Part One: Red Coffins
“Before I left Petersburg, I visited the Peter and Paul Cathedral. Everything was wide open – the fortress gates, the cathedral doors. Idle people were roaming about everywhere, looking around and spitting out sunflower seeds. I walked around the cathedral, looked at where the Tsars were buried, and, with a bow to the ground, I begged their forgiveness…”1 – Ivan Bunin.
Within sight of the Cathedral, near the western face of the Golovkin Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress, sometime in 1988 or 1989, a construction crew unearthed four skeletons lying at a depth of about a meter (3.25 feet or 39 inches). This, in itself, was not unusual; throughout the twentieth century, during repairs and construction in certain areas of the Peter and Paul Fortress, bones had been discovered and hastily removed and reburied in other locations. But in 1989, the future of the Soviet Union was unclear, and beliefs and ideals outside those of the Party were no longer strongly suppressed. And so - cautiously - the bones of these four bodies were exhumed, cleaned, and stored in the archival structure of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg along with personal items and clothing retrieved from the grave. These events were not publicized, no criminal inquiry was opened, and no attempt was made to forensically identify the remains.2 And there the bones waited, for almost twenty years.
In March 2007, while replacing utility lines between the Kronverskaya Canal and the Golovkin Bastion, construction workers again found human remains. This time, an excavator’s bucket exhumed the lower half of a man’s skeleton, dragging it out of the mud and detritus from a depth of about two meters (6.5 feet). Further excavation showed that:
“The deceased was lying on his back with his arms outstretched. Clothes made of thick material with buttons (possibly an overcoat), fragments of one leather belt, and another belt well-preserved. On the inner concave side of the button, there are several letters: V…VIN. On his hands, the deceased one wore thin gloves.
“He had light brown hair, about five or six centimeters [two inches or so] long, still to be seen on his skull, but with a greenish tinge. Experts later explained that the greenish tint appeared because of interaction with the copper parts of his headdress, fragments of which were nearby.
“To his left lay the lower part of a skeleton (tibias and femurs) in good leather boots of military type, with high shafts and corroded metal strap-clasps on the upper edge of the backs. They were wrapped in a protective cloth. Near the head of the deceased, another pair of boots with a two-centimeter heel and metal pads for threading laces was discovered.”3
The Bureau of Forensic Medicine initially concluded that the remains were those of two, and possibly three, young men between the ages of twenty and thirty, who had been shot in their heads and torsos. They were determined to have been in the ground for at least fifty years. Experts later revised the contents of this grave – designated as grave #2 - concluding that there was a mixture of bones from possibly as many as six individuals.
Having completed their analysis of the bones found in 2007, the experts then turned their attention to the four sets of bones discovered in 1989, which had fortunately been securely kept along with some notes and artifacts from their communal grave. These remains had been found near the wall of the Golovkin Bastion, at the previously mentioned depth of about one meter, and under a limestone slab. This slab is believed to have been the floor of a shed that was constructed at some time between 1926 and 1932.4
Given the location of the shed and the depth and other anomalies of the grave, it seems most likely that the shed builders found the bodies, but the politics of the time, local rumors of what had happened in the Fortress ten years or so previously, and a probable desire to not become involved with something unpleasant and possibly punishable, they simply slightly reoriented the remains so that they lay neatly under the limestone floor.5 This grave was designated #5.
The grave was known to have been opened again, as we have seen, in 1988 or 1989, when the remains were exhumed and other artifacts recovered, but there were a couple of items – modern era wine corks and a three-kopek coin from 1971 – that suggested an additional disturbance of some sort. It is difficult to pin-point this, as virtually all grave openings in the Fortress went unreported in Soviet times; only in later years have former construction workers “remembered” finding burials. All of this meant that the bones - in Grave #5 as well as elsewhere - were disturbed and sometimes mixed together during hurried and amateur reburials. When the bodies in Grave #5 were recovered in the late 1980s, the only partially articulated skeleton was found right at the bottom of the grave – the leg bones were still in their trousers with a silver spoon in one pocket.6
The four skeletons were determined to be male, and all aged between thirty-five and sixty.7 The temptation is to identify these skeletons with the missing bodies of the four Romanov Grand Dukes – Nicholas Mikhailovich; George Mikhailovich; Dmitri Konstantinovich; and Paul Alexandrovich- who are said to have been shot in the Fortress in January 1919. There are additional bones found in and around the pit where the four skeletons were found, and one random pelvic bone appears to have come from a female aged around thirty-five or forty, which suggests a larger burial nearby.7 This information squares with the accounts that claim the Grand Dukes were taken to an area where there was already an open communal grave.
Personal items and remnants of clothing were recovered from this grave: Fragments of four grey or black felt hats with silk linings; four sets of gold-framed pince-nez glasses, one of which had darkened lenses, believed at the time to help a person with poor eyesight, and we know Dmitri Konstantinovich was going blind in 1919; buttons made of bronze, bone, mother-of-pearl and some iron garment rivets; fragments of a soldier’s overcoat, pencils, and a carved-bone object which might have been a fountain pen. There were also three gold cufflinks, two with inserts for stones, a third with a piece of – perhaps – jade carved into a scarab; a “massive” cufflink clip; several silver icons; a gold cross with inlaid mother-of-pearl and an inscription on the back “Save and Keep Me.” Also in the grave were two sets of dentures and a tooth with a gold filling.8
But as hopeful and suggestive as these four bodies are for Romanov history, there is evidence that leads away from identifying the men as the Grand Dukes: “The condition and volume of the presented remains…has an absence of signs of gunshot, stabbing or chopping injuries to the bones, and so we cannot judge the possible cause of death of these unknown persons.”9 There is space in this expert opinion to consider that the four men may have died from some sort of soft-tissue injury that wouldn’t necessarily damage bones (strangulation or cutting of the throat or maybe being beaten to death) or perhaps they individually died from disease or heart attack while being held in one of the local Bolshevik prisons. The four Grand Dukes are almost always alleged to have been shot.
It is difficult to draw solid conclusions about these bodies without both additional information and consideration of various elements of political expediency in Russia at this time, especially when it comes to the identification of Romanov bones. What we do know with a great amount of certainty is that in the summer and autumn of 1918, the Petrograd Cheka arrested and detained 6,229 people. Some of these were common criminals and wartime spies; some were enemies of the new Bolshevik state – Whites and aristocrats and other wealthy classes; and some were straight-up hostages. Following the murder of Moisei Uritsky, the Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, 512 of these citizens were shot and buried somewhere in the city, most likely in the environs and surroundings of the Peter and Paul Fortress. This event sparked the September 5 official decree of “On the Red Terror” which led to the shootings and murders of hundreds or perhaps thousands of Russians in the Fortress through 1921.
Of all of these people, only eleven graves have been discovered and excavated, and approximately 160 sets of remains have been recovered. Ninety of these were reburied in 2022, under respectful, religious, and ceremonial circumstances. Of these ninety individuals, sixteen – or possibly seventeen – have been identified with some amount of confidence. It would therefore perhaps be hasty to exclude the four sets of older male remains from identification with the Grand Dukes, absent further research and testing.
The semi-official word of a specialist anthropologist working on the case cautions patience. In a 2017 interview with Fontanka magazine, Denis Pezhemsky weighed in with the following:
"I know that many people want to 'find' the remains of the Grand Dukes as soon as possible, but let's take it calmly and scientifically. Perhaps it will still be possible to isolate them in the course of further anthropological work, which is not yet complete. Perhaps they will be found later – in the course of morphological analysis, we found that not all the execution pits have been discovered yet. I have a negative attitude to the ‘sharpening’ of all work with the burial complexes at Golovkin Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress to search for the remains of the Grand Dukes. If possible, all the people who died and were buried here in 1918-1919 should be identified. In the case of the Grand Dukes, for whom the most data have been preserved, their identification is most likely."10
We will discuss further the fate of the Grand Dukes in Part III of this article, which will be uploaded here in June.
In October 2006, some six months prior to the discovery of the second grave in March 2007, Alexander Kolyakin was appointed to the post of Director of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg although he had no apparent interest in historical matters. His qualifications were in the field of mechanical engineering and his work experience lists the commercial directorship of Intourist and general directorship of the Grand Hotel Europe.11 Clearly, the intention of this appointment was to advertise and popularize the various points of historical interest in and around St. Petersburg, so as to take the most advantage possible of tourist and entertainment markets.
In direct support of this, “glamorous” and upscale restaurants and shops were established within the environs of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and indeed, as time would tell, a summer karaoke café was set up directly (but only coincidentally) on the location of one of the grave pits and next to a place of execution. A manager of one of the new restaurants complained to a reporter from Novaya Gazeta that the lack of convenient parking at the Fortress prevented him from properly and fully developing his business. Kolyakin appeared to agree with him, and in April 2009, applied for permission to create new parking areas at the Fortress, intended to accommodate not only the frustrated diners of St. Petersburg, but also the huge flow of tourism expected from the 200 busses Kolyakin planned to host every day during the summer months.12
There was some amount of push-back from historians and other concerned parties, including the writer Daniil Granin, who appealed to Governor Valentina Matvienko for permission to erect a memorial to those murdered in the Fortress during the Red Terror, in the form of a small cross near the Kronversky Canal, carefully away from the main tourist attractions.
Matvienko refused, claiming that her research had uncovered “only fragmentary testimonies about shots fired in the Fortress,” by which she meant that there was no official evidence of mass killings at the Fortress, just the diary commentary of local citizens and ear witnesses to the sounds of shootings inside the Fortress, and that even a small cross would unacceptably change the face and “appearance of the… Fortress, a monument of federal significance, [something] inadmissible in accordance with the requirements of current legislation.”13 Kolyakin’s parking lot was fine, though, and construction began on that in the autumn of 2009.
On December 20, human remains were turned up on the construction site, originating from 1.2-1.3 meters deep (about 4 feet). Construction was immediately stopped, and the Museum set up tents and ran in heat and light so that excavation could continue round the clock. Haste was called for, both for reasons of the upcoming holiday season and so as not to attract ghoulish media attention.14
In this pit – designated Grave #1 – sixteen sets of remains were recovered. They had been stacked in two layers across the bottom of a hole measuring 1.8 meters (approximately 6 feet) by 2.3 meters (7.5 feet), at different angles, awkwardly on top of each other. All the remains showed damage from having been shot, and most of the skulls showed bullet holes.15
There were remnants of a good amount of clothing in the grave, but interestingly, there was no footwear or outerwear such as overcoats. It seems likely that these items were confiscated prior to their owners being murdered, perhaps to be sold on later, but this confiscation could also be a means of controlling the group of people in the potentially cold weather of a northern autumn or winter, as suggested by the clothing that was in the grave, knitted sweaters and thick socks. And really, both could have been true.
Dr. A.V. Aranovich, a specialist in military costume from the Department of Historical Sciences at St. Petersburg State University of Applied Sciences, was able to conclude that the clothing was dominated by military uniforms of the sort issued between 1907 and 1917.16 But the grave also bore civilian clothing – striped trousers, cloth belts and suspenders with buckles, and the aforementioned knitted sweaters. Additionally – and unusually to this point – there was evidence of a woman’s remains being included in the grave: corset stays, a piece of a dress, and a silk-veiled felt hat with remnants of long hair. And finally, there was a cap with a bronze Railway Employee Badge – bearing the image of crossed hammers and an adjustable wrench.
Outside of clothing, there were small personal items – a collection of icons and crosses, a silver medallion, a gold chain, gold cufflinks, and a silver chain with two charms – the first showing St. Andrew the First-Called with an inscription on the back: “Blessing Church of the Battleship Andrew the First-Called.” The second charm was an image of St. Nicholas. These tokens were given out to crew members in 1912, when the ship was consecrated; silver versions would have been given to a senior officer.17
This evidence, together with the female body in the grave, plus the additional fact that one of the fifteen male bodies had had a leg amputated during his lifetime, made tentatively identifying the people in the grave a relatively easy task.
In late 1918 and through 1921, various newspapers in Petrograd would publish lists of people who had been executed by the Cheka (or “by the Revolution”) in the city. Sometimes they even published lists of those who would be killed if some certain event came to pass (usually the assassination of a Bolshevik official or well-known revolutionary). And on December 20, 1918, Petrogradskaya Pravda published a short article announcing the execution on December 7 of sixteen people, including Vera Viktorovna Shulgina (1882-1918), a Red Cross nurse and owner of a Petrograd café popular with White Officers, and Alexander Nikolaevich Rykov, Major-General of the Navy, who had lost a leg as a result of having been wounded in the Russo-Japanese War.18
The Rykov family – Alexander Nikolaevich’s daughter and two grandsons – had been badgering the archives off and on since the 1980s for a report on the fate of the repressed Major-General, with an eye towards applying for his rehabilitation at the earliest possible moment.19 Rykov’s daughter, his only child, named Xenia Alexandrovna, had died in 2000. But her sons had preserved some letters and other pieces of mail received from her, so geneticists were able to match DNA from the bones in the grave to DNA from saliva on the postage stamps that Xenia had licked to DNA extracted from the blood of Xenia’s children, Nicholas and Ingo Krylov, to prove a 99.9993% confirmation of the strongly suspected family relationship.20
The remains of Alexander Nikolaevich Rykov were returned to his family, and he was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in St. Petersburg on November 14, 2011, following a funeral at the St. Nicholas Epiphany Naval Cathedral.
Rykov, Shulgina, and the other fourteen people executed on December 13, 1918, were allegedly involved in the Kovalevsky group, which was an anti-Bolshevik organization engaged with British agents – including Francis Cromie who was killed in August 1918 when Bolshevik forces stormed the British Embassy and opened fire on the staff – in smuggling secret information along with White Officers to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. From there, using the secret information, the officers were to engage with other White forces and bring down the Bolshevik government. The members of this organization were supposed to have recognized each other by the single yellow button which replaced a normal button on an overcoat; Shulgina’s small restaurant, Café Goutes, was a gathering place for officers who would then be taken to safe houses.
It is still not clear exactly what Kovalevsky’s end game was, for beyond helping White officers from the former Imperial Army escape from the city, nothing else remains of his plans. But the Petrograd Cheka – paranoid and extremely vicious – believed that they had gathered sufficient information to warrant arresting and executing anyone associated with the Kovalevsky group, and it was virtually wiped out.
The sixteen people in grave #1 were:
Vladimir Pavlovich Kovalevsky. He was a naval doctor and a graduate of Kazan University. He worked at the Military Medical Academy and was sent to Port Arthur as part of the Red Cross Mission at the start of the Russo-Japanese War. He served on the cruiser Aurora, the gunboat Sivuch, and the battleship Emperor Paul. At the time of revolution, he was the Sanitary Inspector of the Baltic Fleet.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Morozov. A cadet in a military school, he was taken hostage on September 10, 1918, according to the newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta. That he was “taken hostage” suggests that he was not, in fact, involved with the Kovalevsky group, but was being detained because he was a member of the “former classes.” He was probably one of the youngest in the grave, probably being only a teenager of eighteen or nineteen. Allegedly, however, according to Cheka records, he admitted to participating in the group’s activities.
Anatoly Mikhailovich DeSimon. Born on January 24, 1880, DeSimon graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps in 1900. He served on the ship Amur during the Russo-Japanese War and last served on board the Ilmen. He was a known associate of M.M. Veselkin, also on this list.
Pavel Mikhailovich Plein. Born on August 17, 1875, he graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps in 1893. He served on the ships Bayan, Skory, Rassopny, Beaver, Vigilant, Donskoy Cossack and Slava, and commanded the battlecruiser Izmail. Alleged to be one of the leaders of the Kovalevsky group.
Vera Viktorovna Shulgina. A nurse and a graduate of the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens. She owned Café Goutes on the corner of Kirochnaya Street and was the sister of Major General Boris Viktorovich Shulgin, as well as a relative of Shulgin of the Provisional Government, who had accepted Nicholas II’s abdication.
Yuri Andreievich Betulinsky. Born in 1888, he was a titular counselor and graduate of the French Diplomatic College. He served in the Senate as an assistant to the Chief Secretary and was a relative of the M.M. Veselkin also on this list.
Michael Mikhailovich Veselkin. Born on November 13, 1871, he was the commandant of the Sevastopol fortress and the commander of the ship Amur.
Prince Vladimir Spiridonovich Tumanov. At the time of his death, Prince Tumanov was approximately 20 years old. He owned an estate in the vicinity of Petrograd and may not have had much – if any – involvement in the group. He claimed he was only patronizing Café Goutes when he was picked up with members of the group by a Cheka sweep.
Ivan Osipovich Login. A member of Kovalevsky’s organization who provided his apartment for meetings and as a safe house.
Alexander Alexandrovich Grabovsky. A Polish legionnaire sent to Murmansk and intercepted there with an address book bearing the information of Prince Vladimir Tumanov and other members of the Kovalevsky group. Closely associated with the French mission.
George Alexandrovich Solovyov. Admitted to being a part of the Kovalevsky organization. An officer and a member of several monarchist groups.
Ivan Nikolaevich Trifonov. Graduate of the Faculty of Mathematics at the St. Petersburg University. He served on the Central Agricultural Council in the Commissariat of Urban Farms. He was a son-in-law of Julius Yulievich Bagli-Conti, who was a tutor to the children of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, and was a cousin of V. V. Morozov, also on this list.
Alexander Nikolaevich Rykov. Born in 1874, he graduated from the Marine Corps in 1894 where his classmate was the future Admiral A.V. Kolchak. During the defense of Port Arthur, he lost a leg and was transferred to the Baltic Fleet where he served on the Main Naval Staff. He was arrested on October 24, 1918, and was shot with the others on this list on December 13.
Iosif Pavlovich Khristik. He was a spy in the service of the British and French and had more than once forged documents to gain access to sensitive information. Was accused of embezzlement, arson and blackmail.
Kalman Abramovich Abramson. A White Guard spy intercepted with forged documents.
Ivan Alexandrovich Smirnov. Charged and found guilty of armed robbery.21
Rykov was not the only positively identified body in grave #1. As we have seen, he was returned to his family. And so was Anatoly Mikhailovich DeSimon, whose family was also available for genetic testing. It is strongly inferred that Shulgina was the female body in the grave, but there have been no members of her family found for definitive testing. So she, along with the others on the list of sixteen, together with seventy-six other bodies from graves #2 through #11, who had had DNA successfully extracted from their remains, were reburied in a cemetery instead of in a pit in November 2022.
That leaves somewhere between sixty and 110 sets of remains still under examination or not yet exhumed, of the 150-200 victims that Russian experts believe lie in graves #2 through #11. "’The degree of readiness of these [ninety sets of] remains is such that we considered it unreasonable to postpone their burial,’ Denis Pezhemsky emphasizes. ‘At the same time, we took tissue particles from them for future genetic analyses. This is done in case such studies become significantly cheaper or when there are relatives of the deceased who have not yet been identified. The rest of the remains are now stored in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where almost ideal conditions have been created for working on them."22
There are obviously still areas of the Fortress where it is believed that burial pits remain undiscovered, but the plan at the moment is to concentrate on the remains in hand.
“Most of them are men,” Pezhemsky says, “Some of them are very young people. In one of the pits, we found the remains of [ten] very young girls – from about eighteen to twenty-four years old. Do you remember Soloukhin’s poem called ‘To Friends’?
“‘Under what dews did the schoolgirls with braids and the cadet boys who did not live to see the morning decay?’23
“It’s about them…”24
Source Notes:
1.Bunin, Ivan Cursed Days translated and annotated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1998 pg. 119. This excerpt is from a diary entry Bunin dated April 23/May 6, 1919; his last visit to Petrograd (“Petersburg”) was before October 1917.
2.Kildyushevsky, V.I. and N.E. Petrova “Discovery of the Burials of the Victims of the Red Terror in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Seasons 2009-2011” in Proceedings of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg Issue 21 St. Petersburg, 2011 pp 109-137. See also Margolis, A. “The First Island of the Gulag Archipelago” in Pravo na Imeni.
3.Petrova, Natalia “Unknown Burials on the Territory of Hare Island,” in Proceedings of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg Issue 15, 2007 pp 128-135.
4. Kildyushevsky and Petrova. On plans drawn up in 1932, a shed appears at the location of this grave, oriented lengthwise to the North and South; this area was handed over from the Mint to the Military in 1926, at which time there was no shed at the location, according to records from that time.
5.ibid.
6.ibid. See also Petrova “Unknown Burials…”
7.ibid.
8. Kildyushevsky and Petrova.
9.Petrova, “Unknown Burials…”; Expert Opinion # 34 of August 30, 2007, Bureau of Forensic Medicine of St. Petersburg.
10. Denis Pezhemsky, anthropologist and senior researcher at the Research Institute of Anthropology, Moscow State University. Interviewed by Antonina Asanova for Fontanka, February 2017.
11.”Bone Meal,” Novaya Gazeta, January 17, 2010.
12.ibid.
13.ibid.
14. Kildyushevsky and Petrova.
15.ibid.
16.Aranovich, A.V. Russian Military Costume 1907-1917 St. Petersburg, 2005.
17. Kildyushevsky and Petrova; see also Boinovich, A.B. and Sibirtsev, Y.V. Istoriya rossiyskogo flaga v znakakh I tokens Moscow: 2008, pg. 68; and Melnikov, R.M. Battleship “Andrew the First-Called” 1906-1925, St. Petersburg: 2003, pg. 172.
18.Petrogradskaya Pravda #279, December 20, 1918, pg. 3.
19. Kildyushevsky and Petrova.
20.Selezneva, V.I., Moiseev V.G. and Shirobokov, I.G. “Anthropological description of skeletal remains obtained as a result of archaeological excavations on the territory of the Peter and Paul Fortress.” St. Petersburg, 2011. On-line version at Way Back Machine.
21. Petrogradskaya Pravda #279, December 20, 1918, pg. 3; Kildyushevsky and Petrova.
22. Vovk, Vladislav “Echo of the Red Terror: The Remains of Those Shot During the Civil War were Buried in St. Petersburg” in SPB Dnevnik online November 24, 2022.
23.I’m reproducing here the poem referenced by Dr. Pezhemsky in his interview with Fontanka. It’s by Vladimir Alexeievich Soloukhin (1924-1997), and I include it here for completion and appreciation.
To Friends
Russia is not dead yet,
As long as we are alive, friends...
Graves, graves, graves,
you can't count them.
They shot people in the back of the head,
Mowed people down with a machine gun.
No one will find these unknown graves
Now.
The earth hid them safely
Under a steady wave of grass.
In fact, they are not graves,
But just pits and ditches.
People were killed secretly
And buried in darkness,
In Yaroslavl, in Tambov, in Poltava,
In Astrakhan, in Kostroma.
And in Petrograd, of course,
And, of course, in Moscow.
Their numbers are endless
With bullets in the head.
Knights, Priests,
Healers of all orders.
Zemstvo and land surveyors,
And just teachers.
Under what dews
Did the schoolgirls with braids
And the cadet boys who did not live to see the morning
Decay?
We don't know which ones have been lost,
Those boys from the country of Pushkin and Griboyedov,
Heroes of Borodino.
Russia is a mass grave,
In rows, one by one,
In Kazan, in Saratov, in Bryansk,
In Kiev and in the Crimea...
Wherever fate takes you,
You'll step on a dead man.
Russia is one grave
Without end and without end.
Treasures of all times are piled into the
black pit:
The golden-domed temples,
And the ringing of bells.
Manors, ponds, and parks,
Alleys in the light of dawn,
And triumphal arches,
And white monasteries.
In the cozy mills of the river,
And the wings of the windmills.
Antique libraries
And old silver.
Manes of horses,
Fairs of many colors,
Feasts and haymaking,
Mercy and kindness.
Sober modesty,
The brightness of spring words.
Chaliapin, Rachmaninoff, Bunin,
Yesenin, Blok, Gumilev.
Glorious legends of the ancients
Intelligible voices.
Our Russian villages, waters, cedars, forests.
Russia is one grave,
Russia is under a block of darkness...
And yet she did not perish,
As long as we are still alive.
Hold on, gather your strength,
We must not leave.
Russia is not dead yet,
As long as we are alive, friends.
24. Denis Pezhemsky, anthropologist and senior researcher at the Research Institute of Anthropology, Moscow State University. Interviewed by Antonina Asanova for Fontanka, February 2017.