Remains Found in Czar Killing Site
AP / May 31, 2000
MOSCOW (AP) - Archeologists discovered two sets of human remains at the site where communists gunned down Russia's last czar and his family, but the corpses were unlikely to be those of two missing royal children, historians said Wednesday.
Archeologists were excavating the site in Yekaterinburg, a city 900 miles east of Moscow, ahead of construction work on a memorial cathedral that is to begin next month. They were searching for the basement room of a demolished house in which Czar Nicholas II and his family were assassinated in 1918.
Parts of the royal bodies were exhumed in 1991 from a mine shaft outside the city, and reburied in St. Petersburg in 1998. But diggers never found the skeletons of two royal children - the heir, Alexei, and a sister, either Maria or Anastasia.
The remains found Tuesday evening were in decayed coffins near the house, said Alexander Blokhin, head of the Discovery Foundation, a local historical society. But preliminary evidence suggested the bones were from a village cemetery dating to the 17th century, he said. "`These bones have no relation to the events of 1918,'' Blokhin said by telephone from Yekaterinburg, located at the foot of the Ural Mountains.
The archeologists, assisted by volunteers from the Orthodox Church, had been searching for the basement Tuesday, over which they hoped to build the cathedral's altar.
Historians say Bolshevik revolutionary guards lined up and shot the czar, his wife, Alexandra, their five children and several servants in the small basement room. They then loaded the bodies onto a truck and disposed of them, first in a mine shaft, then in a shallow forest grave.
The house was demolished in the 1970s on orders from former President Boris Yeltsin, who was then the region's party chief. Soviet authorities at the time worried the building might become a pilgrimage site.
The Russian Orthodox Church is considering canonizing the family.