me of the story of the Princes in the Tower. Their bodies were missing for several centuries, hence the claim that they had never been killed in the first place, and the subsequent rise of various pretenders like Perkin Warbeck. But since the real princes were never seen again after the reign of Richard III, most contemporary historians assumed, rightly as it turned out, that they had been murdered.

[ChristineM]

Dear Prasnoslavnaya

I cannot remember where I read this, it could have been here, it may have been in Russia - which just goes to show, one should not write anything without first of all checking sources, and to be honest, I cannot think where to start.   However, one indication where you can see they were of similar height is the well known photograph of father and son sawing wood in the yard of the Governor's House, Tobolsk.

Their bravura never fails to surprise me - imagine a young haemophiliac weilding a saw like that.   I know this is very simplistic in so far as this illness is concerned, but nonetheless, one slip and....

An old friend of ours in Tsarskoe Selo (now deceased) told us stories of the imperial children whom she saw almost daily.   Her father worked in the Alexander Palace.   I remember her telling me how Alexei was allowed to ride his pony bareback using only reins.   She said, after they discovered the true nature of his illness, they recalled this, and were quite shocked at what they regarded as irresponsibility.

To return to the Tsarevich's height - a medical friend has told me that sudden spurts of growth in the long bones is not uncommon in sufferers of haemophilia.

If I find my source - I'll post it.

Thanks

tsaria

[Alexa]

Hi Elizabeth

I just purchased "The Fall of the Romanovs". Which photographs are you referring to? I haven't noticed any mistakes myself, are there different editions or did I mistake OTMA for their mother too:-[?

Karentje

It was the first edition of Fall of the Romanovs.  There's a picture of Olga in bed (at least, she looks like Olga to me), and other of Marie (again, that's who she looks like to me) with Nicky.  Both girls are labled as Alix.

Alexa

[Alexa]

Horrible, nasty subject, but the burning of human remains is virtually impossible unless in very special, supervised circumstances.   Even in the confines of crematoria, the femurs are not completely reduced in the intense, regulated heat.   It is, I am told, virtually impossible to destroy teeth.   The remains require to be ground down. This is in the 21st century and in controlled conditions.   (I once was regaled with the workings of crematoria - during research for a documentary, I was unable to sleep for about three nights...  the delights of the life of a journalist).   I only raise this now because it is pertinent to this subject.  

Hindu funeral pyres in India take hour upon hour of constant tending by numerous people - and this is only to reduce one human body.
  
I once thought the two younger bodies were 'disposed of' first, simply because they were the youngest, therefore the smallest.   But I was wrong.   Alexei grew considerably in height whilst in Tobolsk - he was taller than his father.   Alexandra F also wrote remarking on how fat Anastastia had grown - just like Marie before her.

I'm with Lisa, the more one studies this case, the less one knows.

tsaria

Not to be gross, but this backs up what tsaria said.  

I have a family member who requested he be cremated when he died, but insisted that the crematorium grind up what bones were left behind so he was all dust.  He had apparantly seen the remains of another family member after cremation and was horrified to see bits of bone mixed with the ashes.  My point is, that even if the 2 missing bodies were burned to the point of getting crematorium results, there would have been  bits left over, hands down, no questions asked.  I doubt under the circumstances Yuroksky was facing, he would have been able to have the bodies burned to a cremated body's state.  If the bodies were burned, then there's something left of them somewhere.  Personally, I stay on the fence with this one, but is a topic that is quite intersting.

Alexa