Alexander Avdonin

Infobox Person
name = Alexander Avdonin


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birth_date = 1930
birth_place = Sverdlovsk, Russian Federation
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Alexander Avdonin was the first known person, in 1979, to begin to exhume the purported grave of the seven murdered Romanovs and four members of that last household. He was born in 1930 in the city of Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union.

Legend of the Romanovs' execution

The imperial Romanov family (former Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, their children Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia, and Alexei, and their loyal retainers Dr. Evgeny Botkin, Anna Demidova, Ivan Kharitonov and Alexei Trupp) were executed en masse in a ground-floor room of their final place of imprisonment, Yekaterinburg’s Ipatiev House, by Bolshevik gunfire, bayonets, and blows in July 1918, and their bodies (some of their bodies) allegedly buried in the Siberian Koptyaki forest, a few miles from Yekaterinburg, near a spot historically known as the Four Brothers, within several days. This was the legend, known to many local residents, including the young Avdonin, who has vivid childhood memories of one of the assassins, Pyotr Ermakov, roaming the environs of his hometown and bragging of the deed. Ermakov was famous both for his drinking and for his stirring addresses at schools and Pioneer gatherings about how he and his revolutionary comrades had so bravely struck down Nicholas the Bloody. Various members (Yurovsky, Ermakov, Medvedev) of the squad of assassins—who by one account outnumbered the eleven victims—vied for years for the honor of having personally shot the Tsar; documents, filmed interviews, and some of the murder weapons themselves, complete with signed statements, were proudly donated to state museums and archives. Gradually, however, as the Stalin regime systematically persecuted and killed so many of the original revolutionaries, as well as so many millions of other Russians, this sort of discourse became unthinkable. Sverdlovsk itself was a city basically off-limits to foreigners.

Interest in graves' location

Avdonin, a geologist by trade in the Soviet years, was also personally interested in local history and folklore, which in Sverdlovsk had to include the murder of the Romanovs. Indeed, the Ipatiev House, at 49 Voznesensky Prospekt—the leafy end of the town’s main street—where the family was imprisoned prior to the murders, was called at the time the House of Special Purpose and maintained for some years afterward as the Museum of the Peoples’ Vengeance; it’s not as though the execution was ever a local secret. Yet this was by all accounts a time and place where you did not converse freely with almost anyone concerning facts or issues the Party had expressly or implicitly directed you to avoid. Several generations of Soviet citizens grew up knowing virtually nothing of three hundred years of Romanov rule. Avdonin gathered information informally for years, and, in 1976, met Soviet writer and filmmaker Geli Ryabov, whose indefinable official position and sources enabled them to identify a precise location to commence an informal exhumation. According to the “Yurovsky Note,” a primary historical document authored by the commandant of the Ipatiev House and chief executioner Yakov Yurovsky, the bodies (nine of the eleven) were buried at the place where the truck broke down on the second night following the murders, near Grade Crossing 184 on the Koptyaki Road. Pots of acid had been smashed into the pit to consume the naked remains, and railroad ties had been placed over the pit before a layer of earth.

Exhumation of Romanovs' graves

In the spring of 1979, Avdonin and Ryabov began an exhumation of the site, struck the rotted wood of the ties at what they judged a reasonable depth, and dug on. Their methods, though bumbling and potentially destructive to later, professional archaeological effort, resulted in the recovery of several skulls. They refilled the pit, kept the skulls briefly, and reburied them with icons and prayers.

Due to the generally repressive Soviet climate, neither Avdonin nor Ryabov said a word about this until ten years later, when Ryabov, in 1989, suddenly exploded the story into the international arena in bizarre and ghoulish detail; somehow, in his lengthy and much-embroidered accounts, he neglected to mention the primum mobile of the entire endeavor, Alexander Avdonin of Sverdlovsk. Ryabov claims that he was simply protecting Avdonin and his family by not revealing their involvement.

The site seems never to have been treated and explored according to the standards of either professional archaeology or careful law-enforcement investigative technique. The official government re-opening in 1991 featured bulldozers, not ultrasound or hand tools; the professional observer stood by in anguish as non-professionals sloshed through the pit, grabbing at bits of ceramic or bone. Evidence indicates that the pit was opened at least once between the re-burial efforts and the “official” opening. Avdonin was present at this event and has maintained a presence in all of the doings since.

* See Nicholas II article, Legends section for an update on the missing bodies of the Tsarevich and one of his sisters

Other works

With the publication in 1995 of Robert Massie’s "The Romanovs: The Final Chapter", and with various other subsequent works, Avdonin’s primary role is clear. What has remained in the intervening years is his role as the head of the Obretenye Foundation (literally, in Russian, “recovery”), and his role in supporting the findings of Russian scientists to the exclusion of findings that may be better scientifically supported. Exhumations in the Siberian forest go on, every spring; the much-hunted remains of Alexei and one Grand Duchess (Anastasia or Marie?) continue to be elusive. Perhaps they truly were burned and scattered; perhaps they are too well buried in the Russian earth; perhaps they were never there. Avdonin continues, apparently tireless, and apparently convinced of some truth.

References

*King, Greg and Penny Wilson. "The Fate of the Romanovs". New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.
*Massie, Robert. "The Romanovs: The Final Chapter". New York: Random House, 1995.
*Radzinsky, Edvard. "The Last Tsar". New York: Doubleday, 1992.