Mystery Files (2010–…): Season 1, Episode 12 - The Romanovs - full transcript
On July the 17th1918,
Russia Tsar Nicholas II,
his wife, and five
children are reported
to have been executed--
--but their bodies
could not be found.
Then in 1991, a
grave is uncovered.
Two of the children are missing.
All the time there
was this confusion,
the myth and the
possibility of some,
or all, or any of
them surviving.
In 2007 a
secondburial site is unearthed.
But can its contents
finally reveal
the true story of what happenedto
the lost royal children?
Investigating
unpublishedreports of attempts
to rescue the tsar's family,
and with access to leading
forensic scientistsstriving
to extract evidence
from severely degradedbones,
we open the mystery
files on the Romanovs.
The beginning of the
20thcentury, the Romanov family
are at the heart
of Russian life.
Tsar Nicholas II has
been emperor since 1894.
Helen Rappaport is a
historianand author specializing
in Russian history.
She has studied in depth,
theprivate lives of the Romanovs.
For the Russian people
atlarge, for the peasantry,
Nicholas was a divine being.
And they did revere him,
they did bow down and crossed
themselves whenever he passed.
His Royal Highness,
Prince Michael of Kent,
is a distant relative
of the Russian tsar
through the British
royal family.
He was a godlike figure to them,
so that reverence was
very, very powerful.
With his German
bornwife, the Tsarina Alexandra,
they are the perfect
royal couple.
Whatreally nailed the popularity
of the Romanov family
was undoubtedly
those five
extraordinarilybeautiful children.
Olga, Tatiana,
Maria, and Anastasia
are the four adored daughters.
The youngest child is their son,
and heir to the throne, Alexei.
The family's official residenceis
here, in the Winter
Palace, Saint Petersburg.
Historian, Charlotte
Zeepvat, has
written extensively aboutthe
lives of the Romanovs.
The Winter Palace is themost
extraordinary setting
to live in and to grow up in,
you have acres of gold leaf
and miles of marble around you.
But in stark contrast,
by 1914 Russia is in turmoil.
Germany declares war.
And within a year,
approximately1 and 1/2 million Russians
are killed or wounded.
Andrew Cook is a
historian, specializing
in early 20th century
British intelligence.
Every failing of the
Russian war machine
is reflected back on
the Russian government,
which is actually Nicholas.
He is now personally
seenas being responsible.
As the conflict takes its toll,
there is starvation
in the cities.
Despite reports
of growing unrest,
the Romanovs are shieldedfrom
the discontent brewing
outside the charmed
life of their palace.
Brian Moynahan is anexpert
on Russian history.
They weren't in touch at all.
When they went on
imperial progresses
through the countryside,
it wasall very much tied up for them.
They didn't see slums,
they didn't see poverty.
In February
1917after three years of war,
the Romanovs face
mounting hostility.
Political agitators
seize their chance
and trigger the
Russian Revolution.
It was a combination
of real, literal
hunger for food,
but also a desperate,
desperate ongoing desire
for democratic freedom.
Nicholas is forcedto
step down from the throne.
In a way,
itcomes as a great relief to him.
He was never really a manwho
relished being a ruler.
The Romanovs retreathere,
to the Alexander Palace,
27 kilometers south
of Saint Petersburg.
As the provisional governmenttakes
control of a country
in chaos, the family
areplaced under house arrest
for their own protection.
There
wasextreme Republican feeling out
on the streets and the mob,
if given half a chance,
would a stormed the
palaceand would have strung
Nicholas and Alexander up.
In October1917,
the Bolshevik party,
led by Vladimir
Lenin, seized power.
The Bolsheviksare
a revolutionary hard-line
group, who are
pathologicallyand passionately
against the aristocracy,
and Nicholas in particular.
The tsar and his family
are taken to the
Bolshevikstronghold of Yekaterinburg
in the Urals,
over 1,700kilometers from their home.
Nicholas said, that's
about the last place
on earth I would want to go to.
He said, I know peoplethere
are very against me.
This is the
heavily guarded house
where the family are
held as prisoners
under the control of
ahard-lined commandant, Yakov
Yurovsky.
Yurovsky
wasa dedicated revolutionary.
His basic role,
apart from overseeing
the guards at the house,
was to prepare for the need
to kill the family.
He had a duty to the revolution,
and he was determined
to fulfill it at any price.
He could sit down and quitehappily
engage in conversation,
when he knew full well withina
couple of days he was going
to go and murder the family.
In a testimony given by Yurovsky
after the revolution,
hestates that around 2:00 AM July
the 17th 1918,
guardsinformed the Romanovs they
are being moved to the cellar.
Yurovsky'smen
were gathered in a room
nearby, priming and
checking their weapons.
Yurovsky
ordersthe family together
for a group photograph,
just like they have
done countless times before.
The girls huddle
with their mother,
the tsar stands by his son.
Their captors line
up in front of them.
Yurovskyread out a very summary
and brief statement
that it had been decided
that Nicholas must be executed.
The family are in disbelief.
Nicholaswas the lucky one,
he died instantly.
But most the others didnot,
they suffered terribly.
There was screaming
andsmoke, and people couldn't
see what they were doing.
One by one, each of the children
are gunned down at
point blank range.
In total, 103 shots are fired.
This photograph
of the cellar room
is taken at the
scene of the crime.
Now the Bolsheviks
need to ensure
the bodies are not
recovered and glorified
by tsarist sympathizers
as martyrs.
Yurovsky's written accountsdescribe
the terrible events
that follow.
To dispose of the
remainsand leave no trace,
the bloodied corpses are
taken to remote woods.
Peter Sarankinaki is partof
an international team
of investigators searchingfor
the burial sites.
Yurovsky gave the order
to take the bodies
out of the truck
and decided right then and thereto
bury the bodies on the spot.
But it is nearly dawn.
Yurovsky and his men areafraid
they will be spotted.
Unceremoniously, the Romanovs
are thrown into a pit,
covered with acid,
and set alight.
They had this idea
that they were going to
incinerate the corpses
initially, out in the forest.
Now, had they done
their homework?
Had they checked how longit
actually takes to burn
one body in the open air?
Depending on the heat,
fire needs around seven hours
to consume tissue
and fat, leaving
the skeleton coated only in
agreasy residue of burnt flesh.
It is now that a crucial
decision is made,
that for the next
seven decades keeps
alive the hope that two of
thechildren might have survived.
Accordingto the Yurovsky report,
they took the two
smallersets of remains nearby
and started burning
those remains.
They separated them off
from the other pile of bodies.
For 80 years,
the twosites where the Romanovs are
supposed to be buried are lost.
Then in 1991, a grave
isuncovered in the remote forest
near Yekaterinburg.
I was allowed to
go visit and film,
and I walked into this room.
When I saw all these
remains, the bones,
skeletons with holes intheir
heads, I couldn't cry,
I was just deeply, deeply sad.
Scientistsanalyze
the excavated bone
fragments with DNA.
Dr. Michael Coble is a
forensicscientist at the Armed Forces
Laboratory in Washington DC.
Our laboratory wasinvolved
with the first round
of DNA testing.
The findings were quite clear.
Of those remains,
there was aconsistent family association
between the skeleton
believed to be Nicholas,
the skeleton believed
to be Alexandra,
and three of their daughters.
This is the Paul and Peter
Fortress, Saint Petersburg.
In 1998, seven years
aftertheir bones are exhumed,
Tsar Nicholas II and
fourmembers of his family
are interred here.
The Romanovs are
canonized as saints.
Prince Michael of Kent
waspresent at the ceremony.
Itwas a very poignant moment
because that's
where the tsars have
always been buried,
since Peterthe Great created the city.
A pair of
tombs remain unoccupied.
For Alexei, the
young prince and heir
to the throne, and
one of the daughters,
either Maria or Anastasia.
The big mystery was,
of course, what happened
to the two missing children.
It was a completely
closed story,
there was no question of
them ever being found.
Determined to uncover the truth,
year after year Peter
Sarankinaki and his team
systematically searched
thearea around the tsar's grave
looking for a
second burial site.
It's afive
acre open meadow of grass
surrounded by a forest on
threesides, and on the eastern side
it's all swamp.
We scraped off the top,
roughly10 centimeters of the soil,
to try to level the ground
sothat the ground penetrating
radar would be
able to go over it
and be able to find anomalies,
and we did not find anything.
With no sign
of two buried bodies,
rumors emerge that Yurovsky'saccount
of the assassination
might be exaggerated,
and that perhaps
the missing children had
escapedor been rescued after all.
A plan took shape in the
spring of 1917, one year
before they are shot,
while the family are being
held in the Alexander Palace.
There are enormous uncertainties
surrounding what will
happenand where they will go.
The family are encouraged
to leave the country.
The RussianProvisional
Government see it,
really, as important
that the Romanov
family is actually exited
fromRussia, probably go to England.
Nicholas turns
to his close friend
and relative, King George V.
They were first cousins andthey
were on very affable terms
together, they were very close.
People often remarked how
the two men bore a
strikingresemblance to each other.
Nicholas requests to
George that his family
take refuge in England.
He was very concernedabout
what was happening.
It is thoughtthat
arrangements were made
for a British ship to bewaiting
for the Romanov family
at the port of Murmansk,
1,000 kilometers north
of Saint Petersburg.
From there,
they wouldsail to safety in the UK.
George's initial instinct,
like anybody's, was
to offer refuge to his cousin.
But there was a problem,
andthe problem was Alexander
was a German and there
wasincredible anti-German feeling
in Britain at the time.
Faced with
theprospect of political unrest
at home in the UK, King
George has no choice
and is pressed to
withdraw the invitation.
It's undeniably the case thathe's
pulled up the drawbridge,
and that Nicholas and
hisfamily are now stranded
in a very hostile environment.
Proposals forthe
family to be officially
exiled to the UK are shelved.
When civil war
erupts, the family
are forced to leave
Saint Petersburg
and are taken to Yekaterinburg.
It seems their fate is sealed.
The mansion house where
the family are held
is ominously renamed
by the new government
The House of Special Purpose.
Heavily guarded, it
becomes their prison.
Must
havebeen a terrifying situation
for them.
To be in this confined
spacewith very hostile guards.
Removed from
the life they once knew,
the only solace they
have is themselves.
They
alwaysseemed to be sufficient unto
each other, they really were
anextraordinarily devoted family.
For a long time
Nicholas and Alexandra
nursed an increasinglyfading
hope that they might
be allowed out into exile.
All the family keep diaries.
Those diaries are
terribly important becauseit's
the last we have of them.
They tell us
of their daily chores,
but there are also
signs of desperation.
Nicholas writes in his diary--
--we have absolutely
no news from outside.
And it was a very
despairing moment
where you could tell,
I think, that he'd
given up all hope of rescue.
But unknown to
thetsar, despite King George's
official refusal to give
theRomanovs asylum, rescuing them
is still being
considered in London.
PRINCE MICHAEL OF
KENT: It was thought
that there was an attempt madeby
an aircraft to get them out.
On the staff of KingGeorge
V, my grandfather,
was an RAF officer
gold commodore fellows,
who was, they say,
given theopportunity to plan an escape.
And that he would haveflown
in and landed nearby
and got them out.
This scheme
was never undertaken,
but recently discovered
evidence reveals
the specific details of
anotherescape plan already underway.
King George increasingly
became conscience stricken.
The gravity of the danger
thathe had placed his cousin in,
led to him taking an initiative.
He had a private consultation
from members of the
British Secret Service,
where effectively he said,
if you can get them out,
please get them out.
Behind closed doors, the British
hatch a secret plot to freethe
family from their prison.
Hidden for 90
years, documents now
disclose how reconnaissance
isassigned to one of their most
senior spies in Russia.
Sephen Ali
isessentially a specialist.
He was born in Russia,
he spoke fluent Russian,
and could dissolve into
everyday Russian life.
This is Ali's notebook.
Kept by his family
over the generations,
it contains entries fromhis
trip to Yekaterinburg.
His unique
collection of documents
really does shine a very
bright light on what
he was doing at that time.
Intelligence work of thatkind
is exceptionally risky.
If he had been
uncovered and arrested,
almost certainly he wouldhave
faced a firing squad.
Ali's log
also has a rough sketch
of the location
of the house where
the Romanovs are being held.
Together with
Russian files, it is
now possible to
build up an accurate
picture of their prison.
The family are
keptin a corner on the first floor
in four rooms.
We also know that on thesame
floor was a guard room.
There were also guardsat
the top of the stairs,
on the staircase itself.
The family's quarterswere
surrounded by guards.
We actually see lists
naming the personnel
and the individuals
who were there.
We can see their shifts,
wecan see how many there were.
There were machine
gunners trained on the
house from the bell
tower of the church.
There were machine
gunplacements in the garden,
in the basement.
There is no way that
familycould have been got out
of there without a bloodbath.
Ali would have reportedback
that this was a suicide
mission, that thisreally wasn't a situation
where he could conceiveof
a realistic possibility
of success.
Ali's plan
to rescue the Romanovs
is never attempted.
But when the five bodies
are identified in 1991,
two of the children are
still unaccounted for.
Speculation that theysomehow
escaped persists.
The mystery of theirdisappearance
remains unsolved.
All the time there
was this confusion,
the myth and the
possibility of some,
or all, or any of
them surviving.
Then in June2007,
a second burial site
is found just 16 meters
from the first grave.
Although these bones
had been chopped up and
burntonly 44 small pieces of bone
still gave clues.
We had two people.
We had a boy, aged 12 to 15,and
we had a girl from 17 to 19.
Who the shattered
remains belong to
can only be found
from their DNA,
but this time scientists
are faced with an almost
insurmountable challenge.
Evgeny Rogaev is a
leader in the field
of genetic identification.
He is invited by
Russian officials
to try and extract DNA
fromthe newly discovered cash.
When we looked at the fragments,
we were very skeptical.
There's a challenge
to the geneticists,
how to work with
very degraded DNA.
Most of
thefragments were very small.
In fact, too small
for DNA testing.
There were probably
only about 10
or so bone fragments that
werelarge enough for DNA testing.
DNA is a genetic fingerprint
unique to each of us,
carrying traits handed down
from generation to generation.
Thefirst thing we wanted to do
was to look at the
mitochondrial DNA.
The mitochondria are passedonly
through the maternal line,
so mothers give their
mitochondria type
to their children.
When the first
gravewas discovered in the 1990s,
tests identified that DNAwas
shared between Tsarina
Alexandra and three
daughters, Olga,
Tatiana, and one of
the youngest daughters,
either Maria or Anastasia.
If the two newly
discoveredbodies are related,
they will share the same DNA.
The scientists mostpainstakingly
search the bones
for any surviving cells.
We scrape
awaythe outer surface of the bone
and we crush it
up into a powder,
and then we use an
extraction buffer
that then completely dissolvesthe
bone and liberates the DNA.
We were quite surprised
ourselves that we indeed
were able to determine
thecomplete mitochondrial DNA
sequences.
And what we found wasthat
the leg bone believed
to be from a female
and the leg bone
believed to be from a male,
bothhave the same mitochondrial DNA
sequence as Alexandra.
But the work
is still far from over.
To reach a complete
andincontrovertible conclusion,
investigators must make
amatch between these children
and their father.
For that, a direct
comparison is required,
but there is only
one sample of Tsar
Nicholas' DNA from when he
wasalive that scientists know of.
And they also know it
was lost decades ago.
On May
1891,during his travel to Osaka
in Japan, Nicholas Romanov,
then heir to the throne,
was attacked.
Nicholas
wasbleeding all over his shirt,
he was holding the
side of his head
with his hand to
stop the bleeding.
The shirt of Nicholas II,
with traces of the blood,
was stored in The
State Hermitage
Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Once home to the Romanov family,
it now houses a collectionof
over 3 million artifacts.
The
museumsaid, we can't find it,
we have no idea where it is.
So they do an inventoryand
they just so happened
to come upon this shirt.
It is thecrucial
piece of evidence,
but the shirt is over
100 years old and DNA
and blood degrades over time.
Professor Rogaev is thefirst
to examine the fabric.
I was very skepticalthat
it was possible at all
to extract the DNA.
He was afraid
chemicalpreservation, heat, or humidity
could have destroyed the DNA.
We were very surprised
weextracted DNA of great quality.
Stored in a drawer wrapped
in paper, Nicholas'
genetic imprint
survived to tell its story.
And when
wecompare these genetic profiles
from the bloodstains and
from the bone specimens,
we found a perfect match.
It was
4trillion times more likely
that these two children
are children of Nicholas
and Alexandra,
than if theywere just two random people
in the population.
Everybody in the
room started crying.
It was a very emotional
time because now we
have definitive proof thatthese
are the missing children,
and that this nearly
90-year-oldmystery is now solved.
None of us,
whether we'reRomanovs or anybody else,
I don't think, has any
doubt because the DNA
tests are definitive.
In February
2009, after two years
of forensicinvestigations, scientists
confirm that the remains of
thetwo missing Romanov children
have been identified.
Proof of their execution dispelsthe
last hope that any of them
survive.
Only now can the reality
of their cruel end
be fully understood.
I think that it's
one of the most
shocking things that
has happened, certainly,
in the last 100 years.
To them it was political, to us it was not.
It was just murder, a
brutal, bloody murder.
The fates
conspiredagainst the Romanovs.
Now a century later,
the lastof Russia's ruling dynasty
can finally be laid to rest.
Russia Tsar Nicholas II,
his wife, and five
children are reported
to have been executed--
--but their bodies
could not be found.
Then in 1991, a
grave is uncovered.
Two of the children are missing.
All the time there
was this confusion,
the myth and the
possibility of some,
or all, or any of
them surviving.
In 2007 a
secondburial site is unearthed.
But can its contents
finally reveal
the true story of what happenedto
the lost royal children?
Investigating
unpublishedreports of attempts
to rescue the tsar's family,
and with access to leading
forensic scientistsstriving
to extract evidence
from severely degradedbones,
we open the mystery
files on the Romanovs.
The beginning of the
20thcentury, the Romanov family
are at the heart
of Russian life.
Tsar Nicholas II has
been emperor since 1894.
Helen Rappaport is a
historianand author specializing
in Russian history.
She has studied in depth,
theprivate lives of the Romanovs.
For the Russian people
atlarge, for the peasantry,
Nicholas was a divine being.
And they did revere him,
they did bow down and crossed
themselves whenever he passed.
His Royal Highness,
Prince Michael of Kent,
is a distant relative
of the Russian tsar
through the British
royal family.
He was a godlike figure to them,
so that reverence was
very, very powerful.
With his German
bornwife, the Tsarina Alexandra,
they are the perfect
royal couple.
Whatreally nailed the popularity
of the Romanov family
was undoubtedly
those five
extraordinarilybeautiful children.
Olga, Tatiana,
Maria, and Anastasia
are the four adored daughters.
The youngest child is their son,
and heir to the throne, Alexei.
The family's official residenceis
here, in the Winter
Palace, Saint Petersburg.
Historian, Charlotte
Zeepvat, has
written extensively aboutthe
lives of the Romanovs.
The Winter Palace is themost
extraordinary setting
to live in and to grow up in,
you have acres of gold leaf
and miles of marble around you.
But in stark contrast,
by 1914 Russia is in turmoil.
Germany declares war.
And within a year,
approximately1 and 1/2 million Russians
are killed or wounded.
Andrew Cook is a
historian, specializing
in early 20th century
British intelligence.
Every failing of the
Russian war machine
is reflected back on
the Russian government,
which is actually Nicholas.
He is now personally
seenas being responsible.
As the conflict takes its toll,
there is starvation
in the cities.
Despite reports
of growing unrest,
the Romanovs are shieldedfrom
the discontent brewing
outside the charmed
life of their palace.
Brian Moynahan is anexpert
on Russian history.
They weren't in touch at all.
When they went on
imperial progresses
through the countryside,
it wasall very much tied up for them.
They didn't see slums,
they didn't see poverty.
In February
1917after three years of war,
the Romanovs face
mounting hostility.
Political agitators
seize their chance
and trigger the
Russian Revolution.
It was a combination
of real, literal
hunger for food,
but also a desperate,
desperate ongoing desire
for democratic freedom.
Nicholas is forcedto
step down from the throne.
In a way,
itcomes as a great relief to him.
He was never really a manwho
relished being a ruler.
The Romanovs retreathere,
to the Alexander Palace,
27 kilometers south
of Saint Petersburg.
As the provisional governmenttakes
control of a country
in chaos, the family
areplaced under house arrest
for their own protection.
There
wasextreme Republican feeling out
on the streets and the mob,
if given half a chance,
would a stormed the
palaceand would have strung
Nicholas and Alexander up.
In October1917,
the Bolshevik party,
led by Vladimir
Lenin, seized power.
The Bolsheviksare
a revolutionary hard-line
group, who are
pathologicallyand passionately
against the aristocracy,
and Nicholas in particular.
The tsar and his family
are taken to the
Bolshevikstronghold of Yekaterinburg
in the Urals,
over 1,700kilometers from their home.
Nicholas said, that's
about the last place
on earth I would want to go to.
He said, I know peoplethere
are very against me.
This is the
heavily guarded house
where the family are
held as prisoners
under the control of
ahard-lined commandant, Yakov
Yurovsky.
Yurovsky
wasa dedicated revolutionary.
His basic role,
apart from overseeing
the guards at the house,
was to prepare for the need
to kill the family.
He had a duty to the revolution,
and he was determined
to fulfill it at any price.
He could sit down and quitehappily
engage in conversation,
when he knew full well withina
couple of days he was going
to go and murder the family.
In a testimony given by Yurovsky
after the revolution,
hestates that around 2:00 AM July
the 17th 1918,
guardsinformed the Romanovs they
are being moved to the cellar.
Yurovsky'smen
were gathered in a room
nearby, priming and
checking their weapons.
Yurovsky
ordersthe family together
for a group photograph,
just like they have
done countless times before.
The girls huddle
with their mother,
the tsar stands by his son.
Their captors line
up in front of them.
Yurovskyread out a very summary
and brief statement
that it had been decided
that Nicholas must be executed.
The family are in disbelief.
Nicholaswas the lucky one,
he died instantly.
But most the others didnot,
they suffered terribly.
There was screaming
andsmoke, and people couldn't
see what they were doing.
One by one, each of the children
are gunned down at
point blank range.
In total, 103 shots are fired.
This photograph
of the cellar room
is taken at the
scene of the crime.
Now the Bolsheviks
need to ensure
the bodies are not
recovered and glorified
by tsarist sympathizers
as martyrs.
Yurovsky's written accountsdescribe
the terrible events
that follow.
To dispose of the
remainsand leave no trace,
the bloodied corpses are
taken to remote woods.
Peter Sarankinaki is partof
an international team
of investigators searchingfor
the burial sites.
Yurovsky gave the order
to take the bodies
out of the truck
and decided right then and thereto
bury the bodies on the spot.
But it is nearly dawn.
Yurovsky and his men areafraid
they will be spotted.
Unceremoniously, the Romanovs
are thrown into a pit,
covered with acid,
and set alight.
They had this idea
that they were going to
incinerate the corpses
initially, out in the forest.
Now, had they done
their homework?
Had they checked how longit
actually takes to burn
one body in the open air?
Depending on the heat,
fire needs around seven hours
to consume tissue
and fat, leaving
the skeleton coated only in
agreasy residue of burnt flesh.
It is now that a crucial
decision is made,
that for the next
seven decades keeps
alive the hope that two of
thechildren might have survived.
Accordingto the Yurovsky report,
they took the two
smallersets of remains nearby
and started burning
those remains.
They separated them off
from the other pile of bodies.
For 80 years,
the twosites where the Romanovs are
supposed to be buried are lost.
Then in 1991, a grave
isuncovered in the remote forest
near Yekaterinburg.
I was allowed to
go visit and film,
and I walked into this room.
When I saw all these
remains, the bones,
skeletons with holes intheir
heads, I couldn't cry,
I was just deeply, deeply sad.
Scientistsanalyze
the excavated bone
fragments with DNA.
Dr. Michael Coble is a
forensicscientist at the Armed Forces
Laboratory in Washington DC.
Our laboratory wasinvolved
with the first round
of DNA testing.
The findings were quite clear.
Of those remains,
there was aconsistent family association
between the skeleton
believed to be Nicholas,
the skeleton believed
to be Alexandra,
and three of their daughters.
This is the Paul and Peter
Fortress, Saint Petersburg.
In 1998, seven years
aftertheir bones are exhumed,
Tsar Nicholas II and
fourmembers of his family
are interred here.
The Romanovs are
canonized as saints.
Prince Michael of Kent
waspresent at the ceremony.
Itwas a very poignant moment
because that's
where the tsars have
always been buried,
since Peterthe Great created the city.
A pair of
tombs remain unoccupied.
For Alexei, the
young prince and heir
to the throne, and
one of the daughters,
either Maria or Anastasia.
The big mystery was,
of course, what happened
to the two missing children.
It was a completely
closed story,
there was no question of
them ever being found.
Determined to uncover the truth,
year after year Peter
Sarankinaki and his team
systematically searched
thearea around the tsar's grave
looking for a
second burial site.
It's afive
acre open meadow of grass
surrounded by a forest on
threesides, and on the eastern side
it's all swamp.
We scraped off the top,
roughly10 centimeters of the soil,
to try to level the ground
sothat the ground penetrating
radar would be
able to go over it
and be able to find anomalies,
and we did not find anything.
With no sign
of two buried bodies,
rumors emerge that Yurovsky'saccount
of the assassination
might be exaggerated,
and that perhaps
the missing children had
escapedor been rescued after all.
A plan took shape in the
spring of 1917, one year
before they are shot,
while the family are being
held in the Alexander Palace.
There are enormous uncertainties
surrounding what will
happenand where they will go.
The family are encouraged
to leave the country.
The RussianProvisional
Government see it,
really, as important
that the Romanov
family is actually exited
fromRussia, probably go to England.
Nicholas turns
to his close friend
and relative, King George V.
They were first cousins andthey
were on very affable terms
together, they were very close.
People often remarked how
the two men bore a
strikingresemblance to each other.
Nicholas requests to
George that his family
take refuge in England.
He was very concernedabout
what was happening.
It is thoughtthat
arrangements were made
for a British ship to bewaiting
for the Romanov family
at the port of Murmansk,
1,000 kilometers north
of Saint Petersburg.
From there,
they wouldsail to safety in the UK.
George's initial instinct,
like anybody's, was
to offer refuge to his cousin.
But there was a problem,
andthe problem was Alexander
was a German and there
wasincredible anti-German feeling
in Britain at the time.
Faced with
theprospect of political unrest
at home in the UK, King
George has no choice
and is pressed to
withdraw the invitation.
It's undeniably the case thathe's
pulled up the drawbridge,
and that Nicholas and
hisfamily are now stranded
in a very hostile environment.
Proposals forthe
family to be officially
exiled to the UK are shelved.
When civil war
erupts, the family
are forced to leave
Saint Petersburg
and are taken to Yekaterinburg.
It seems their fate is sealed.
The mansion house where
the family are held
is ominously renamed
by the new government
The House of Special Purpose.
Heavily guarded, it
becomes their prison.
Must
havebeen a terrifying situation
for them.
To be in this confined
spacewith very hostile guards.
Removed from
the life they once knew,
the only solace they
have is themselves.
They
alwaysseemed to be sufficient unto
each other, they really were
anextraordinarily devoted family.
For a long time
Nicholas and Alexandra
nursed an increasinglyfading
hope that they might
be allowed out into exile.
All the family keep diaries.
Those diaries are
terribly important becauseit's
the last we have of them.
They tell us
of their daily chores,
but there are also
signs of desperation.
Nicholas writes in his diary--
--we have absolutely
no news from outside.
And it was a very
despairing moment
where you could tell,
I think, that he'd
given up all hope of rescue.
But unknown to
thetsar, despite King George's
official refusal to give
theRomanovs asylum, rescuing them
is still being
considered in London.
PRINCE MICHAEL OF
KENT: It was thought
that there was an attempt madeby
an aircraft to get them out.
On the staff of KingGeorge
V, my grandfather,
was an RAF officer
gold commodore fellows,
who was, they say,
given theopportunity to plan an escape.
And that he would haveflown
in and landed nearby
and got them out.
This scheme
was never undertaken,
but recently discovered
evidence reveals
the specific details of
anotherescape plan already underway.
King George increasingly
became conscience stricken.
The gravity of the danger
thathe had placed his cousin in,
led to him taking an initiative.
He had a private consultation
from members of the
British Secret Service,
where effectively he said,
if you can get them out,
please get them out.
Behind closed doors, the British
hatch a secret plot to freethe
family from their prison.
Hidden for 90
years, documents now
disclose how reconnaissance
isassigned to one of their most
senior spies in Russia.
Sephen Ali
isessentially a specialist.
He was born in Russia,
he spoke fluent Russian,
and could dissolve into
everyday Russian life.
This is Ali's notebook.
Kept by his family
over the generations,
it contains entries fromhis
trip to Yekaterinburg.
His unique
collection of documents
really does shine a very
bright light on what
he was doing at that time.
Intelligence work of thatkind
is exceptionally risky.
If he had been
uncovered and arrested,
almost certainly he wouldhave
faced a firing squad.
Ali's log
also has a rough sketch
of the location
of the house where
the Romanovs are being held.
Together with
Russian files, it is
now possible to
build up an accurate
picture of their prison.
The family are
keptin a corner on the first floor
in four rooms.
We also know that on thesame
floor was a guard room.
There were also guardsat
the top of the stairs,
on the staircase itself.
The family's quarterswere
surrounded by guards.
We actually see lists
naming the personnel
and the individuals
who were there.
We can see their shifts,
wecan see how many there were.
There were machine
gunners trained on the
house from the bell
tower of the church.
There were machine
gunplacements in the garden,
in the basement.
There is no way that
familycould have been got out
of there without a bloodbath.
Ali would have reportedback
that this was a suicide
mission, that thisreally wasn't a situation
where he could conceiveof
a realistic possibility
of success.
Ali's plan
to rescue the Romanovs
is never attempted.
But when the five bodies
are identified in 1991,
two of the children are
still unaccounted for.
Speculation that theysomehow
escaped persists.
The mystery of theirdisappearance
remains unsolved.
All the time there
was this confusion,
the myth and the
possibility of some,
or all, or any of
them surviving.
Then in June2007,
a second burial site
is found just 16 meters
from the first grave.
Although these bones
had been chopped up and
burntonly 44 small pieces of bone
still gave clues.
We had two people.
We had a boy, aged 12 to 15,and
we had a girl from 17 to 19.
Who the shattered
remains belong to
can only be found
from their DNA,
but this time scientists
are faced with an almost
insurmountable challenge.
Evgeny Rogaev is a
leader in the field
of genetic identification.
He is invited by
Russian officials
to try and extract DNA
fromthe newly discovered cash.
When we looked at the fragments,
we were very skeptical.
There's a challenge
to the geneticists,
how to work with
very degraded DNA.
Most of
thefragments were very small.
In fact, too small
for DNA testing.
There were probably
only about 10
or so bone fragments that
werelarge enough for DNA testing.
DNA is a genetic fingerprint
unique to each of us,
carrying traits handed down
from generation to generation.
Thefirst thing we wanted to do
was to look at the
mitochondrial DNA.
The mitochondria are passedonly
through the maternal line,
so mothers give their
mitochondria type
to their children.
When the first
gravewas discovered in the 1990s,
tests identified that DNAwas
shared between Tsarina
Alexandra and three
daughters, Olga,
Tatiana, and one of
the youngest daughters,
either Maria or Anastasia.
If the two newly
discoveredbodies are related,
they will share the same DNA.
The scientists mostpainstakingly
search the bones
for any surviving cells.
We scrape
awaythe outer surface of the bone
and we crush it
up into a powder,
and then we use an
extraction buffer
that then completely dissolvesthe
bone and liberates the DNA.
We were quite surprised
ourselves that we indeed
were able to determine
thecomplete mitochondrial DNA
sequences.
And what we found wasthat
the leg bone believed
to be from a female
and the leg bone
believed to be from a male,
bothhave the same mitochondrial DNA
sequence as Alexandra.
But the work
is still far from over.
To reach a complete
andincontrovertible conclusion,
investigators must make
amatch between these children
and their father.
For that, a direct
comparison is required,
but there is only
one sample of Tsar
Nicholas' DNA from when he
wasalive that scientists know of.
And they also know it
was lost decades ago.
On May
1891,during his travel to Osaka
in Japan, Nicholas Romanov,
then heir to the throne,
was attacked.
Nicholas
wasbleeding all over his shirt,
he was holding the
side of his head
with his hand to
stop the bleeding.
The shirt of Nicholas II,
with traces of the blood,
was stored in The
State Hermitage
Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Once home to the Romanov family,
it now houses a collectionof
over 3 million artifacts.
The
museumsaid, we can't find it,
we have no idea where it is.
So they do an inventoryand
they just so happened
to come upon this shirt.
It is thecrucial
piece of evidence,
but the shirt is over
100 years old and DNA
and blood degrades over time.
Professor Rogaev is thefirst
to examine the fabric.
I was very skepticalthat
it was possible at all
to extract the DNA.
He was afraid
chemicalpreservation, heat, or humidity
could have destroyed the DNA.
We were very surprised
weextracted DNA of great quality.
Stored in a drawer wrapped
in paper, Nicholas'
genetic imprint
survived to tell its story.
And when
wecompare these genetic profiles
from the bloodstains and
from the bone specimens,
we found a perfect match.
It was
4trillion times more likely
that these two children
are children of Nicholas
and Alexandra,
than if theywere just two random people
in the population.
Everybody in the
room started crying.
It was a very emotional
time because now we
have definitive proof thatthese
are the missing children,
and that this nearly
90-year-oldmystery is now solved.
None of us,
whether we'reRomanovs or anybody else,
I don't think, has any
doubt because the DNA
tests are definitive.
In February
2009, after two years
of forensicinvestigations, scientists
confirm that the remains of
thetwo missing Romanov children
have been identified.
Proof of their execution dispelsthe
last hope that any of them
survive.
Only now can the reality
of their cruel end
be fully understood.
I think that it's
one of the most
shocking things that
has happened, certainly,
in the last 100 years.
To them it was political, to us it was not.
It was just murder, a
brutal, bloody murder.
The fates
conspiredagainst the Romanovs.
Now a century later,
the lastof Russia's ruling dynasty
can finally be laid to rest.