Pig's Meadows Grave Questions

[AGRBear]

The citizens of Ekaterinburg had built up quite a bit of resentment at their city's becoming famous as the site of the Romanov massacre.  There was widespread hope that any bodies found would prove not to be the imperial family or -- better yet -- that no bodies would be recovered at all.

Apparently there were fears that the attempt to recover the bodies would be blocked either by political intervention or by public unrest.  The digging was done under armed guard, with hoardes of local onlookers on the periphery throughout the dig.

One also has to remember that the national political situation was very unstable in the summer of 1991.  This dig was undertaken just a month before the coup against Gorbachev.  And Boris Yeltsin, who was soon to become Russia's first President, was an Ekaterinburg native who had torn down the Ipatiev house in 1977 to prevent its becoming a pilgrimage site.  (Although he had done this on Moscow's orders and reportedly against his own inclinations, I doubt anyone was sure of his motives or the pressures he was under that summer fourteen years later.)

My guess is that the people who were interested in recovering the bodies felt they had a quickly-narrowing window in which to recover as much from the site as they could.

The climant around the first "public excavation" in July of 1991 is interesting.   

What was happening around  the second dig in Oct. 1991?  Because it was the second dig that they brought in the bulldozer and then sifted through every inch of the tons of soil to find the rest of the bones. 

I don't have the right books with me to produce the answer for this myself, sorry.

AGRBear

[Elisabeth]

What was happening around  the second dig in Oct. 1991?  Because it was the second dig that they brought in the bulldozer and then sifted through every inch of the tons of soil to find the rest of the bones. 

I don't have the right books with me to produce the answer for this myself, sorry.

AGRBear

If you want to know my honest opinion, the climate around the so-called second dig in Oct. 1991 was INCOMPETENCE. And it's never helpful in Russian history to underestimate the overall incompetence of the government, or shall we say here, officialdom.  "In this country we can't even hang people properly," as one Russian intellectual complained in the nineteenth century about the bungled hangings of certain Russian revolutionaries. These executions went all wrong, and the people being executed had to bear being "executed," then resurrected, and executed all over again, twice, simply because the Russian executioner in charge didn't know how to tie a noose properly. Can you imagine dropping through the scaffold on a noose, which begins to strangle you, enough to cause you extreme discomfort but not enough to kill you - and then you're suddenly being dragged up to the scaffold again, only in order to be dropped through it a second time - and ohmygod, once again the noose doesn't work? You're strangling, but not dying... how does that feel? Only the third time did the executioner finally manage to get the noose right. The prisoner was finally killed. But only after undergoing unimaginable mental, emotional and physical tortures - not because of some "conspiracy," but simply because the Russian authorities didn't know what they were doing.

So AGRBear, IMHO you keep looking for conspiracies where there is only incompetence. Yurovsky screwed up. The Russian authorities in July 1991 screwed up again (hey, big surprise), and, if we're to believe other reports, screwed up yet again in October of that year, in bulldozing the site of the mass grave in Pig's Meadow. Bit personally, I would have been surprised if the Russian officials had done anything differently. It's not in the tradition of Russian officialdom to be competent and thorough. If you doubt my word, just read Gogol's great novel, Dead Souls, or his play, The Inspector General . Then you'll see that official incompetence is part and parcel of Russian culture. Just my two cents.

[AGRBear]

Okay, let's discuss the Russian "INCOMPETENCE".

How far to we take their "INCOMPETENCE"?

I'm just talking about the bones at this time , so let's not  jump off into another direction and get all tangled up into  switches, conspiracies, etc. etc.....

SOOOOoooooo, do we just talk about the number of bones missing  which were found from July to Oct 1991?

Or,  can we  take Elisabeth's  incompetency  blanket and place it over  the entire excavations  from 1918 to Oct 1991?

AGRBear

[helenazar]

AGRBear, IMHO you keep looking for conspiracies where there is only incompetence.

I think Elisabeth hit the nail right on the head. IMHO, even if the Russian officials really REALLY wanted to pull off some sort of a conspiracy, even a tiny one, they wouldn't have been able to. AGRB, go to Russia - experience it for yourself and let's see what sort of tune you sing. But come to think of it, forget it...

[AGRBear]

AGRBear, IMHO you keep looking for conspiracies where there is only incompetence.

I think Elisabeth hit the nail right on the head. IMHO, even if the Russian officials really REALLY wanted to pull off some sort of a conspiracy, even a tiny one, they wouldn't have been able to. AGRB, go to Russia - experience it for yourself and let's see what sort of tune you sing. But come to think of it, forget it...

I know the Russian officials are NOT the lame brains you are making them out to be.


AGRBear

[helenazar]

I know the Russian officials are NOT the lame brains you are making them out to be.

Who said they were "lame brains"? There is a big difference between bureaucrats  and "lame brains"... Look it up.

[AGRBear]

AGRBear, IMHO you keep looking for conspiracies where there is only incompetence.

I think Elisabeth hit the nail right on the head. IMHO, even if the Russian officials really REALLY wanted to pull off some sort of a conspiracy, even a tiny one, they wouldn't have been able to. AGRB, go to Russia - experience it for yourself and let's see what sort of tune you sing. But come to think of it, forget it...

I must have misunderstood  part of your post which I placed in bold print.   Sorry.

And,  let me remind you, the topic at this time is about the number of bones missing?  Unless you think there was some kind of conspiracy which prevented the excavators in 1991 from finding all the bones which should have been in the mass grave.  I could make that #3  on the list,  if you'd like.  Or ...not.  Let me know.

AGRBear

[_mysterious]

I really don't have anything much to contribute, but I want to say thanks for posting up all this information Bear it is very enlightening. Also I read earlier in this thread that the bones were confirmed through DNA testing. Can anyone please give me a link or reference to these reports? 

[LisaDavidson]

I really don't have anything much to contribute, but I want to say thanks for posting up all this information Bear it is very enlightening. Also I read earlier in this thread that the bones were confirmed through DNA testing. Can anyone please give me a link or reference to these reports? 

Most of the testing done happened before the internet took off. Therefore, the majority of the scientific reports are actually published in academic journals. You can find a great deal of information in King and Wilson's Fate of the Romanovs, Massie's The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, and more recently, some excellent articles in the European Royal History Journal.

[Belochka]

I really don't have anything much to contribute, but I want to say thanks for posting up all this information Bear it is very enlightening. Also I read earlier in this thread that the bones were confirmed through DNA testing. Can anyone please give me a link or reference to these reports? 

Most of the testing done happened before the internet took off. Therefore, the majority of the scientific reports are actually published in academic journals. You can find a great deal of information in Massie's The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, and more recently, some excellent articles in the European Royal History Journal.

Thank you Lisa! 

To _mysterious:

Here is the latest work on this subject which Helen and I wrote last year:

http://www.geocities.com/mushkah/Nagai.html  or

http://www.searchfoundationinc.org/Nagai-Russian.html (in Russian)

This discussion paper was published in two editions:

Part I:  European Royal History J. vol 9.5, October, 2006, pp 24-32    and

Part II:  Published in European Royal History J. vol 9.6, December, 2006, pp 7-11

and more recently will be published in Dr Avdonin's journal in the Russian language publication "Romanov Readings" (Ekaterinburg)

Thank you for your interest.

Margarita Nelipa

[AGRBear]

According to the first news reports about the new possibility of the grave of Alexei and
Marie/Anastasia being found 29 July 2007 about 60 km from the mass grave, that
the early articles state:

>> The remains were found while digging up an area indicated in a document that had remained classified until recently and records a detailed account of the execution by the firing squad commander, Yakov Yurovsky...<<

Today,  when I followed a thread to an article written on 31 Aug. 2007,  I noice the words  "recently" is no longer being
used about Yurovsky's note.

http://english.pravda.ru/news/russia/24-08-2007/96318-russian_heir-0

>>The spot where the remains were found this summer appears to correspond to a site described in writing by Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the family's killers, said Pogorelov, deputy head of the archaeological research department at a regional center for the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in Yekaterinburg. <<

I thought this was interesting.

AGRBear

[AGRBear]

Thought this quote should be repeated here along with photos:

Moscow Procurator (criminalistics), Vladimir Soloviev at the excavation site

The three bullets of different calibre found at the site

An assortment of bone fragments

[AGRBear]

The excavation site courtesy of Russian Channel Four news service

Thanks Belochka for the photos.

AGRBear

[AGRBear]

It should be generously acknowledged that a local resident from Ekaterinburg, Леонид Вохмяков (Leonid Vokhmyakov) was the first person to discover the skeletal remains.

The first skeletal bone he found was a juvenile pelvic bone.

Leonid Vokhmyakov (on the right) and Sergei Plotnikov

Another view of the location:

[AGRBear]

....[in part]....

Two of the three skull fragments