Kostroma's Search for a Skull for the Tsar
By Oksana Yablokova
Staff Writer
Leonid Novikov / Izvestia
KOSTROMA -- The legend of Ivan Susanin, the peasant who gave his life to save the first Romanov tsar, may stand or fall on the analysis of a skull found near the ancient Volga River city of Kostroma, where archeologists are claiming to have unearthed the local hero's remains in a 17th-century graveyard.
They hope to prove the skull is Susanin's and that he really did die a martyr's death to protect Mikhail Romanov from Polish invaders.
They organized a scientific conference in the city ahead of a visit by President Vladimir Putin last month, intending to present their findings to the president in an effort to provide historical underpinning for a campaign to boost patriotism and national pride.
But archeologists and anthropologists who attended the conference failed to agree on whether the skull, one of 700 dug up from a graveyard near the village of Isupovo, was Susanin's, citing the paucity of DNA and other evidence.
Putin's visit to the city, which included a meeting of the State Council devoted to the preservation of cultural and historical monuments, passed without any reference to Susanin, leaving the mystery unsolved.
For Sergei Alexeyev, the archeologist who led the yearlong search for Susanin's bones, the question has a political dimension.
"Not every Russian region can boast having had a personality like Susanin," he said.
Over the centuries, Susanin's story has been invoked as an example of the heroism of ordinary Russians and their devotion to the country's ruler.
Mikhail Glinka's opera based on the Susanin legend, "A Life for the Tsar," was presented to Tsar Nicholas I in the 19th century, as the country's Slavophile elite united around the slogan, "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, National Roots." A century later, during the Soviet era, the opera was renamed "Ivan Susanin," while the tsar was written out and replaced with a patriotic state official.
Earlier this year, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky predicted the emergence of a new conservative patriotic movement in the country, based around reviving the same tsarist-era slogan.
Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said the Kremlin could have planned to invoke the Susanin legend during Putin's visit to Kostroma as part of a campaign to drum up patriotism but then decided against it.
"Playing the anti-Polish card has come into fashion recently, but the Kremlin folks must have decided that it could turn counterproductive. Besides, Putin is a skeptical person and probably thought the idea was not that credible," Pribylovsky said.
Alexeyev, sitting in his office in central Kostroma, where plastic bags with human bones could be seen in every corner, said that he undertook the excavations to put an end to the speculation over whether Susanin actually existed.
"Our main motive for the research was the mythological nature of Susanin's story, which became the theme for Glinka's opera," Alexeyev said.
Susanin's name is linked with the end of one of the most turbulent periods in Russian history, the Time of Troubles from 1598 to 1613, when the country lacked a single recognized ruler.
After several years of foreign invasions and infighting among the boyars, in the winter of 1612-13 a Polish army marched on Moscow, hoping to put a Polish prince, Vladislav, on the Russian throne. In response, leading boyars called a Zemsky Sobor, or Land Assembly -- a collection of boyars, clerics and freemen -- in Moscow, which proposed offering the crown to 15-year-old Mikhail Romanov, the heir of a well-known noble family.
On March 14, 1613, the entire assembly came to the Ipatyevsky monastery in Kostroma, where Mikhail Romanov was to come with his mother, a nun named Marfa, from their family estate in the nearby village of Domnino.
A group of Polish soldiers looking for Romanov found Susanin, Marfa's steward, and ordered him to lead them to the Romanovs' estate. The legend goes that Susanin agreed but instead led the Poles into the depths of a dense forest. When they found that they had been tricked, the Poles killed him.
Meanwhile, Mikhail and his mother escaped to the monastery, where Mikhail accepted the boyars' invitation to become the tsar.
The Susanin legend, as well as forming the basis for Glinka's opera, was also associated with the Romanov national anthem, "God Save the Tsar," which was sung in the opera's final scene at its royal premiere at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater. Legend has it that Nicholas I himself renamed the opera, which had originally been called "A Death for the Tsar."
The anthem survived until the Bolshevik Revolution and briefly resurfaced, without any words, in the post-Soviet era.
The main square in Kostroma was named after Susanin in the early 1990s, and one of the Kostroma region's districts was named after the local hero during Soviet times.
More recently, a Russian Internet company unveiled a search engine called www.susanin.net.
Susanin's act of heroism was first documented by 18th-century historian Nikolai Sumarokov, who headed the Kostroma gentry's assembly. Other historians treated the legend with a certain degree of skepticism, as they were more inclined to believe that a band of thieves -- one of many that roamed the country during the lawless Time of Troubles -- had murdered Susanin, and that there was nothing heroic in his death.
According to Alexeyev, there exist at least two documents showing that Susanin did indeed give his life for Mikhail Romanov. Both are petitions to the tsar submitted by Susanin's descendants, in 1619 and 1730, describing his martyrdom and asking for a pension. Both petitions carried the tsar's signature approving the awards, Alexeyev said.
After examining the graveyard and scouring historical archives, Alexeyev came to the opinion that Susanin did not actually lead the Poles into a dense forest so they would not find their way out, but rather led them along a roundabout route to the Romanovs' estate. Meanwhile, his son-in-law Bogdan ran to warn the future tsar of the danger, Alexeyev said.
The exhumations in search of Susanin's remains were commissioned by the Kostroma regional administration in 2001. The next year, Alexeyev's group unearthed a 17th-century graveyard near Isupovo, outside Kostroma.
Part of the funding for the identification of the remains came from a Moscow-based group, the Foundation for Aiding the Identification of Victims of Violence.
The archeologists found the remains of 700 people, but only four of them appeared to have died violent deaths, as their skulls were smashed in, Alexeyev said. It took him more than two years to analyze the findings, consult historians and forensic experts, and wade through the archives. Eventually, he narrowed the search down to just one skull, taken from a grave the scientists numbered 13A.
Having examined the skulls, Viktor Zvyagin, a scholar with the Moscow-based Forensic Studies Center, backed Alexeyev's theory.
"My conclusion was that there were no features" contradicting the theory "that the skull from grave 13A belonged to Ivan Susanin," Zvyagin said by telephone. He refused to give any further details about his research, which has been criticized by some of his fellow scholars in recent weeks.
But in an earlier interview to the Izvestia newspaper, Zvyagin said that he had compared the skull's size and shape with those of Susanin's living descendants and with remains from a graveyard in the village of Korobovo, where Susanin's relatives resettled some years after his death.
Based on these comparisons, Zvyagin made a composite sketch of Susanin's face. The findings impressed one of Susanin's recorded descendants, a retired Air Force officer from Saratov named Viktor Belopakhov, who attended the conference in Kostroma with his son and grandson. "Alexeyev called and congratulated us on being the real descendants of Susanin and promised to invite us to a reburial ceremony," Belopakhov told Komsomolskaya Pravda in February.
Zvyagin told Izvestia that skull 13A was the only one in the graveyard that had been fractured four times on the left side and on the front, and that the person had been severely beaten and had probably died of head injures.
Other tests showed that the skull belonged to a person in his or her 40s or 50s who suffered from a thyroid disorder and as a result was most likely quick-tempered, Zvyagin said. Both features matched the description of Susanin at the time of his death, he said.
But Pavel Ivanov, another scholar with the Forensic Studies Center and one of the country's top DNA experts, said that making a final identification of the remains would be problematic, as scientists had failed to retrieve from the remains any fragment of DNA that could be matched with any of Susanin's descendants.
"Judging by what we had, there was evidence of severe DNA destruction," said Ivanov, who was one of the experts who identified the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and members of his family for a government commission in the late 1990s. The royal family's remains were reburied in St. Petersburg's SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1998.
But despite the lack of DNA evidence, Alexeyev said he was undeterred in his quest to prove the remains were Susanin's and would look for more evidence to discover the route by which Susanin had led the Polish invaders.
For now, Alexeyev remains hopeful of a quick decision by the authorities on the skull's identity.
"If the authorities need patriotic symbols such as Susanin, the decision will come soon," he said.