Final Rites For The Czar

By Paul Quinn-Judge/St. Petersburg

The funeral last week of the last Czar of Russia and his family, held in the austerely beautiful confines of St. Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress, was originally intended to be an act of national repentance for 80 years of death and division. It turned out to be a symbol of the dominant feature of Russian politics today: the fine art of cutting a deal.

For the priests and the President in the cathedral last Friday, the small coffins in front of them were not those of Nicholas II, his wife, three of his children and four faithful retainers. (The remains of two children, Alexei and Maria, have yet to be found.) In the view of the church, the boxes draped with the imperial flag contained the skeletons of anonymous victims of the political terror that engulfed Russia after the overthrow of autocracy in 1917. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexi II, who has been accused by former dissidents of collaboration with the Soviet-era KGB, expresses doubts about the authenticity of the bones, despite positive DNA tests. He calls them the "Yekaterinburg remains," a reference to the town in the Urals where the imperial family was killed in the early hours of July 17, 1918. President Boris Yeltsin--who as Communist Party chief there in 1977 had destroyed the site of the massacre--denounced the murder during his funeral address but stuck to the official church description of the remains as innocent and unnamed victims.

Yeltsin's mere presence at the rites was an unexpected act of political daring. The idea of national repentance for the murders was dropped months ago after the Patriarch withheld his blessing, and most leading politicians, with the exception of the ambitious Alexander Lebed and opposition leader Grigori Yavlinsky, found other things to do that Friday. Yeltsin's sudden decision to appear achieved the effect he so clearly enjoys, catching his rivals off balance and making them look foolish. This time, however, his about-face may have been inspired by more profound considerations. The day before the funeral, the one living Russian with any claims to sainthood, Dmitri Likhachev, 91, spoke on the phone with the President and urged him to attend. Yeltsin is reputed to be in awe of Likhachev, a specialist in early Russian literature and a survivor of one of the worst of the early Soviet political prisons, where in previous centuries the Orthodox Church sent its dissidents. Soon after the call, Yeltsin announced he would travel to St. Petersburg, and during the ceremony Likhachev stood just behind the President.

Surviving members of the Romanov family--who had come from addresses as diverse as Paris; Oakland, Calif.; New South Wales; and East Sussex--kept a low profile. Those who spoke Russian did so in an archaic St. Petersburg accent that has all but disappeared. Some, such as the mayor of Palm Beach, Fla., Paul Ilinsky, never learned the language. They were restrained in their comments on Nicholas and made no claim to any stake in Russia's political future.

The Russian media showed no such restraint. In the days preceding the funeral, the country's largest privately owned network, NTV, ran a series of programs and discussions that all but canonized Nicholas and endorsed autocracy. His Russia, NTV told its viewers, was a country of "order and prosperity." One young historian argued that Nicholas was a statesman of almost supernatural insight, though he gave himself away when he went on to suggest that Rasputin--the Czarina's "spiritual adviser" whose scandalous reputation did so much to discredit the Czar--was given a raw deal. The guiding logic of the programs seemed to be that if the Bolsheviks hated Nicholas, he must have been a wonderful man.

In fact, Nicholas II is viewed by most historians as a mediocre personality, deeply flawed and sometimes sinister. Popular unrest was ruthlessly suppressed by his army in 1905 and again in 1917, until the troops themselves mutinied that February. The Czar presided over a court and political system so byzantine that several of his ministers were assassinated by "revolutionaries" who were in reality secret police, and a Prime Minister, Sergei Witte, suspected until the end of his life that the identities of those behind a plot to kill him were known to the Czar. These defects were erased in most people's minds by the manner of the Romanovs' death: the massacre in the cellar of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg, the 12 bullet holes in the body of Alexei--"a beautiful child," one of the executioners recalled--and the way some of the women who hid behind cushions were finished off with bayonets. The killers took a certain pride in their work: in a 1964 interview taped for secret Communist Party archives, one of the execution party jovially referred to the corpses as golubchiki--the little dears.

Many networks--as well as a site on the Web--offered Russians live coverage of the events. But life in St. Petersburg went on as usual. The center of the city is turning into a smaller version of Moscow, with Gucci shops and bodyguards, hotels with London prices and unofficial landmarks of the new order--like the spot on Nevsky Prospekt, the city's most famous shopping street, where a top government official was gunned down last year in a highly professional contract hit. As the funeral proceeded, city streets were busy, shops and offices were open as usual and few people seemed touched by the event. "I'll catch it on the news," said Lyudmilla Petrova, a shop worker on Nevsky Prospekt. Tanya, a slender 19-year-old in a miniskirt waiting by a chauffeured Mercedes for her businessman boyfriend, said she had not missed a single TV program on the Romanovs all week. "It was so sad," she said, "but it doesn't seem like it happened here--it's like a miniseries." The muted response to the funeral, in political circles and on the street, suggests that Russians have not yet found a way of coming to terms with their past. The real question is whether they are even trying anymore.