Chapters 15-16, The Tsar of All the Russias, These Rough Notes and Our Dead Bodies Summary and Analysis

On the night of July 16th-17th, 1918, the last of the Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas II, is executed by a Bolshevik death squad, along with his family. While Nicholas's death is reported, no mention is made of his family. The bodies are secretly disposed of. However, in the early 1990s a bog reveals nine basically complete skeletons in the same area. Maples and his colleagues are invited by the Russians to investigate, following up on reports of the bodies' disposal, which Maples retells from testimony. It is not clear whether the witness, Ermakov, is reliable, however, as he says both sulfuric acid and gasoline are used to destroy the corpses, which seems redundant. However...