The Discovery and Identification

How the bodies disposed of in 1918 came to light and were identified. The main grave at Porosenkov Log was located by Geli Ryabov and Alexander Avdonin in 1979, kept secret through the Soviet years, and officially exhumed in 1991; a second grave with the two missing children was found nearby in 2007. A series of genetic studies (Gill and Ivanov 1994; Coble 2009; Rogaev 2009) identified the remains as the imperial family and their retainers to a high degree of scientific confidence, and in the process closed the long-running Anna Anderson “Anastasia” affair. This file reports the science; its ecclesiastical status is treated separately.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

The Discovery, 1979–1991

The killers had disposed of the bodies in two places in the Koptyaki forest (see The Murder of 16–17 July 1918), and the Yurovsky Note described the sites. Working partly from that document and from local knowledge, the filmmaker Geli Ryabov and the geologist Alexander Avdonin located the main burial pit at Porosenkov Log in 1979. In the repressive Soviet climate they reburied what they had found and kept the discovery secret for a decade, revealing it only as the Soviet system loosened (Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, 1995, the standard narrative of the discovery and identification). The grave was officially exhumed in July 1991, yielding nine sets of remains.

The nine were provisionally reckoned to be Nicholas, Alexandra, three of the four daughters, and four others — the physician Dr. Botkin and three servants. Two family members were missing from this grave: the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters, consistent with the Yurovsky Note’s statement that two bodies had been burned and buried apart (Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, 1995; King and Wilson, The Fate of the Romanovs, 2003).

The First Genetic Identification, 1994

The identification of the 1991 remains was carried out chiefly by an international team including the British forensic geneticist Peter Gill and the Russian scientist Pavel Ivanov, using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. Their results were published as Gill, Ivanov, et al., “Identification of the remains of the Romanov family by DNA analysis,” Nature Genetics 6 (1994): 130–135. The study established the family group by sex testing and short-tandem-repeat (STR) profiling (showing a family of two parents and three daughters), and confirmed maternal lineage by mitochondrial DNA:

  • The Empress Alexandra and the three daughters were matched by mtDNA to a living maternal-line relative of Alexandra, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who shares the same matriline descending from Queen Victoria (Gill et al., 1994; Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, 1995).
  • The Tsar Nicholas’s identification was complicated by a mitochondrial heteroplasmy (a mixture of two mtDNA sequences), which was resolved by comparison with living Romanov maternal relatives and, definitively, by the 1994 exhumation and testing of Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Georgij Alexandrovich, who showed the same heteroplasmy (this resolution is discussed in Massie, 1995, and in the later Rogaev and Coble studies).

The 1994 study concluded, to a high statistical confidence, that the nine remains were the imperial family (less the two missing children) and their companions.

The Two Missing Children, 2007–2009

In August 2007, amateur searchers found a second, smaller burial a short distance from the main grave, containing burned bone fragments of two individuals — consistent with the Yurovsky Note’s account of two bodies destroyed separately. Two independent genetic studies published in 2009 identified these as the two missing children:

  • Evgeny Rogaev et al., “Genomic identification in the historical case of the Nicholas II royal family,” PNAS 106 (2009): 5258–5263; and
  • Michael Coble et al., “Mystery Solved: The Identification of the Two Missing Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis,” PLoS ONE 4, no. 3 (2009): e4838.

Both teams concluded that the 2007 remains were the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters, and that, with the 1991 grave, all seven members of the family were now accounted for (Rogaev et al., 2009; Coble et al., 2009). The same work identified the hereditary disease: Rogaev’s team found in the remains the mutation for hemophilia B, the “royal disease” that had afflicted Alexei (Rogaev et al., “Genotype Analysis Identifies the Cause of the ‘Royal Disease,’” Science 326, 2009).

[Disputed: which daughter is in which grave. The two teams agreed that all seven were identified but reported the identity of the daughters differently. The Russian team (Rogaev) identified the daughter among the 2007 remains as Maria (so that Anastasia lay in the 1991 grave), while the American AFDIL team (Coble) concluded the 2007 daughter was Anastasia (so that Maria lay in the 1991 grave). The discrepancy turns on the difficulty of distinguishing sisters, who share the same maternal mtDNA and very similar profiles, from fragmentary remains. It does not affect the central finding — that all seven family members are accounted for between the two graves — but it is a genuine, unresolved detail. Cf. Rogaev et al., PNAS 2009; Coble et al., PLoS ONE 2009. This collection reports the disagreement and does not assert which daughter is which.]

The Close of the Anna Anderson Affair

The genetic work also closed the most famous imposture of the century. For decades a woman known as Anna Anderson claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, survivor of the massacre; her claim was litigated and believed by some. In the 1990s, DNA from tissue attributed to Anderson (who had died in 1984) was compared with the Romanov profiles and with a maternal relative of her suspected true identity, the Polish factory worker Franziska Schanzkowska; the tests excluded any relationship to the Romanovs and matched the Schanzkowska line (Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, 1995; Gill et al.’s and subsequent analyses). With the 2007–2009 identification of both missing children, no member of the family survived Ekaterinburg, and the survival legends were definitively closed as history.

The 1998 Burial

On 17 July 1998 — the eightieth anniversary of the killing — the remains exhumed in 1991 were interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, the traditional burial place of the Romanov emperors, in a state ceremony attended by President Boris Yeltsin (Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, 1995, anticipating the burial; the 1998 interment is widely reported). The ceremony was, however, shadowed by the Moscow Patriarchate’s refusal to affirm the remains as authentic relics — the subject of the companion file. The 2007 remains (Alexei and the missing sister) have not been formally interred with the others, pending the resolution of the ecclesiastical question.

See Also

References

  • Gill, Peter, Pavel L. Ivanov, et al. “Identification of the remains of the Romanov family by DNA analysis.” Nature Genetics 6 (1994): 130–135. (The 1991 remains; mtDNA match to Prince Philip; the Nicholas heteroplasmy.)
  • Coble, Michael D., et al. “Mystery Solved: The Identification of the Two Missing Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis.” PLoS ONE 4, no. 3 (2009): e4838. (The 2007 remains as Alexei and a sister; identifies the missing daughter as Anastasia.)
  • Rogaev, Evgeny I., et al. “Genomic identification in the historical case of the Nicholas II royal family.” PNAS 106, no. 13 (2009): 5258–5263. (The 2007 remains; identifies the missing daughter as Maria.)
  • Rogaev, Evgeny I., et al. “Genotype Analysis Identifies the Cause of the ‘Royal Disease.’” Science 326, no. 5954 (2009): 817. (Hemophilia B in the remains.)
  • Massie, Robert K. The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. New York: Random House, 1995. (The discovery, the 1991–94 identification, the Georgij heteroplasmy resolution, the Anna Anderson refutation.)
  • King, Greg, and Penny Wilson. The Fate of the Romanovs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (The grave and the two-body disposal.)