Пермский государственный архив социально-политической истории

Activities of the international team on the search for the remains of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and his secretary Nikolai Johnson

Peter Sarandinaki,

president and founder of SEARCH Foundation, Inc.,

Reston, USA

Thank you for the provided opportunity to give a report on searches for the remains of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and his secretary Nikolai Johnson at the international scientific and practical conference "Perm Exile of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and His Murder on the Night of June 12 to 13, 1918". Since 1994 I have been searching for the truth in the issue of the remains of the Royal Family. I organized several expeditions that conducted excavations at Ganina Yama and Porosyonkov Ravine. Over recent years I have been organizing the search for the remains of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich in the suburbs of Perm. It is a very hard work that started in 2009.

And first I would like to tell you why I am here and what I am doing in Perm. I am a Russian American, a sea captain by profession. I am the President and founder of the group called SEARCH Foundation, Inc. My great-grandfather, Lieutenant General Sergey Nikolayevich Rozanov, was a participant of the White movement. Before the First World War he served in Penza, was the chief of the 178th Infantry Vendensky regiment. The criminal investigator for special purposes Nikolai Sokolov, who investigated the execution of Nicholas II and His Family, also served there in a judicial department. They became very good friends and would hunt together in the barony of my great-grandfather’s mother-in-law, Baroness von Rosen. During the First World War my great-grandfather was fighting at the Austrian front, he served in Admiral Kolchak's Army, later he became the Military Commander of the Amur Region. First Rozanov had to serve in the Red Army and later he crossed over to the White. But yet when he was with the Reds, he collaborated with an underground organization helping to convey officers to the White. They invented a way how to retrieve officers. My great-grandfather would send his daughter Anna under the guise of a maid to Lubyanka to take the arrested officers’ laundry, and in their clothes there were pieces of paper with names and addresses of the officers who needed to be rescued. She went to Lubyanka many times and, I think, she rescued a considerable number of officers. My grandmother, she was very brave.

In 1918, seven days after the execution of the Imperial Family the White entered Ekaterinburg and my great-grandfather Sergey Rozanov and his adjutant, my grandfather Colonel Kirill Naryshkin, were among the first. The White Army General Staff first appointed Alexander Namyotkin and then Ivan Sergeyev to conduct the investigation, but they proved to be untrustworthy and lacked the enthusiasm necessary to conduct the task. When my great-grandfather got to know that his friend Nikolai Sokolov had crossed the front line, he recommended Sokolov to that job.

My grandparents moved from Ekaterinburg to Vladivostok and from there to Japan. Sokolov escaped out of Russia to Harbin, China, carrying evidence of the execution of the Royal Family. He then traveled to Japan where he met up with my grandparents, Kirill Naryshkin and Anna Nary- shkina, Rozanova by birth, who were already there. Sokolov and Naryshkin with their wives left Japan for Italy on a ship, where the four shared a cabin. Sokolov had a small box where he kept the most important evidence of the murder of the Royal Family which he had found. During the voyage the box was kept under my grandmother's bunk and was always guarded by one of them. Once my grandmother looked inside and saw a finger of the Empress there, the Empress’s earrings, Doctor Botkin’s denture… There were a lot of relics in it. A lot has survived and being in the possession of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad now is kept in Jordanville and in Brussels. Once I saw and held in my hands that very Sokolov’s box, it was a very touching moment.

My grandmother began to tell me all that when I was ten years old. This made a deep and lasting impression on my young mind, and perhaps explains why I am determined to find the truth today. I learned of my family history from the many stories my grandmother used to tell me.

Being a sea captain, I like to work alone, and my family's history kept opening me many doors. In 1994 I first visited Russia, went to Ekaterinburg and I was everywhere and saw everything. Before that I spoke with Dr. Maples who had come to Russia to help the Russians. I was actively involved in this work as I had a very great interest in this case because my family was a party to it. In 1993 Alexander Avdonin came to America to give a report at the Academy of Sciences on his discovery of the remains of the Royal Family near Ekaterinburg. To believe that it was the Royal Family, DNA testing was conducted in the UK by the English geneticists Peter Gill and Victor Weedn with the participation of the Russian geneticist Pavel Ivanov, but the results were not unmistakable. Later, in 1994-1996, the DNA of George Alexandrovich, the Tsar’s brother, was studied.

Dr. Maples said to me that they needed to search for two children of Nicholas II as in the grave in Porosyonkov Ravine there were no bodies of Alexei and Maria. From then our Foundation "Scientific Expedition to Account for the Romanov Children", abbreviated as "S. E. A. R. C. H." ("Поиск" in Russian) traces its origin. The searches needed the appropriate tools. I asked the American military for help, as they have great experience in a similar kind of work searching for the remains of fallen soldiers.

In 1998 I found 10 thousand dollars and with that money I brought two American anthropologists and one geologist to Ekaterinburg to work together with the Russians. They are good professionals and they worked for free. We searched the Four Brothers Mine area. We examined everything there and even found traces of Sokolov’s work, found some of his tools and topaz beads from a necklace that belonged to one of the daughters of Nicholas II and now they are in a museum in Ekaterinburg.

In June 1999 I came back to Ganina Yama. We did electromagnetic sound. My grandmother told me that Sokolov had found fresh clay there. I found that place, we began excavating and under the clay we found traces of a fire.

In 2004 together with Dr. Sergey Nikitin and the geophysicist Vladimir Filippovich Konstantinov, one of Russia's foremost GPR specialists, who provided radars and other instruments, we started searching in Porosyonkov Ravine. We found nothing there. We searched everywhere except one small square, which was in the forest. And in that very square the natives of Ekaterinburg Leonid Vokhmyakov and Nikolai Neuimin found the remains in 2007. I decided to organize the DNA study and enquired the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory asking for their help. They agreed because they had examined the DNA of members of the Royal Family and Grand Duke George Alexandrovich.

The investigator Vladimir Solovyov agreed with conducting the study in the United States. And geneticists of the U.S. Army began to study the DNA of the remains found in 2007. The second laboratory elected for testing was the University of Innsbruck. The third laboratory study was conducted under the guidance of the leading Russian geneticist Eugene Rogayev. The laboratories worked independently from each other and all came to identical results in 2008. It all came together!

But in December 2008, the day when we announced the results of our research to the world, Patriarch Alexis II died. New Patriarch Kirill, of course, did not know those questions that well, he needed time to get it all sorted out.

Vladimir Konstantinov told me that he had friends in Perm who wanted to find the remains of Michael, the Tsar’s brother, and offered me to be engaged. I agreed. In 2009 I arrived in Perm to see the place. We were shown the alleged place where Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and his secretary Nikolai Johnson had been killed and buried. We saw a tree was the letter M at a height of four meters there, and another one with the letter A. Behind the trees there was a large pit. We got interested in it. But later the forensic botanist whom I brought to the place, told me that trees do not grow like that: as the years went by, the lettering would be on the same level.

In 2012 Konstantinov, Nikitin and me were in Perm again. In 2013 Konstantinov was gone, but we continued to work. The following techniques are used during the search: Forensic Archaeology, Forensic Geophysics (Electromagnetometry and Ground Penetrating Radar), Forensic Botany, Cadaver Detection Dog, Digital Plotting, Probing and Visual Searching. In June 2013 I collected a very interesting group of unique specialists. For example, Mick Swindells brought from England a special dog trained to search for human remains. Mick Swindells is a founder member of the Forensic Search Advisory Group. He specialises in training Cadaver Detection dogs and was awarded the Home Office Research Award. Another specialist from the UK is John Hunter, a forensic archaeologist with 45 years field experience. There are only eight forensic archaeologists in the UK, and John Hunter is the best among them. Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, he has written over a dozen books. He lectures widely to police forces and other agencies and has been involved operationally in the UK, the Balkans and Iraq. Americans Brook Schaub and Clark Davenport are from NecroSearch International. Clark Davenport's career spans over 50 years of planning, managing and performing remote-sensing surveys on six continents. He is a recognized expert in the utilization of remote sensing and geophysical techniques to locate clandestine graves and hidden evidence. Since 1987 he has personally assisted on more than 100 criminal investigations around the world. Through NecroSearch, Davenport serves as a consultant to municipal, federal and foreign law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI, EPA, DEA, BATF, NCIS, Secret Service, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Brook Schaub has a valuable experience in diagraming outdoor crime scenes. His qualifications are: consultant on cold cases for National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and rapid response to missing & abducted children cases, Disaster management training, Expert witness on computer forensics and missing and abducted children, Current manager of computer forensics and e-discovery at Eide Bailly LLP. Crystal Strouse has been a botanist for the last 25 years. She specializes in the taxonomy of plants, fire ecology, restoration ecology, and plant community characterizations. She has served as the State President of the Colorado Native Plant Society. She is a Certified Wetland Delineator and is currently a forensic botanist for NecroSearch International. Steve Jackson, a historian, is writing a book describing the events related to the theme of the search from after 1905 up until now.

All of them work without any payment. Our expeditions and staying in Perm have been sponsored by Georgy Nikolayevich Sosnovsky who is over 95 now.

I cannot but mention Dr. Sergey Nikitin, a forensic medical examiner from Moscow. He is an expert in forensic-medical portraiture investigation. The youngest in our international team is a promising archaeologist from Rostov Dmitry Zenyuk. This year Andrey Johnson from St. Petersburg, a great-grandnephew of Nikolai Johnson, has joined our team and his participation is of great help.

For eight years now I have been organizing the expeditions to search for the remains of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and his secretary Nikolai Johnson. We have been exploring certain places indicated by the killers as a burial site. Their testimonies differ very much. We studied the route with our instruments and I guess, now we know the place about which three murderers spoke, but it is a whole kilometer. We cut the place to pieces and examine them. To get to the level of 1918 we employed an excavator to create search trenches, which were then explored using ground-penetrating radar, a magnetometer and a search dog.

What importantly has been found is as follows:
– a buried cobblestone roadway with a width of 10 meters which is believed to be of significant importance in the murder of Michael and Johnson;
– the buried remains of structures including a box factory, many of which show indications of being burned;
– an upper, overgrown road which tends to lead into the aforementioned cobblestone road (this road was traced using vegetation analysis);
– the remains of a bridge - although not yet dated, these remains appear to be of early 20th century construction and the location of the bridge closely fits what is known from historic documents;
– eighty bullets found impacted into a hillside, which is between the cobblestone road and the upper overgrown road (forensically examined in a crime laboratory).

And I do not give up so easily, I continue to move on. We have the right equipment and personnel and have the support of the Perm Krai Government and the Russian Orthodox Church. Our partner organization in Perm, the Obretenye Foundation, has provided tremendous logistical support. We now know approximately where, what and how. I will do my best if God grants me strength and health. It is very important to me, it is important for the history of my family, it is important for our Russian history.

But to continue, we need reliance on historical documents from the archives and related informed sources, we need precise maps of 1918 and those of later periods to see how laying water pipes and gas pipes influenced the ground surface of the search area. And I have high hope to gain the proper help and support.

My goal in this case has always been and is – To give Grand Duke Mikhael Alexandrovich and his secretary, Nikolai Johnson, the honorable and dignified burial they deserve.

I thank the audience for your kind attention.