Much Ado About Nothing? : Czar Nicholas II May Have Been Killed in 1918, but Wrangling Over His Funeral Has Just Begun

Prince Nicholas Romanov, the great-great-grandson of Czar Nicholas I, is royally peeved at the Russian government. The Russians are talking about burying their last czar, Nicholas II, who was executed by Lenin’s henchmen in 1918. And nobody has asked the prince his views on the funeral arrangements.

“I’d like to get a written note, please,” Nicholas complained to about 250 up-market New Yorkers at a reception last week at the St. Regis Hotel. “It is a ridiculous situation.”

The burial of the last czar, like most matters concerning the modern-day House of Romanov, is no simple matter. Who will go to the funeral, who will lead the Romanovs (or Romanoffs, as some family members spell it), who will be buried where, whether these bones are even the real ones--these are matters that stir the royal bloodlines.

The remains, now lying in a common morgue in Ekaterinburg, Russia, were exhumed in July 1991 and over the next four years, they were examined by renowned DNA experts from around the world. In August, these experts reported that the relics were indeed those of the czar and his family, and a Russian commission recommended that the czar be buried Feb. 25 in the former imperial capital of St. Petersburg.

But Prince Nicholas, 73, does not like this plan. This tall, elegant man who calls himself the head of the House of Romanov believes that a certain democracy should be added to this funeral ceremony, and he came from his home in Switzerland to a Manhattan publishing party to vent those feelings.

Normally, a czar is buried with the other czars in the imperial vaults at Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The rest of the family would rest nearby, and the loyal commoners who died at the czar’s side would be sent to rest in less grand Russian graveyards elsewhere in the city.

But, the prince believes that all the bones should be buried together. They were executed together, he says, they were thrown together into a pit outside Ekaterinburg, where they stayed for more than seven decades.

Moreover, these bones of nine people were mixed together, especially when the first excavation was carried out by a local official using a tractor.

“They should be together,” Prince Nicholas says, his shaggy eyebrows arching to emphasize the point. Moreover, at the funeral, the families should all be together, he says, commoner next to royal, side by side.

“We get raving mad when we read in newspapers that Grand Duchess--put that in brackets, Grand Duchess-- Maria has declared that she will be the chief mourner and ‘What about the other princes and people?’ she is asked. ‘Oh, them,’ ” he dismisses them with an elegant wave in imitation of Maria. “ ‘They can stand in the back of the church and pray.’ ”

“Well, that is nonsense. It is not a question of whether I stand in front of Maria or whether Maria stands in front of me. But Mrs. Schweitzer [Marina Botsina Schweitzer, the granddaughter of the czar’s doctor, who was also executed], she should stand beside us. No. She should stand in front of us.”

Such talk has provoked those following Grand Duchess Maria Wladimirovna, 42, who lives in Spain and whose father, before he died at a news conference in Florida in 1992, named her pretender to the throne, should it ever be revived in Russia.

As Prince Nicholas spoke last week, one of the grand duchess’ followers passed out her statement challenging his status and even his title.

“N.R. Romanoff is . . . legally speaking, neither a member of the dynasty nor a ‘prince of Russia,’ ” her statement said.

The flier argues that according to the Russian imperial laws of succession, it is Maria, not Nicholas, who heads the family--primarily because Nicholas and some of his forebears married beneath their royal status.

“Basically what we have here is dancing on the head of a pin,” says Robert K. Massie. Massie has written three books on the Russian czars, and his publisher, Random House, brought Prince Nicholas to Manhattan to help sell Massie’s latest effort, “The Romanovs: the Final Chapter.”

“Both sides are arguing about a law of succession for a Russian empire that no longer exists,” Massie was saying a few days after the event. “Nobody had envisioned the revolution, emigration and now the end of the Soviet Union, and these rules are now being used by people the way some people use the Bible--for their own purposes.”

*

The complicated rules of succession that were in place when the Romanov dynasty ended after the Bolshevik revolution include stipulations that give hope to the claimants from each side. Prince Nicholas, who avoided a question about his age, is the oldest surviving male in a direct line from a czar, says Massie, and his followers disqualify Maria because she is a woman.

Grand Duchess Maria argues that the pretender’s crown goes to her because there are no qualified males in the line of succession. She disqualifies Nicholas and the other princes because in each case either they or their parents failed to marry royalty.

Marrying royalty has been a difficult rule for the emigre Romanovs to follow, and indeed Prince Alexis Scherbatov, president of the Russian Nobility Assn. of America in New York, says that actually neither Nicholas nor Maria can pretend to be the pretender.

“Nobody is going according to the laws,” Prince Alexis said last week after Prince Nicholas’ visit. Nicholas is not married to a person of equal rank, and neither was Maria’s father.

“If you go according to the laws, nobody of the Romanovs has the right to return to the throne,” he added.

Prince Alexis, who knew Maria’s father, Grand Duke Vladimir, says he warned Vladimir before he died not to try clear up questions about the succession. “But, he proclaimed his daughter the only head of the Romanov family anyway,” Alexis says. “This was, of course, very stupid.”

Prince Alexis is also among those who is against the funeral because he doubts the bones are real. After Massie told the New Yorkers how “disgraceful” it was that people, including himself, were still handling the skull of the czar (now in a morgue in Ekaterinburg), Prince Alexis protested that this skull being readied for burial was not the last czar’s.

The real skull, he believes, is somewhere else. Maybe it was hidden in the Kremlin, he says, maybe the headquarters of the KGB.

While the Romanovs and the Romanoffs feud, the New Yorkers who came to hear Prince Nicholas found that Russian royalty is a far cry from Princess Di. And the real glitter seemed to come from New York’s social royalty: designers such as Mary McFadden and Oleg Cassini, and such socialites as Pat Buckley and Nan Kempner.

In fact, the only crown for the evening was worn by a model, Karen Holmberg from Virginia. The diamond and emerald tiara was “a real imperial crown,” according to the large man standing with her. It was on loan, he explained, not from one of the royals in the crowd, but from a Manhattan jewelry store.