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February 28, 1998
Russia to Bury Last Czar in St. Petersburg
By REUTERS
OSCOW -- Russia's last czar Nicholas II and his family will finally be laid to rest in his former imperial capital St. Petersburg on July 17, 80 years to the day since he and his family were murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries.
The Russian government ended seven years of agonizing and intensive scientific research Friday with a unanimous decision to recognize sets of remains found in 1991 as genuine and to inter them in state alongside Nicholas's ancestors.
The Russian Orthodox Church, anxious to avoid errors in establishing what will become, for some, holy relics, said it still reserves judgement on the authenticity of the bones.
But it said it had no problem with the government decision, paving the way for a religious ceremony for the interment in St. Petersburg's Peter and Paul Cathedral.
Survivors of the Romanov dynasty and members of European royal families are expected to attend.
Announcing the outcome after a marathon three-hour special session of the cabinet, First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov said ministers were unanimous in backing St. Petersburg.
"This is a final decision," he told a news conference, clearly spelling out that the government wanted an end to seemingly eternal squabbling over the issue, not least between the three cities who were vying for the right to bury the czar.
The remains were uncovered in 1991 near the Urals city of Yekaterinburg where Nicholas, his empress Alexandra, their children and several servants were shot by Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918, more than a year after he had abdicated in a vain attempt to stave off revolution.
The deaths were something of an embarrassment for later communist leaders and in 1977 President Boris Yeltsin himself, then party boss of Sverdlovsk, as Yekaterinburg was then known, had the house where they died demolished.
In a further demonstration of the touchiness of the issue, Yeltsin agreed to make a final decision on the fate of the remains and then belatedly asked the government to choose.
Nemtsov said ministers had taken into account not only expert scientific advice, based among other things on genetic tests of some of Nicholas's surviving relatives, including Britain's Prince Philip, but also public opinion.
Regal St. Petersburg, relegated to second city by the communists, will hail the decision. Mayor Alexander Yakovlev has already detailed plans for a ceremony at Peter and Paul cathedral where the city's founder Peter the Great, who died in 1725, lies buried along with the czars who came after him.
Moscow will be disappointed, as will Yekaterinburg, whose local leader had waged a fierce personal campaign to hang on the bones which currently reside in the city morgue.
The final position of the Orthodox Church remains cloudy. Thursday, a synod concluded there were still doubts on their authenticity but backed an early burial.
But Metropolitan Yuvenaly, who represented the church at the government meeting, told Friday's news conference there was no disagreement between church and state.
"There is no and cannot be any conflict on this issue," the senior cleric said, praising the government for its cooperation.
The church has won back an influential role in Russian society since the end of communist repression. Yuvenaly said it was concerned that if the bones did turn out not to belong to Nicholas, then people would be "worshipping false relics."
However, it was prepared to pray over the remains insofar as they were definitely those of "victims of atheistic powers."
The church is considering canonizing the czar but has put off a decision, probably till the year 2000. Privately, some clerics say the church now has doubts about canonizing an autocrat who remains a controversial figure for many Russians.
The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which broke from the Moscow patriarchate after 1917 and has the loyalty of some potential claimants to Nicholas's throne, has already done so.
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