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couldn’t be recognized and to prevent any stink from them rotting. We scattered it with branches and lime, put boards on top, and drove over it several times—no traces of the hole remained. The secret was kept—the Whites did not find this burial site.
    At the end of his report, Yurovsky added the precise location of the secret grave: “Koptyaki, 12 miles from Ekaterinburg to the northwest. The railroad tracks pass 6 miles between Koptyaki and the Upper Isetsk factory. From where the railroad tracks cross [the road] they are buried about 700 feet in the direction of the Isetsk factory.”
    This was exactly where Avdonin and Kachurov had bored into the old roadbed and found traces of wood beneath the surface.

    Confident that they had located the site, Avdonin and Ryabov had to wait until the following spring before continuing their search for the remains. In late May 1979, Avdonin and his wife, Galina, and Ryabov and his wife, Margaret, came back to the area. Using Avdonin’s homemade steel-pipe core sampler, they bored deeper into the ground, five feet. All the holes disclosed alluvial, loamy soil, pebbles, and layers of dark brown and greenish clay. Under two of the holes, something was different: the layers were all mixed up, and at the bottom there was a dirty, black, mucousy clay (“black as soot,” Ryabov remembered), oily to the touch, with a foul, bituminous smell. They took these samples home for acid testing and found that the soil in these two holes was highly acidic. Yurovsky had written that he had poured acid on the bodies, and Avdonin knew that acid can remain in soil, particularly in clay, which acts as a sealant, for even longer than sixty years. He was certain they had found the grave.
    They were impatient. Early on the morning of the following day, May 30, they dug into the site. There were six in the party: Ryabov and Avdonin, their wives, a geologist friend of Avdonin’s named Vassiliev, and an army friend of Ryabov’s named Pysotsky. (Kachurov was unavailable, and not long afterward, he drowned accidentally in a northern Siberian river.) Throughout the enterprise, Avdonin did hisbest to impose security. Before the excavation, he introduced no friends or colleagues to Ryabov. Ryabov never met Kachurov and only met Vassiliev the day of the excavation. “I did all of this because I was very much afraid of everything,” Avdonin said. “It was a very frightening business. We were scared.”
    In May near Ekaterinburg, the sun rises near five in the morning. By six that morning, the party, carrying shovels, was in the forest. They were alone except for a few mushroom hunters, wandering about, calling to one another. As soon as Avdonin and his colleagues began to dig, they found the railroad ties, and directly underneath, they saw human bones. In one small area, only eleven square feet, they saw three skulls. All of them were frightened. “I admit that our interference in this pit was barbaric,” Ryabov said. “It was horrible. But we did not have the time, we did not have the instruments, and, of course, we were controlled by fear … fear that we would be found out. Of course, when we found this, it was even more frightening!” Shaking his head, he said it again: “It was frightening! It was frightening!” Avdonin, also, was afraid: “All my life I had searched for this, or somehow was heading for this. And then, when we first started to lift up the planking, I thought to myself, ‘Let me find nothing.’ ”
    Nevertheless, they kept going. “We removed the three skulls,” Avdonin said. “We knew that some kind of tests should be done—we didn’t know what kind yet. We separated them and lifted them out. Then we closed up the grave, putting everything back the way it was, with the grass on top. We had to do it as quickly as possible; it was six when we started to dig and we were finished by nine or ten.”
    Back in town, the group was in a state of emotional shock. That evening,