Investigation into the royal case. Experts have established that the “Ekaterinburg remains” are not Tsar’s

What is the official investigation and scientific examination hiding in the case of the murder of the family of the last Russian emperor?

"The world will never know what we did to them..."

Commissioner Peter Voikov

(answering a question about the circumstances of Nikolai’s deathIIand his family)

The results of an unprecedented 24-year investigation into the belonging of the “Ekaterinburg remains” to the family of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas should soon be summed up II, shot in Ipatiev’s house on the night of July 16-17, 1918. The Patriarchal Commission and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church supported a comprehensive anthropological and historical examination. High-ranking scientists in Russia and other countries are studying molecular genetic and other data from the bones allegedly buried by the murderer of the royal family, Yakov Yurovsky, in a place called Porosenkovlog to make a final verdict on their authenticity.

Researchers were first brought to this location where the remains were found (on the Old Koptyakovskaya Road) by a note from Yurovsky, in which he describes in detail where and how he buried the corpses of the royal family. But why did the malicious killer give a detailed report to his descendants, where should they look for evidence of the crime? Moreover, a number of modern historians put forward the version that Yurovsky belonged to an occult sect and was certainly not interested in the further veneration of holy relics by believers. If he wanted to confuse the investigation in this way, then he definitely achieved his goal - the case of the murder of Nicholas II and his family under the symbolic number 18666 has been shrouded in a halo of secrecy for many years and contains a lot of contradictory data.

The burial commission, the head of which in 1998, for unknown reasons, was appointed by a former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, according to the estimates of today's researchers of the remains (in particular, Bishop Tikhona Shevkunova), performed her work in bad faith and committed many violations in her research. After this, at the request of the Orthodox public in 2015, President Vladimir Putin a decree was given to conduct a re-examination of the Ekaterinburg remains, involving highly professional experts in the case.

Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, in his recent report, described in detail how exactly the work of experts is carried out: samples for molecular genetic examination are sent to several similar researchers at once, after which final conclusions are drawn about the results. The work of the commission is carried out behind closed doors, in an atmosphere of strict secrecy. To avoid leakage of information, members of the commission signed non-disclosure documents, which also worries many Orthodox Christians.

It is known that in order to ensure the objectivity of the examination, an autopsy of the king’s grave was also recently carried out AlexandraIII to take samples of biomaterial from his skull. Despite the fact that the procedure was carried out with all the rituals provided for by the Orthodox Church - memorial services and other prayers, the moral aspect of this action is questioned by Orthodox believers. And in general, anthropological and genetic examination is not welcomed by the people of God in the study of relics.

The Orthodox are afraid that they will end up with results that are incompatible with their ideas, because on Ganina Yama, where tens of thousands of pilgrims flock every year on Tsar’s Day (July 17-18), miracles and healings occur. According to believers, this is where the grace of God is clearly present. In the event of a “transfer” of the holy place where the relics were found from Ganina Yama to Porosenkov Log, believers will be, in a sense, lost.

“Our religious procession will be divided in two - some of the pilgrims will go from the Church on the Blood to Ganina Yama, while the other will go to Porosenkov Log,” the Orthodox community sadly jokes.

In addition to the religious problem of analyzing the Ekaterinburg remains, it is of a legal and cultural nature. Many circumstances indicate that the murder of the royal family is an act of human ritual sacrifice. The four-digit inscription in the basement of the Ipatiev House is an encrypted message left in accordance with cabalistic rituals. However, for some reason the modern investigation diligently ignores this fact.

“In the lifetime edition of the book (by the first investigator in the case of the murder of the royal family) Nikolai Sokolov there is a subtle hint at the ritual nature of the crime in the description of the four-digit inscription in the Ipatiev basement. There is no such hint in the posthumous edition,” says the historian. Leonid Bolotin, who has been researching this topic for 20 years.

“After many years of studying materials about the regicide, I believe that the regicides used Jewish rituals, not Hasidic or Pharisees, but Sadducean rituals. And the postcard with a sacrificial rooster with the head of a sovereign in the hands of a Hasidic rabbi was created precisely by the Sadducees, the world bankers, in order to turn the arrows of regicide on the dark Hasidim.

The Ekaterinburg regicide rituals are fundamentally different from the Hasidic human sacrifices known from the Saratov, Velezh cases and other high-profile murders, which are described by the famous ethnographer, writer and military doctor IN AND. Dahl. According to Hasidic rituals, one should not destroy or hide the victim, but must leave it. As you know, they did not do this with the bodies of the royal martyrs - they were burned. This is rather reminiscent of the burning of human victims in ancient Carthage.

The Sadducees, for their conspiracy purposes, used the Phoenician (Carthaginian, Hebrew) alphabet, and the four-character inscription in the Ipatiev basement was made in Hebrew letters,” notes Bolotin.

It is worth adding that the criminal case of the murder of the royal family has now been resumed and expanded, and its ritual nature (raising little doubt among the Orthodox public) is one of the working versions.

“Ritual killings are happening all over the world. If someone denies them, he is simply an idiot who believes in the “official” media. There are known ritual murders of Christians by Jews who are now canonized by the church - for example, a baby GabrielBialystok and others. If we recognized the murder of royal martyrs as ritual, and with it the fact that Lenin-Blank And Trotsky-Bronstein involved in satanic rituals - this would completely change the situation in the understanding of the events of October 1917, in the political life of the country. We would see what forces were really behind the revolution, we would realize that they were far from atheists.

Look what is happening now - how many media outlets are involved in ensuring that these remains are recognized as royal relics. A huge amount of material and human resources are involved... and it is unlikely that all this was done in the interests of truth, in the interests of Russia », - the publicist is convinced IgorFriend.

Regarding the expert opinion on the remains, all citizens who respect the history of our country have every right to express doubts and ask questions - after all, we are talking about the holy relics of the Sovereign, canonized by the Church of the last Russian emperor. Fraudling the results of this study would be akin to a national crime.

“It is possible that another anti-church provocation awaits us. Most Orthodox Christians do not want to identify the Ekaterinburg remains with the royal ones. Problems in the examination began with a gross violation of the rules for examining bodies. They were dug in unsanitary conditions. The purity of the experiment could have been violated, the historian said PeterMultituli at the scientific conference “Ekaterinburg remains: where is the truth and where is the fiction?”, which took place on June 18, 2017.

The very first investigation of the “white” investigator Sokolov, who was certainly interested in revealing the truth, showed that the bodies of the martyrs were destroyed using gasoline and sulfuric acid. There are witnesses, for example, a forester Rednikov, who discovered burnt bones, a finger that belonged to the empress Alexandra Fedorovna, sebaceous masses, fat left over from burning bodies. Witnesses saw 640 liters of gasoline, 9-10 pounds of sulfuric acid, brought by order of the Bolshevik Voikova, also involved in this case...

Supporters of the version about the authenticity of the Yekaterinburg remains rely primarily on a note from the murderer of the royal family, Yurovsky, who deliberately set everyone on the wrong trail. He told in detail where and when he buried the corpses of the royal family. Not only did he not try to hide this information, but he also disseminated it as much as possible. For what?

Judging by the actual data, on the night of July 17, Yurovsky remained in the Ipatiev House after the bodies of the murdered were taken away. He sent for people to clean up the blood in the room. It was not difficult for Yurovsky to destroy the remains of the corpses. The events in the forest were most likely completely invented by him.

Yurovsky was also not in Porosenkov Log on July 19 and did not bury the corpses. Many of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the “burial ground” of the royal family there are false.”

By the way, Peter Multatuli himself is the great-grandson of the cook Ivan Kharitonov, murdered in the Ipatiev House along with the royal family, and devoted a significant part of his life to discovering the truth about this fateful event.

At the same conference, a former investigator for particularly important cases of the Main Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation addressed the audience Vladimir Solovyov, to whom in the 90s of the last century was entrusted with the conduct of the criminal case into the murder of the royal family, which consisted of 26 volumes.

According to Solovyov’s official conclusion, the “ritual version” of the murder has been ruled out, and the investigation does not have any evidence of the involvement of Lenin or any other representative of the top leadership of the Bolsheviks in the destruction of the royal family. Allegedly, this was a private decision of the Ural Regional Council, which was later conveyed to the presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Leninist Council of People's Commissars. And the “burial of several people in the form of stacked skeletal remains,” found in 1991, certainly belongs to the royal family (only two bodies were burned).

Actually, Solovyov repeated this version in his speech. However, social activists and historians asked the investigator (who, by the way, is still under a subscription not to disclose documents in the case) a number of pressing questions:

“The procedure for removing the remains was grossly violated several times - is it possible to use such evidence in criminal proceedings? And many scientists consider the method of genetic testing itself unreliable - is there any unity on this issue?” - asked the religious expert Vladimir Semenko, but no clear answers were received.

Neither the leadership of the Russian Church nor representatives of the Romanov family came to the pathetic burial of the Ekaterinburg remains in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998. Moreover, then Patriarch Alexy II made Boris Yeltsin promise that he would not call the remains royal - and the president kept this word.

There are also purely scientific contradictions. Professor Lev Zhivotovsky, Head of the Center for Human DNA Identification, Institute of General Genetics. Vavilov, conducted his own independent examinations in two institutes in America, comparing the DNA of the queen’s sister Elizaveta Fedorovna with the remains found in Piglet Log. Analysis showed that they have nothing in common. A similar result was obtained by DNA analysis of the remains considered to be those of Nicholas II, with the genes of his own nephew Tikhon Nikolaevich Kulikovsky-Romanov.

Soon after this, a criminologist from Japan unexpectedly visited the Moscow Patriarchate for Alexy II Tatsuo Nagai, Director of the Forensic Science Department at Kitasato University . He announced that the analysis of sweat from the lining of Nicholas II’s frock coat and the blood data remaining in Japan after the assassination attempt on the emperor when he was Tsarevich coincided with the result of an analysis of blood samples from the Tsar’s nephew Tikhon Kulikovsky-Romanov and did not coincide with the “Ekaterinburg remains.” So here, at least, “not everything is so simple.”

Today it is obvious that new facts have emerged in this complicated case, otherwise it would not have been resumed with the involvement of such powerful resources. Just what these facts are - alas, no one knows, which gives rise to many new conjectures.

Already in November of this year, a detailed conclusion of the commission on the issue of the identity of the Yekaterinburg remains is expected. Around the same time, the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church will take place, which will issue its verdict. Whether it will become the cause of another schism in Russia or, on the contrary, will strengthen the Orthodox faith - time and the reaction of the people will tell. “What determines the holiness of relics - God’s grace or DNA chains?” - Believers ironically asked at the conference on the royal remains...

The question is rather rhetorical, but the subtext is clear - modern examinations should not become a screen for distorting the truth. According to the Orthodox community, the end to this matter will be put not by an investigation hidden from everyone, but by an open scientific and historical discussion.

Varvara Gracheva

No, let’s say right away, the investigation into the murder of the royal family is not yet ready to agree with the “ritual version” of the murder of the royal family, which is so close to the radical-conservative part of the Orthodox community. But progress, from the point of view of this public, is obvious: this version is no longer rejected in the TFR.

Patriarch Kirill at the conference “The case of the murder of the royal family: new examinations and archival materials”

But not only the words themselves are important, but also, so to speak, the context in which they were spoken. The statement was made at the conference “The Case of the Murder of the Royal Family: New Expertise and Archival Materials,” held on Monday, November 27 at the Sretensky Monastery with the participation of Patriarch Kirill.

And by and large - that's all. And the case itself, as the patriarch said, speaking at the same conference, was resumed after he, in a conversation with the president, “formulated the conditions under which the church could seriously consider the results of the examinations.”

Namely: 1) the whole process must be repeated again, from the very beginning to the end; 2) the church should not observe from the outside - it should be included in this process.

Senior investigator for particularly important cases of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Marina Molodtsova

Without an answer to this question, the church refuses to believe in the authenticity of the remains. After all, according to supporters of the “ritual” version, the bodies of the Romanovs simply could not remain intact. They were either dismembered, burned, or dissolved in acid. Or one, and the other, and the third were done sequentially.

Moreover, a significant part of the church commission has no doubt that this was so.” The church leadership, in a politically correct manner, does not specify who could have performed this bloody ritual. According to Tikhon, the murder of the Tsar and his family “for many” had a “ritual, symbolic content.”

For example, on the respectable “Russian People’s Line” and quite close to the patriarchy, a certain Leonid Bolotin, presented as a “historian, publicist and public figure,” thoroughly proves the inconsistency of the version of the murder of the Romanovs by Hasidic Jews. In favor of the version of murder by the Sadducean Jews...

Naturally, we are talking about the previous investigation and the previous government. Specifically, about investigator Vladimir Solovyov and the government commission to study issues related to the research and reburial of the remains of the royal family, which operated in 1993–1997.

Meanwhile, among the materials of the latter one can easily find the report of Vladimir Solovyov “Checking the version of the so-called “ritual murder” of the family of Russian Emperor Nicholas II and people from his entourage in 1918,” read at one of the commission meetings in 1997. The “ritual” version breaks down literally every point.

The reason was the aggravation of the military situation and the imminence of the fall of Yekaterinburg. The execution of the sentence also does not support the “ritual” version... The day of execution was not timed to coincide with any Jewish religious holiday. The execution procedure was worked out “collegially” by the Ural security officers.

There were proposals to blow up the Romanovs with grenades, kill them while they were asleep, and finally shoot them. Russians dominated among those discussing execution options (Medvedev, Nikulin, Kabanov).

A study of the personal files of the participants in the events showed that not one of them at the time of execution had an educational level that would allow them to navigate Jewish customs and ancient languages...”

Skull of skeleton No. 4, identified as the remains of the last Russian emperor

As you might guess, the study was carried out at the urgent request of the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, who wished to once again make sure that the heads were not cut off and preserved in alcohol.

According to MK sources familiar with the investigation, the results of this examination were ready at the beginning of October 2015 and were then reported to the church leadership. There was no sensation: the skulls corresponded to the rest of the bones.

“Complete sets” of bones were discovered near Yekaterinburg. But supporters of ritual murder do not believe scientists and insist on replacing the remains

Nevertheless, the church and the investigation, placed under its full control, stubbornly continue to dig in the same direction. Well, God help you, as they say.

But, perhaps, it would be useful to remind researchers that establishing the ritual nature of the murder of the Russian Tsar turned out to be an impossible task even for Hitler and his henchmen.

For reference: the materials of the “White Guard” investigation into the tsar’s case, which was conducted by judicial investigator Nikolai Sokolov, who emigrated after the Red victory, returned to the country in a very interesting way - they were found in Berlin, in the Reich Chancellery.

According to available data, the Nazis, having taken possession of Sokolov’s documents, previously stored in France, intended to use them to organize a grandiose anti-Semitic trial. But the texture, it seems, was still not enough.

However, he who seeks will always find. There would be the desire, energy and corresponding mood of the higher authorities.

Andrey KAMAKIN

Photo: patriarchia.ru, rusarchives.ru, wikipedia.org, screenshot from video

"Ritual, symbolic content"

Patriarch Kirill at the conference “The case of the murder of the royal family: new examinations and archival materials.” Photo: patriarchia.ru

“The investigation plans to commission a psychological and historical examination to resolve the issue, including the possible ritual nature of the murder of members of the royal family,” said Marina Molodtsova, senior investigator for especially important cases of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, leading the case. But not only the words themselves are important, but also, so to speak, the context in which they were spoken. The statement was made at the conference “The Case of the Murder of the Royal Family: New Expertise and Archival Materials,” held on Monday at the Sretensky Monastery with the participation of Patriarch Kirill.

Neither Molodtsova herself nor her colleagues hide the fact that the course of the investigation is, in fact, determined by the patriarchy: many examinations, they say, are carried out at the “request” of the church. And by and large - that's all. And the case itself, as the patriarch said, speaking at the same conference, was resumed after he, in a conversation with the president, “formulated the conditions under which the church could seriously consider the results of the examinations.” Namely: 1) the whole process must be repeated again, from the very beginning to the end; 2) the church should not observe from the outside - it should be included in this process.

Senior investigator for particularly important cases of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Marina Molodtsova. Photo: patriarchia.ru

Meanwhile, the main question that the Russian Orthodox Church poses to the investigation is not even the authenticity of the “Ekaterinburg remains.” The main thing that worries and worries: were the Orthodox sovereign not tortured by adherents of another, non-Orthodox cult - out of their own religious need? Without an answer to this question, the church refuses to believe in the authenticity of the remains. After all, according to supporters of the “ritual” version, the bodies of the Romanovs simply could not remain intact. They were either dismembered, burned, or dissolved in acid. Or one, and the other, and the third were done sequentially.

How far everything has been neglected, in the sense of how far the process of popularizing such an interpretation has gone, is evidenced by the words of the secretary of the patriarchal commission for studying the results of the study of the remains of Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Yegoryevsk, spoken at the same “Sretensky” conference: “We have the most serious attitude to the version of ritual murder. Moreover, a significant part of the church commission has no doubt that this was so.” The church leadership, in a politically correct manner, does not specify who could have performed this bloody ritual. According to Tikhon, the murder of the Tsar and his family “for many” had a “ritual, symbolic content.”

But what is not allowed to Jupiter is allowed to the bull: supporters of the “ritual” version on the lower floors of the church vertical are less inclined to politeness. And the matter, alas, is not limited to marginal network resources. For example, on the respectable “Russian People’s Line” and quite close to the patriarchy, a certain Leonid Bolotin, presented as a “historian, publicist and public figure,” thoroughly proves the inconsistency of the version of the murder of the Romanovs by Hasidic Jews. In favor of the version of murder by the Sadducean Jews...

All members of this society “Ritual” - both moderate and completely frostbitten - base their position on the fact that the investigation and the authorities as a whole have not answered, they say, the question that worries the clergy and flock. Naturally, we are talking about the previous investigation and the previous government. Specifically, about investigator Vladimir Solovyov and the government commission to study issues related to the research and reburial of the remains of the royal family, which operated in 1993–1997. Meanwhile, among the materials of the latter one can easily find the report of Vladimir Solovyov “Checking the version of the so-called “ritual murder” of the family of Russian Emperor Nicholas II and people from his entourage in 1918,” read at one of the commission meetings in 1997. The “ritual” version breaks down literally every point.

“We can conclude that the decision to execute the entire royal family was not associated with any religious or mystical motives, but mainly with the mood of the leadership and masses in the Urals,” the resulting part of this document says. - The reason was the aggravation of the military situation and the proximity of the fall of Yekaterinburg. The execution of the sentence also does not support the “ritual” version... The day of execution was not timed to coincide with any Jewish religious holiday. The execution procedure was worked out “collegially” by the Ural security officers. There were proposals to blow up the Romanovs with grenades, kill them while they were asleep, and finally shoot them. Russians dominated among those discussing execution options (Medvedev, Nikulin, Kabanov). A study of the personal files of the participants in the events showed that not one of them at the time of execution had an educational level that would allow them to navigate Jewish customs and ancient languages...”

Skull of skeleton No. 4, identified as the remains of the last Russian emperor.

But, as we see, the church was not convinced by these arguments. Just as the first results of the resumed investigation were not convincing. By the way, the very first examination ordered as part of the royal case “rebooted” in September last year was a genetic comparison of the skulls of the emperor and empress with the rest of their skeletons. As you might guess, the study was carried out at the urgent request of the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, who wished to once again make sure that the heads were not cut off and preserved in alcohol. According to MK sources familiar with the investigation, the results of this examination were ready at the beginning of October 2015 and were then reported to the church leadership. There was no sensation: the skulls corresponded to the rest of the bones.

“Complete sets” of bones were discovered near Yekaterinburg. But supporters of ritual murder do not believe scientists and insist on replacing the remains. Photo: frame from video

Nevertheless, the church and the investigation, placed under its full control, stubbornly continue to dig in the same direction. Well, God help you, as they say. But, perhaps, it would be useful to remind researchers that establishing the ritual nature of the murder of the Russian Tsar turned out to be an impossible task even for Hitler and his henchmen. For reference: the materials of the “White Guard” investigation into the tsar’s case, which was conducted by judicial investigator Nikolai Sokolov, who emigrated after the Red victory, returned to the country in a very interesting way - they were found in Berlin, in the Reich Chancellery. According to available data, the Nazis, having taken possession of Sokolov’s documents, previously stored in France, intended to use them to organize a grandiose anti-Semitic trial. But the texture, it seems, was still not enough.

However, he who seeks will always find. There would be the desire, energy and corresponding mood of the higher authorities.

Two days before the opening of the Council, on November 27, a conference “The case of the murder of the Royal Family: new examinations and materials. Discussion". The commission reconstructed the execution and came close to the questions: was it a ritual murder and who ordered it - Lenin or Trotsky?

Present at the conference presidium were: His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus'; Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga Barsanuphius, manager of the affairs of the Moscow Patriarchate, chairman of the church commission for studying the results of the study of the remains found near Yekaterinburg; Bishop Tikhon of Yegoryevsk, chairman of the Patriarchal Council for Culture, secretary of the church commission for studying the results of the study of the remains found near Yekaterinburg.

Among the conference participants are hierarchs and clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, members of the church commission for studying the results of the study of the remains found near Yekaterinburg, researchers and experts participating in the investigation into the murder of the holy Royal Passion-Bearers.

His Holiness Patriarch Kirill addressed the conference participants with an opening speech in which he said that the Church had not yet formed its position regarding the Yekaterinburg remains.

Leading Russian scientists, criminologists, historians and investigators reported for several hours to a room filled with clergy.

The first report “On the shortcomings of the previous investigation and the need to resume the investigation in the fall of 2015. On the progress of the investigation of the criminal case and the results of individual forensic examinations” was made by the acting. Senior Investigator for Particularly Important Cases under the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Colonel of Justice M.V. Molodtsova.

She said that after the investigation into the murder of the royal family was resumed, more than 20 people who discovered the burial of the remains and participated in the excavations were interrogated.

“With their participation, inspections of the crime scene were carried out - both Ganina Pit and Porosenkov Log, where they spoke about the circumstances known to them in the case.”, Molodtsova said.

She also reported that the investigative authorities, after resuming the investigation into the death of the royal family, ordered 34 different examinations.

“The examination is not completed. There are only intermediate results on some issues"“, the investigator said and added that the molecular genetic examination has not been completed, as well as the examination of the soil in order to establish the likelihood of their burning.

Chief researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, researcher of the history of Russian special services, Doctor of Law Vasily Khristoforov, denied rumors that the Bolsheviks allegedly cut off the head of Nicholas II and sent him to the Kremlin. According to the historian, this information was not confirmed during the investigation into the circumstances of the death of the royal family.

« We do not have not only a single document, but not a single indirect evidence of a participant in the events regarding the beheading“, said Khristoforov, who is a member of the Patriarchal Commission for studying the results of the study of Yekaterinburg remains.

The head of the department of forensic medical identification of the Russian Center for Forensic Medicine, Viktor Zvyagin, believes that the search for possible burial places of Emperor Nicholas II, his family members and servants must be continued.

According to the expert, this conclusion was made based on the mass of discovered bone and dental fragments of the burial, which presumably belongs to Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Anastasia. “A total of 46 bone objects were delivered, most of which were less than a gram in mass,” he said, noting that this was significantly less than what experts estimated should have been found. In addition, bone fragments were found there that do not belong to humans.

“The results show that only one of several criminal burial sites has been discovered and the search needs to continue. There is information that several places have been discovered where it is possible to find them (the remains - Ed.) using 3D radar methods.", said Zvyagin.

Chairman of the Forensic Medical Association of North-West Russia, President of the International Congress of Forensic Physicians Vyacheslav Popov is confident that the bodies of the family of Nicholas II and their servants could not be completely destroyed by sulfuric acid and fire.

“There is no reason to overestimate the damaging effect of sulfuric acid; it, of course, could be poured onto bodies, but it is impossible to destroy them with this method of exposure to concentrated acid”, noted the expert.

He said that experiments were carried out not only using concentrated sulfuric acid, but also an experiment examining the processes in the cremation chamber, which led experts to the conclusion that it was impossible to completely burn the bodies.

Patriarch Kirill noted that it is necessary to once again check the version about the possible complete burning of the remains. He told how he himself witnessed the process of cremation of the dead in India.

“I was there and saw with my own eyes how cremations are carried out: they burn all day long, from early morning until late at night, using huge dry firewood. As a result of cremation, body parts still remain.", said the Primate.

One of the speakers at the event was the head of the Department of Public Law of the State University of the Russian Federation Vyacheslav Popov. Before that, he headed the department of forensic medicine at the Military Medical Academy for 20 years, was an expert in the investigation into the case of the royal remains in the early 1990s, and is now participating in a new investigation together with clergy. He coordinates the forensic and anthropological research carried out by the new commission.

According to him, the commission works with two groups of experts: anthropological, which studies the found remains, and historical, which studies documents. The groups include enough specialists from St. Petersburg, for example, they include professors Vladimir Trezubov and Lyudmila Aleksina from the First Medical Institute, Doctor of Science Oksana Fandeeva from the Leningrad Regional Bureau of Forensic Medicine. Both the historical and anthropological expert groups have representatives of the church.

Everyone’s task is complex: to identify who owns the Ekaterinburg remains, how exactly these people were killed and who ordered the crime. So far, only a family connection has been established - five people, especially four women, represented one family. They have a special structure of teeth and jaws, related skulls. The commission has not yet confirmed that these are royal remains, although a number of indirect evidence - age, dentistry exclusive for that time - allows one to guess about the complex origin of the found bones.

- Wasn’t it established in 1991 whose remains these were?

– If they had installed it in 1991, there would be no fuss now. Yes, in 1991 a certain opinion was expressed on this matter, but it was later disputed. The church proposed 10 questions that the investigative team had to answer, but investigator Solovyov ignored them all. The case was opened in connection with the massacre, but was closed due to the identification of the victims. The investigation did not achieve its goal, and now this flaw must be corrected. Therefore, they stopped the previous investigation and started everything from scratch two years ago.

- Does the Church pose questions to experts?

– Some version arises, and you must either reject it or accept it. And we are busy answering: was it possible to burn all these remains, was it possible to burn one or two people to ashes (to ash and powder in a damp forest in a short time is impossible), there was a version about the separation of heads in 1918 - they checked that too . Not confirmed. The question arose about sulfuric acid: was it possible to burn all these bodies with sulfuric acid so that no trace of them remained? They checked (it was impossible to destroy the remains with the available supplies). We also reconstructed the execution itself.

Sometimes questions are asked that we have not touched on before. Yesterday they said: okay, we agree that it is impossible to burn the bodies on firewood somewhere in a damp forest. But if they were exposed to acid and only then burned, no one investigated this! Please answer this question for us.

At the same time, the version of ritual murder, which Bishop Shevkunov called yesterday one of the seriously discussed in the church community, has yet to be verified - a psychological and historical examination will be ordered.

– This version appeared a long time ago, back in 1918. A cabalistic recording was allegedly made in Ipatiev’s house (it was deciphered: “Here, by order of secret forces, the Tsar was sacrificed for the destruction of the State. All nations are informed about this”), one recording of a mystical nature from a poem by Heinrich Hein in German (“ Belzazzar was killed that night by his servants." There are photographs of them. This is where this version came from. She is truly of such a mystical nature...

- What should be the outcome of the investigation?

– Establish the identity of these people and reconstruct the circumstances of the death. But as a super task, the customer must be established. The fact is that in the leadership of the country at that time there were people who had a legal education. True, not everyone, only Lenin. And the rest intuitively felt that they needed to hide the ends of their criminal activities somewhere, and, if possible, they succeeded. They tried not to document anything, to blame it on the regional bodies - the Yekaterinburg Cheka, that they themselves decided to shoot and mutilate everyone.

Historical examination, which is at the beginning of its journey, must answer the question of who ordered this crime. It is clear who the organizer is, and it is clear who the performer is, but here is the customer... To what extent our leadership - both Trotsky and Lenin, in particular - were involved in this matter and to what extent they participated.

- Why is this necessary? What will it give?

– Historical justice, historical truth. This must be established, as in any investigation.

- Is there a completion date by which you strive to complete the investigation?

- Nobody is pushing us. Nobody sets any deadlines: November 7 or May 1. We work in a relaxed manner. This was decided at the highest level so that no one interferes with the experts. But we are not lazy - we do something all the time. We do this, in general, not for money, but in our own time. And thank God we are not being rushed. When we started, we thought it would last 2 – 3 years. But this is probably a realistic timeframe. No one is rushing us to any date. Although it will be the 100th anniversary of the execution, maybe someone there would like to get answers to all the questions by this date, but no one set such a date for us.

- Why will Vladimir Putin come to the Council, where the work of the commission will be discussed?

– Yesterday’s event was chaired by His Holiness the Patriarch. And it seemed to me that he received all the information from the primary source. But I think that Vladimir Vladimirovich needs to be given results. Let's do the work, and we can talk about all this. Therefore, I think that (tomorrow at the Council) new tasks will simply be set. As far as I am aware of the matter, Vladimir Vladimirovich has the following point of view: there is no need to push anyone, we need to resolve this issue once and not return to it again.

Chairman of the Synodal Department for Church Relations with Society and the Media Vladimir Legoida noted that the completion of the examination is “just a stage: you need to see how the results of one examination are combined with another.”

Date of publication or update 11/01/2017

One of the events that accompanied the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the reunification of the Church Abroad with the Moscow Patriarchate was a unique exhibition in the Exhibition Hall of the State Federal Archives of Russia. “The death of the family of Emperor Nicholas II. A century-long investigation" is the story of a criminal investigation that lasted 93 years. More than 200 original documents and relics related to both the murder of the Royal Family and various stages of the investigation, the search for remains and their identification.

The First Hierarch of the Church Abroad, Metropolitan Hilarion, took part in the opening of the exhibition, and Archpriest Vladimir Tsurikov, dean of the Holy Trinity Theological Seminary in Jordanville, took part in its preparation. The exhibition built a symbolic bridge to the next memorable date, 2013 - the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanov.

Jordanville Relics

The participation of the First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, Metropolitan Hilarion of Eastern America and New York, is not accidental. The museum located at the Holy Trinity Monastery and Theological Seminary in Jordanville (USA) brought to the Russian capital a unique “royal” collection concerning the first, “White Guard” stage of the investigation undertaken by the investigator for particularly important cases of the Omsk District Court Nikolai Sokolov at the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak.

The path of these relics to the West is worthy of a good detective story. Sent to Europe by the head of the commission created by Kolchak to investigate the murder of the imperial family, Lieutenant General Mikhail Diterichs, by a roundabout route through the Far East, in the holds of cargo ships, with inevitable losses along the way, they went for years to their own “emigration”, in order to eventually settle in private collections and in scattered museum collections. It took a Herculean effort for the curators of the Jordanville Museum to find them and put them back together over many decades.

What is striking in this collection is, first of all, the material evidence collected by investigator Sokolov at the site of the murder of the royal family - in the house of the Yekaterinburg engineer Ipatiev (or, as the Bolsheviks called it, in the House of Special Purpose) and in the area where the corpses of those killed in the Four Brothers tract were burned, as well as in the place of exile of prisoners in Tobolsk - in the “House of Freedom”. Among them are icons, travel hangers, which were touched by the hands of the emperor and empress, cavalry leggings of Nicholas II, a French jacket of the 16th Kyiv Grenadier Regiment that belonged to Tsarevich Alexei...

“The documents from the American collection, perhaps, do not contain any special sensations,” adds Marina Sidorova, curator of the exhibition and head of the exhibition department of the State Archives of the Russian Federation. - But they contain separate and very important signs of the times, touches on the last year and a half of the life of Nicholas II and his family. For example, it is known that when setting off from Tsarskoe Selo, where the prisoners were under house arrest, to Tobolsk, they took with them many household items. As is now clear, they went into exile with the knowledge that they would have to spend a long time there. But there are very few documents from this period in Russian archives.

Thanks to our colleagues from Jordanville, we see what exactly they took with them (the four-page list of items is most likely incomplete): gymnastic bars and mats, two balalaikas, 21 boxes of films, gramophones, six pairs of skates, paintings by the artist Mikhail Nesterov "Annunciation" and "At the Skete". By the way, as the receipts indicate, upon arrival in Tobolsk, many items were distributed to servants, guards from the guard and even commandants Kobylinsky and Pankratov.”

Telegrams of the great drama

Matching the Jordanville collection are those exhibits that have never left Russia. The vast majority of them have already been exhibited before, including the Act of Abdication of Nicholas II with the famous pencil signature, endorsed on March 2, 1917 by the Minister of the Imperial Household Fredericks. But taken together, they give a surprisingly capacious and complete picture of the catastrophic months for Russia.

Here is the Act of Abdication of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, dated March 3. And next to it is a desperately naive diary entry made by Nicholas II immediately after this: “It turns out that Misha renounced. His manifesto ends with a four-tail for elections in 6 months of the Constituent Assembly. God knows who convinced him to sign such disgusting stuff! The unrest in Petrograd would stop, if only it would continue like this.” Here is the last entry in Alexandra Fedorovna’s diary, made three hours before the execution: “10 1/2 hours. She went to bed. + 15 degrees." Here is the original nervous telegram from the Presidium of the Ural Regional Council to Lenin and Sverdlov from the funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation: “In view of the approach of the enemy to Yekaterinburg and the disclosure by the emergency commission of a large White Guard conspiracy aimed at kidnapping the former Tsar and his family.

The documents are in our hands. By decision of the presidium of the regional council, Nikolai Romanov was shot on the night of July 16th. His family was evacuated to a safe place.” But here is an authentic envelope from the Administrative Office of the Council of People's Commissars, which had lain for 94 years in another archive (now it is called the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political Information) and “met” with the original form of the telegram only at this exhibition: “Secret. Comrade Lenin from Yekaterinburg. 17/7 12 days.” Did the head of the Soviet state see this dispatch, was he aware of the Yekaterinburg atrocity from the very beginning? Yes.

Here next to the same envelope is his personal autograph: “Received. Lenin” with the note “For Sverdlov, a copy was received on 13.10. 17/7". A few hours later, in the next encrypted telegram addressed to the Secretary of the Council of People's Commissars Gorbunov (its original a few days later the White Guards would find at the Yekaterinburg Post Office), the Chairman of the Ural Regional Council Beloborodov was already confidently managing the situation: “Tell Sverdlov that the whole family suffered the same fate as the head. Officially, the family will die during the evacuation.”

Secret film from special storage

And what kind of “big White Guard conspiracy” are we talking about, who specifically set the goal of “kidnapping the former Tsar and his family”? In 1918, Bolshevik Moscow preferred not to talk about this issue from high revolutionary tribunes. The circumstances of the death of the royal family in the Soviet Union were strictly classified. Having published a message about the execution of Nicholas II in the first days after the execution, the Bolsheviks never acknowledged the fact of reprisal against the rest of those executed, although the participants in the bloody drama in the basement of the Ipatiev House were proud of the title of “regicides.”

Let us note, by the way, that throughout the entire Soviet period of our history, the murder of the wife of Nicholas II, their children and four close associates never received any official comments in the open press or speeches from government officials.

The veil over the secret of the “conspiracy” was lifted almost half a century after the revolution, and almost by accident. One of the participants in the cynical murder, career security officer Mikhail Medvedev (Kudrin), who headed the Chelyabinsk Cheka in July 1918, shortly before his death, in his personal will, asked his son to transfer his memoirs and the Browning from which he shot at the prisoners of the Ipatiev House to the Museum of the Revolution. In return, the veteran of the organs asked to assign his wife to the special hospital in his place.

In March 1964, after the death of his father, Medvedev Jr. outlined this request in a letter addressed to Nikita Khrushchev, after which on Old Square they decided to separately work with documents that captured a dark page in Russian history. Requests and instructions to provide relevant information were sent to the Central Archive of the October Revolution and the Central Party Archive. And two then still living participants in the execution - Grigory Nikulin and Isai Rodzinsky (Ilyin) - in May of the same year were invited to the studio of the State House of Radio Recording on the street. Kachalov, where they gave an extensive 4.5-hour interview.

Within two days it was deciphered. In December 1964, the future “father of perestroika”, and at that time an employee of the propaganda department of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev, included his typewritten version as part of the certificate “On some circumstances related to the execution of the Romanov royal family.” Yakovlev considered that it was pointless to search for and open the royal grave. And as Yakovleva’s then boss, head of the ideological commission of the Central Committee and Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Ilyichev, reasoned, naturalistic details of the physical liquidation of prisoners of the Ipatiev House will not benefit the image of the Soviet state. The verdict followed: “it is undesirable to print,” and Medvedev’s memories, along with the tape, ended up in the special storage facility of the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism for many decades.

Now they are being shown publicly for the first time. You can listen to part of the audio recording of the conversation by wearing headphones. This interview, which itself has lain in the shadows of history for almost half a century, is very difficult. But it helps an unbiased visitor to dot the i’s in some aspects of the “royal” affair, which have acquired their own myths. For example, like this.

Which of the “secret liberators” did the royal family correspond with?

The State Archive of the Russian Federation (fond 601, inventory 2, file 27) contains four so-called letters from a Russian officer, written in red ink in French in the last month of the Romanovs’ life, and the same number of replies to them. The last message, for example, says: “The hour of liberation is approaching, and the days of the usurper are numbered... the moment is becoming critical and now there is no need to fear bloodshed...” (all letters are here in the exhibition). As Isai Rodzinsky admits, this story is a pure provocation, prepared by security guards. Like, every firefighter needed written evidence of the impending kidnapping-escape, and we (along with Rodzinsky, the texts were composed by security officers Pavel Beloborodov and Pyotr Voikov) decided to hedge our bets in such an original way: “Voikov dictated in French, and I wrote it down.”

What about response letters? They were written by the same provocateurs, with the exception of one, the very last one. It is also presented to the general public for the first time, and even outwardly you can see how very different it is from the others, including in the size of the leaf. “The surveillance of us is constantly increasing, especially from behind the window,” you can read everything in the same French on a very faded piece of paper 7x15 cm. “As our specialists found out, this is the hand of Alexandra Feodorovna, and the inscription was made between July 11 and 14 1918,” says Sidorova.

“No kidnapping was being prepared” (From the transcript of a tape recording of the memoirs of Isai Rodzinsky. Moscow, May 1964):

“It must be said that no kidnapping was being prepared; apparently, the relevant groups would be very happy if these were among them. But, apparently, they were engaged in something else, not so much in the search for the royal family, but in organizing a counter-revolution. On a larger scale." How the execution was carried out

An accurate picture, with almost documentary scrupulousness recreating the scenario of the murder of eleven people in the basement of the Ipatiev House, was compiled not only on the basis of the transcript of the mentioned audio recording. The expert reconstruction of the circumstances of the shooting was the result of a complex, multi-stage situational examination that has no analogues in domestic jurisprudence, undertaken under the leadership of two criminologists - doctors of medical sciences Viktor Kolkutin and Andrei Kovalev (now holding the post of chief forensic expert of the Russian Federation). In their work, Kolkutin and Kovalev relied on photographic and cinematic material from the times when the Ipatiev House had not yet been demolished; to numerous lifetime memories and testimonies of participants in the execution (note, often fragmentary and even contradictory); finally, on the conclusions of the “White Guard” investigation of Nikolai Sokolov (1918-1919).

Step by step, experts established the circle of the most plausible testimonies of eyewitnesses and participants in the shooting. As it turned out after a comprehensive analysis of their evidence, before the execution began, members of the imperial family and its entourage were located in the basement room as follows. Along the eastern wall, from the left arch to the left door frame, are the chamberlain Alexey Trupp, the senior cook Ivan Kharitonov and the room girl Anna Demidova. In the projection of the left door of the eastern wall there was one of the Grand Duchesses. In the far right corner of the room, in the projection of the right wing of the door on the eastern wall, was Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, behind her were the three Grand Duchesses. The Emperor stood in the left half of the room, in front of the Tsarevich and facing him (with his back to the front door), shielding him from the executioners with his body. Behind the Tsarevich, in front of Troupe and Kharitonov, was the physician Evgeniy Botkin.

Before the start of the drama, the performers occupied the following positions.

The commandant of the House of Special Purpose, Yakov Yurovsky, entered the room (who took a place in the right corner, near the western wall), as well as five more members of the firing squad, located along the western wall in one line. The rest of the executioners (which, in addition to the security officers, also included several “Red Latvians” from the duty shift of the Red Army guard) stood in the entrance doorway (two people) and in the adjacent room. “After the initial shots,” experts note, “some of the performers could move into the main room.”

Approaching the memoirs of executioners preserved by history with an unbiased mind, you are struck by one feature: almost everyone proudly says that it was he who shot Nicholas II. In addition to Yurovsky (“Nikolai was killed by the commandant himself on the spot”), at least two performers clearly insist on this: Pyotr Ermakov (“Nikolai’s phrase escaped: they won’t take us anywhere like that, it was impossible to wait any longer, I fired at him point-blank, he fell right away”) and Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin (“I’m already pulling the trigger on my Browning and putting the first bullet into the Tsar”).

However, this can be explained not only by the desire to attribute to oneself the glory of “first among equals,” but also by the firing squad, according to which the first collective volley was most likely directed at the emperor and the crown prince. The same hypothesis fits well with the picture of bullet damage to walls and door frames found in the interiors of the basement room. Of the 31 marks from various bullets, 25 are located in the left half of the room.

In addition, the most probable authors of the situational examination seem to have the following circumstance: after the first volleys at the condemned, those who stood on the right side of the room rushed to the head of the family and the boy and tried to cover them with their bodies. Perhaps at that moment those executed were driven by the desire to simply be together at the last minute of life, feeling each other’s presence.

This is indirectly evidenced by the memories of the participants in the execution concerning the final, most dramatic episode of the execution (as you know, it was not possible to shoot everyone the first time, and the Red Army soldiers, at the command of the officers, ran to finish off the unfortunate people at point-blank range, and to finish off some with bayonets). “Humanity was shown on our part” (From the transcript of a tape recording of the memoirs of Grigory Nikulin. Moscow, May 1964):

"Well, there's someone else there<...>was not quite yet completely, which means he was killed.

Well, then, that means we had to finish shooting someone else<...>Well, there was this one... Anastasia and this one... covered herself with a pillow - Davydova (meaning Anna Demidova). I had to pull the pillow off and shoot it. Yes... (Pause). And the boy was right there, right away... Well, it’s true, he tossed and turned for a long time... In any case, it was over quickly with him (with Nicholas II) and with the boy<...>For example, I think that humanity was shown on our part... Then, when, you know, I fought, as part of the 3rd Army, 29th Infantry Division, I believed that if I were captured by the whites and they will do this to me, then I will only be happy. Because, in general, they treated our brother brutally there.”

How corpses were buried and reburied

As the investigation found out, initially the corpses of the passion-bearers, under the cover of darkness, were lowered into an open mine shaft in the Four Brothers tract near the Verkh-Isetsky mining plant (in 1918 - a suburb of Yekaterinburg, now - the forested periphery of the Zheleznodorozhny district of the city). But when the “funeral team” reported what had been done to their superiors, the security officers clutched their heads: in a few days they would leave the city white (Admiral Kolchak’s units were approaching Yekaterinburg), and the traces of the crime were not destroyed - the mine was not deep enough. We had to get the corpses out of the mine. Subsequent operations with the bodies in the area of the village of Koptyaki took another whole day. The leaders of the group took turns going to the city - for food, for approvals, for transport, for fuel, and in the end they decided to lower the corpses into another, deeper and more distant mine, and first burn them or, in any case, mutilate them. The road ran through the forest, but first it was necessary to overcome Porosenkov Log, a swampy lowland. And then the unexpected happened.

“When human beings burn, the smells are generally terrible” (From the transcript of a tape recording of the memoirs of Isai Rodzinsky. Moscow, May 1964):

“When we pulled them out (from the mine - editor's note), they all turned out to be mothballed. There is such cold, icy water there. We pulled out what looked like living people - red-cheeked. They could lie there for years<...>What to do next? We got up and prepared nothing, didn’t even think about it. And here, you understand, it’s already dawn, there’s a road nearby. Day. They are going to the market. We don't have any extra people. But still, they sent one horseman in the direction and started talking about how there was a raid in the forest, criminals were escaping from prison and the road was closed<...>

But then something unexpected happened. Suddenly our car got stuck on some country road and it turned out to be a quagmire. It was late in the evening. We drove a little. We all pulled this car out, we barely pulled it out, and then an idea flashed through our minds, which we carried out. We decided that we couldn't find a better place. We've dug out this quagmire right now, it's deep.<...>Well, then they decomposed some of these same little darlings and started pouring sulfuric acid on them, disfigured everyone, and then it all turned into a quagmire. There was a railway nearby. We brought rotten sleepers and built a bridge across the quagmire<...>I remember Nikolai was burned, it was this same Botkin<...>

Well, in general I have to tell you, human flesh, oh, when it burns, the smells are generally terrible. Botkin was fat. They burned them for a long time, watered them and burned them with kerosene there, something else so powerful, they put wood there. Well, we've been fiddling with this matter for a long time. I even, while they were burning, went, reported, went to the city, and then arrived. It was already night, I arrived in a car.”

The truth is somewhere near

The story of the discovery of the remains of 11 human bodies near the old Koptyakovskaya road, which included two main episodes - in 1991 and then in 2007 - is described in detail and is well known. Having carried out many examinations and officially closed the criminal case last year about the discovery of terrible finds in the Four Brothers tract, the state expressed its opinion: these are the remains of Nicholas II, his wife, heir, four daughters and four close associates. However, while scientists and numerous experts were engaged in research, a fierce debate did not subside in society about the authenticity of the remains, as well as documents proving or disproving this authenticity.

14 years ago, the Church, without refuting the conclusions of state examinations, decided not to express its judgment about unconditional trust or distrust in them. “History testifies: what is considered the most modern, accurate and reliable in science today may turn out to be outdated, inaccurate and erroneous tomorrow” - these words are from the statement of Metropolitan Juvenaly of Krutitsy and Kolomna at one of the meetings of the government commission for the study of the “royal” remains, perhaps most accurately convey the prevailing position in the Church on this difficult issue.

Dmitry Anokhin

Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, July, No. 7, 2012

Portal for schoolchildren. Self-preparation