The Romanovs: The Final Chapter Read Online Free Page B

lecture by saying, ‘I personally shot the tsar.’ ”
    Sometimes, Ermakov modified his story. In 1935, the journalist Richard Halliburton visited Ermakov, supposedly dying of throatcancer, in his Sverdlovsk apartment: “On a low, crude Russian bed … piled with red cotton quilts … a huge … fat man of fifty three [was] turning restlessly in his feverish efforts to breathe.… His mouth hung open and from one corner there was a trickle of blood.… Two bloodshot and delirious black eyes gleamed at me.” During a three-hour conversation, Ermakov admitted to Halliburton that it was Yurovsky who had killed Nicholas. His own victim, he said, was Alexandra: “I fired my Mauser at the tsarina—only six feet away—couldn’t miss. Got her in the mouth. In two seconds she was dead.”
    Ermakov’s account of the destruction of the bodies buttressed Sokolov’s assumptions: “We built a funeral pyre of cut logs big enough to hold the bodies, two layers deep. We poured five tins of gasoline over the corpses and two buckets of sulfuric acid and set the logs afire.… I stood by to see that not one fingernail or fragment of bone remained unconsumed.… We had to keep the fire burning a long time to burn up the skulls.” Ultimately, Ermakov said, “we didn’t leave the smallest pinch of ash on the ground.… I put the tins of ashes in the wagon again and ordered the driver to take me back toward the high road.… I pitched the ashes into the air—and the wind caught them like dust and carried them out across the woods and fields.” Back in New York, Halliburton published his interview as Ermakov’s deathbed confession; in Sverdlovsk, however, Ermakov arose from his red quilts and lived another seventeen years.

    In 1976, forty-one years after Halliburton’s book appeared, two journalists working for BBC Television asked new questions about the disappearance of the Romanovs. In their book
The File on the Tsar
, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold challenged Sokolov’s conclusion that, in two days, even with a plentiful supply of gasoline and sulfuric acid, the executioners had been able to destroy “more than half a ton of flesh and bone” and, as Ermakov had claimed, “[pitch] the ashes into the air.” Professor Francis Camps, a British Home Office forensic pathologist with thirty years’ experience, explained to the authors how difficult it was to burn a human body. Fires char bodies, he said, “and the charring itself prevents the rest of the body being destroyed.”Professional cremation, performed in closed, gas-fired ovens at temperatures up to two thousand degrees, can reduce a body to ashes, but this technique and equipment were not available in the Siberian forest. As for sulfuric acid, Dr. Edward Rich, an American expert from West Point, told the authors that with “eleven fully-grown or partly-grown bodies … merely pouring acid on them would not do too much damage other than disfigure the surface.”
    The most glaring forensic discrepancy in Sokolov’s findings, both the Home Office and the West Point experts agreed, was the total absence of human teeth. “Teeth are the only components of the human body which are virtually indestructible,” wrote Summers and Mangold. “If the eleven members of the Romanov household were really taken to the mine, there are about 350 missing teeth.” The West Point expert told them that he had once left several teeth completely immersed in a beaker of sulfuric acid, not for two days but for three weeks. They emerged as teeth. *

    During the Second World War, Sverdlovsk grew from a town to a large city. As the German Army rolled eastward across Russia and the Ukraine, whole factories and thousands of workers were moved behindthe Urals. By the end of the war, Sverdlovsk produced tanks and battlefield Katyusha rockets. After the war, once the Soviet Union acquired the knowledge to build an atomic bomb, secret new towns, ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers,