It doesn't look much like Alix; I thought it was Alexei!
But then I read the caption and you can make out the words. This is interesting because I was just re-watching "Revenge of the Romanovs" yesterday with my mom and they were doing the facial reconstruction over the casts of the skulls but they didn't show the finished products, they only showed them in the act. I thought, 'i wonder what they look like finished?' I wonder why we have not seen this picture earlier?
Interesting how this concludes that Maria is not present.
Griffin, the location of the grave was given by Yurovsky clearly enough so that Ryabov and Avdonin found it on their own. I can't find the exact quote from the Yurovsky Note, but I know it is in 'The Last Tsar' by Radzinsky. It says something like "the bones are located [a number of] versts off such-and-such road in a pit [a number of] arshins deep" or something. I will go look for it now.
peter kurth writes:
And so the hunt for the bones began, along with the vagueness, the half truths, the claims and counterclaims. When the story hit the Western papers in April 1989, Ryabov was pictured like a road company Hamlet, scowling and holding a skull which he claimed was a plaster cast of Alexei's. It was a sign of the general credulity of reporters that they simply wrote this down, without asking questions, without checking facts, without even wondering, apparently, how it came about that a "crime writer" in the Soviet Union, poking into archives and combing the forest with spades, had dug up the tsar unmolested. By his own account, Ryabov spent more than three years searching for relics in the woods outside Ekaterinburg -- it was a closed city in those days, a sensitive defense industry town -- helped only by a small band of unnamed "friends" and "volunteer assistants.” When the moment of discovery finally carne, on May 30, 1979, the group was “rewarded":
We took a water pipe [Ryabov told The Orthodox Word], a few inches wide in diameter, sharpened it and began to insert it over the approximate site of the grave, using a heavy mallet. At first we hit virgin topsoil, undisturbed by human hands. But further down we hit soil which showed evidence of human action.... Soon we made the first find -- the very first one was black green.... It was the pelvic bone of Nicholas II.
They "reached down into the grave” and "touched at, least eight or nine skeletons.”
