Why Are Alexei's Bones Absent?
By John Kendrick
In the 80 years since the Romanov's deaths, numerous pretenders have claimed to be a member of the imperial family who miraculously survived. Sooner or later, their claims were debunked, but as John Kendrick reports, the claims of one man who never publicly pushed his case while alive have yet to be convincingly disproved.
VANCOUVER, Canada - A world of controversy surrounds the identity of the remains to be interred this Friday in St. Petersburg, but one matter is not in dispute. The remains of Tsarevich Alexei, Nicholas II's only son and heir, will not be among those laid to rest.
Half a world and 11 time zones away from the former imperial capital, there is a grave where a man known as Alexei Tammet-Romanov was buried 21 years ago, soon after his death on June 26, 1977, which followed a two-year battle with a mysterious blood disease.
On July 2, 1977, an obituary marked by the Romanov crest of the imperial double eagle ran in the Vancouver Sun stating that, "Alexei Nicolaievich, Sovereign Heir, Tsarevich, Grand Duke of Russia," had died June 26. On page 62 of its July 5 edition, the same paper reported that Tammet-Romanov's widow, Sandra, intended to write a book on her late husband's life. Within a month, the Ipatiev House where the Bolsheviks executed Nicholas II was gone, demolished by the governor of the Sverdlovsk region, one Boris Yeltsin, at Leonid Brezhnev's order.
Tammet-Romanov never publicly claimed to be the tsarevich. When 16-year-old Sandra Brown met 52-year-old Heino Tammet on a beach in 1956, she had no idea that the man she would marry four years later was anything more than an Estonian immigrant who ran a small dance studio.
Mrs. Romanov explained that when she met Alexei it was her father who first sensed that there was something unusual about the man calling himself Heino Tammet. In the beginning he would only tell them that, "as a youngster I lived in many houses," although he was not beyond dropping an occasional, broader hint. When pressed, he said that he was the Tsarevich Alexei Romanov, who had survived the bloodbath at Ipatiev House on July 17, 1918, when the rest of his family were killed.
After Alexei had escaped the fate of his parents and sisters, he and the Veermann family who took care of him stayed at their farmhouse close to Yakaterinburg before moving to the Estonian capital of Tallinn in September 1921. He lived in Tallinn for the next 22 years, the same town where a boy named Alexy Mikhailovich Ridiger was born in 1929. Alexy Ridiger grew up to become His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II.
Tammet-Romanov used the name of Ernst Veermann until 1937, when he changed it to Heino Tammet. As Heino Tammet he operated seven newspapers in Tallinn as editor-in-chief, before fleeing the advancing Red Army in early 1944. He moved to Sweden, before emigrating to Canada in 1952.
According to Mrs. Romanov, Alexei explained that he blacked out after hearing Yakov Yurovsky - the head of the execution squad - give the command to fire. He woke up almost three days later at nearby farm house belonging to Johann and Paula Veermann. Alexei was told that Johann Veermann was on the road with his farmer's cart when he happened upon the assassins' truck stuck in the mud - possibly at the same spot where geologist Alexander Avdovin discovered in 1979 the remains that will be interred this Friday. Veermann told Alexei that he was asked to take two bundles wrapped in sheets off the truck to lighten its load and take them to a nearby pit. When one of the bundles moved he took it home, and found the injured Alexei wrapped inside the sheets.
What exactly happened will probably never be known, but the official versions of the killings leave much to be desired. The firing squad of 11 to 13 men (official versions vary on the number of assassins) are said to have emptied their weapons at the party of 11 - Romanovs and servants - yet those who examined the remains and the house found evidence of far fewer than the 80-plus bullets that would have been loaded into the guns used by the firing squad. Then there are the bizarre assertions that bullets bounced off diamonds and jewels sewn into the grand duchesses' corsets. Yurovsky later claimed that his deputy, Grigory Nikulin, emptied an entire clip of bullets at the girls and Alexei with no effect. This story does not fit with an understanding of basic physics.
The force of a bullet fired at near point blank range and striking a diamond or similar stone dead center would either shatter the stone or push it into the soft cloth and flesh situated directly behind it. If the bullet struck the stone off-center then it might change direction slightly but it would still pass some of the energy of its forward momentum onto the jewel it struck. Anyone who has played a game of billiards knows how this works.
Then there is the medical evidence. Execution squad commander Yurovsky fired two shots at the right ear of Tsarevich Alexei. Alexei Tammet-Romanov was completely deaf in that same ear. Doctors thought the injury was caused by some kind of concussion accident, such as a very loud noise, during his youth.
Adding that evidence to executioners' stories that the bullets they fired at the young Grand Duchesses were having no effect suggests a new possibility. Execution squad commander Yurovsky loaded the guns himself before handing them out to his hand-picked firing squad. Each assassin was told to fire at a certain member of the Imperial party. If Yurovsky had loaded some of the guns with blanks, that would explain how guns fired at the Grand Duchesses had no effect. It would also explain how a gun fired at the ear of Alexei would make him deaf in that same ear, but would not kill him.
At the height of the civil war Lenin was faced with the problem of 11 imperial hostages that were attracting a lot of attention. Might the Bolshevik leaders have looked for a way to reduce the number of hostages but keep the one who was the most politically important?
The identity of Alexei Tammet-Romanov's foster mother, Paula Veermann, may provide a clue. Her maiden name was Paula von Benckendorff-Kanna. Research into the genealogy of the Benckendorff family has suggested that Paula may have been related to Count Paul Benckendorff, Grand Marshall of the Tsar's Imperial Court. Count Benckendorff was known to have led the efforts to find the Romanovs a place of exile or rescue right up to the time of the murders.
Then there is the matter of the tsarevich's health. Historians have always suggested that Nicholas II's only son suffered from hemophilia, but no actual proof of that diagnosis is known to exist. The only official statement on the disease from the tsar's doctors described the boy's symptoms as "significant anemia."
It took six months for Tammet-Romanov's Vancouver doctors to identify the disease that eventually took his life. They decided it was a form of leukemia. Throughout those last two years, Tammet-Romanov displayed the same symptoms that struck down Tsarevich Alexei during a visit to the tsar's hunting lodge at Spala in Poland in October 1912.
The key to the true nature of Alexei's disease can be found in a letter that Nicholas II wrote to his mother.
"The days from the 6th to the 10th were the worst ... His high temperature made him delirious night and day."
An episode known to modern medicine as thrombocytopenia produces the same symptoms of hemorrhaging and fever that struck down the tsarevich and is known to occur in child and adult patients with leukemia and aplastic anemia. If thrombocytopenia does not kill the patient first it can instead go into spontaneous remission - which could explain Rasputin's alleged power to "heal" the tsarevich.
Modern medicine also has greater knowledge on methods of identification. In 1994, British expert Peter Gill announced that DNA matching techniques at the Forensic Science Service Research Laboratory in Aldermaston, England, had shown that the woman known as Anna Anderson, who had long claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, could not have been related to Nicholas II or Empress Alexandra.
Gill and Russia's molecular biologist Dr. Pavel Ivanov were the researchers who first used DNA to verify the identity of the bones to be interred Friday. Two of Alexei Tammet-Romanov's teeth extracted in 1962 were sent in April 1993 at Ivanov's request to the Adermaston laboratory. Ivanov admitted in a 1995 letter to Tammet-Romanov's widow that a DNA extraction was started on her late husband's DNA samples while the identification of the remains found near Yekaterinburg was being done at the English laboratory in 1993. He told her that shortly after that "we were forced to stop all the tests on any potential survived Romanov claimants." He did not explain why the tests were stopped.
In the five years since DNA extraction was started on one of Tammet-Romanov's teeth, no one has said if the tests were ever completed.
Neither has any person connected to the investigation of the murders of the Imperial Family been willing to say anything about the man buried in a Vancouver-area cemetery and whether or not he really could have been the missing Tsarevich Alexei Nicolaievich, Grand Duke and Sovereign Heir to Russia's throne.