And Still a Focus of Controversy

The remains of Czar Nicholas II will be buried in the former imperial capital of St. Petersburg on Friday, exactly 80 years after he and his family were executed by their Bolshevik captors. Nicholas’ remains, along with those of his wife, three of their five children and a number of servants, will be held in nine miniature oak coffins. The royal rites were decided upon seven years ago by President Boris Yeltsin as an act of reconciliation with Russia’s past. But the funeral will fall short of what any self-respecting emperor has a right to expect.

While one or two of the lesser princes of Europe’s remaining royal houses might attend, few of those paying their last respects to the last of the Romanovs would make any social arbiter’s “A” list. Yeltsin has decided to stay away. Also boycotting is Patriarch Alexei II of the Russian Orthodox Church, traditionally a loyal supporter of the monarchy. A local cleric will conduct the ceremony.

The church is unhappy with the funeral because it says it doubts the accuracy of the DNA tests that identified Nicholas and his family members, whose bodies were burned and doused with acid. The Communists, still a powerful political bloc, see the ceremony as a dark plot to discredit the country’s Soviet period. Russian emigres who are loyal to the monarchy smell a different kind of plot, as does the Orthodox Church Abroad, which split from the Moscow church after the revolution. The Orthodox Church Abroad has accused the Moscow church of collaborating with the Communists during the Soviet era. It sees the funeral as a trick by Yeltsin and other former Communists to curry popular support by bolstering their nationalist credentials.

That Nicholas died tragically is obvious. That he was responsible for bringing untold tragedy to Russia is also true. Reactionary in outlook, committed to maintaining autocracy, vacillating in character, he lacked the sense to recognize that Russia was sliding toward revolution, propelled in no small part by his own inept policies. In a famous letter to the czar in 1902, Leo Tolstoy warned of the “great evil you will bring to yourself and to millions if you continue on your present course.” Nicholas ignored the advice. He plodded on, until the cataclysm of the First World War ended the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and brought to Russia radical and brutal change from which it is still trying to recover.

Some see Nicholas as a martyr of the Russian revolution. Certainly he was the most notable of its victims, but certainly too he and those who ruled and repressed in his name bear inescapable responsibility for helping make that upheaval unavoidable. Nicholas is entitled to a decent burial, and the $833,000 the cash-starved Russian government has budgeted for his funeral will give him that. What it can’t do is rehabilitate the reputation of one of history’s greatest royal bumblers.