Nostalgic for Nicholas, Russians Honor Their Last Czar

Seventy-five years after their last czar was cut down in a hail of bullets, Russians this weekend recalled Nicholas II’s coldblooded murder and wrestled with the departed autocrat’s checkered legacy.

In the Ural Mountains city of Ekaterinburg, where on orders from V.I. Lenin the last of the Romanovs were shot in a cellar by Bolshevik gunmen on the night of July 16-17, 1918, mourners wept as hymns were sung and prayers said for the dead.

Today, a large white cross marks the spot where Nicholas, his German-born wife, Alexandra, and their five children were killed. Scores of people packed a tiny Russian Orthodox church opposite the site for a memorial service Friday. Outside, Cossacks in uniform guarded the steps and hundreds of city folk gawked.

In Pushkin, a town near St. Petersburg where Nicholas was born 125 years ago, hundreds gathered Saturday for the unveiling of what organizers said was Russia’s first monument to its last czar.

And in Moscow, more than 500 people marshaled by nationalist and conservative political parties opposed to President Boris N. Yeltsin gathered near a swimming pool that had been the site of one of Russia’s most famous churches until it was razed by the Communists.

Nicholas “took upon himself the sins of all Russia,” a clergyman declared to the mourners. “All of us who were silent in the years of atheism and the defamation of the czar are guilty in his death.”

As this weekend’s emotionally charged anniversary neared, people in positions of power were struggling to channel or limit expressions of royalist nostalgia.

The headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church appealed to Muscovites not to take part in the religious procession that anti-Yeltsin parties had organized. Instead, it said that Russians should mark the day as one of “national repentance and prayer.”

In Russia’s atmosphere of bleak uncertainty and constitutional disorder, a return to the simple pre-industrial, Russia-first values incarnated by Nicholas has come to seem the best way out to some, and it is evidently the reason both the church and elected officials are taking the czarist cult seriously.

His martyrdom at the hands of the Communists seems the chief cause of the late czar’s popularity; few admirers seem to care that Nicholas was an effete, trivial-minded, passive man who presided over humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and wholesale carnage of Russian soldiers in World War I.