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filmmaker. Together, the two men found more objects—buttons, a coin, wires, glass, a bullet—which Avdonin gave to Ryabov. “We treated Ryabov with great respect, as an older person, a well-educated person, a writer,” Avdonin remembers.

    They went back and forth over the Sokolov and Bykov accounts. Bykov said that there had been remains and that they had been taken quite far from the Four Brothers site. Where had they been taken? Curiously, Nicholas Sokolov, whose book had firmly denied the existence of any remains, provided a clue. In it, there was a picture, taken during his 1919 investigation, of a simple platform or bridge made of fresh logs and railway ties laid over a muddy spot in the Koptyaki road. In the photograph, Sokolov himself is standing beside the bridge. His explanation for its existence was that on the night of July 18, two days after the executions, a truck left Ekaterinburg and went down the Koptyaki road. At 4:30 A.M. (by now it was July 19), this truck got stuck in the mud. The railroad operator at the small workstationwhere the road crossed the tracks said that men came to him, told him their truck was stuck, and asked for railroad ties to make a bridge across the mud. They made the bridge and the truck left; by 9:00 A.M. , it was back in its garage in Ekaterinburg.
    Reading Sokolov, Avdonin and Ryabov decided that the investigator had overlooked something important: “From the woods where the truck got stuck, back to the garage, it was half an hour’s drive,” Avdonin reasoned. “If the truck was stuck and all they had to do was push it out, that is not so complicated—this could have been done by the soldiers in half an hour. So what was it doing there? Something must have been going on there. What was happening in that place for nearly five hours?” Although Sokolov had had his picture taken standing on the bridge, the investigator had never asked himself this question. Therefore, Avdonin and Ryabov decided, it was up to them to look for the spot where a bridge of railroad ties had been placed across the Koptyaki road.
    Because Ryabov had to return to Moscow, Avdonin began the search with the help of a friend, a fellow geologist named Michael Kachurov. “We were looking for the bridge,” Avdonin said. “There were four low areas in that part of the Koptyaki road near the railway where the mud might have been deep in July 1918, and where they might have had to build a bridge. But, of course, in 1978, when we were looking, the bridge was no longer there. Fifty years had passed since Sokolov took his picture, cars had driven over it, dirt had been added to it, and, with time, it sank into the ground and ceased to exist. Grass grew over it, then the road itself ceased to exist. And then one day, we came to a ravine and Kachurov climbed a tall tree and from his perch called down, ‘Sasha, I see the old road and two low places where the bodies might have been buried.’
    “We constructed a very simple instrument made of a sharpened steel water pipe to take core samples, a contraption that resembled a large corkscrew. We walked along the path of the old road, and, at intervals in low places, we pounded and screwed this instrument into the ground. If there was nothing there, it went all the way in. If there was a stone in its way, I would move it a little to one side and it would go in right past the stone.” When Kachurov made his sighting in thearea of the Porosyonk [Pigs’] Meadow, Avdonin began drilling his corkscrew at closer intervals. He recounted, “We hit something soft like wood at a depth of forty centimeters [sixteen inches]. We moved here and there, drilling all around, and discovered an area approximately two meters by three meters [six and a half feet by ten feet] where there was evidence of wood beneath the surface. That is when we wrote to Ryabov that we had found the place.”

    Geli Ryabov, meanwhile, had made another momentous discovery. With the help of a Urals friend