EUROPE	MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 8
	R.I.P.--At Long Last An epic dispute over the bones of the Romanovs shows that the last Czar and his family still hold power over Russia By ANDREW MEIER /MOSCOW he Romanovs are finally to be laid to rest--eight decades after their death before a Bolshevik firing squad. It took years of forensic sleuthing, but now after bitter debate among Russia's supreme ecclesiastical and secular powers, and an unseemly bidding war for the skeletal remains, Russia's last Czar and his family will receive a proper funeral. "The time has come to grant them eternal peace," declared Boris Nemtsov, the Deputy Prime Minister who heads the commission appointed by Boris Yeltsin to decide what to do with the bones dug up in a birch forest in western Siberia in 1991. Nemtsov is ready for a bit of relief, as well. From a cast worthy of Fellini--clerics and coroners, aristocrats and archivists--he has fought to forge a consensus. He has also settled a dispute among three Russian cities battling for the bones. Yekaterinburg, the city of the Romanovs' death (known as Sverdlovsk during the Soviet era), lobbied hard, as did Moscow, but the commission chose St. Petersburg. If Yeltsin agrees, as is likely, the bones of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, three of their five children, their doctor and three servants will be buried in the former imperial capital on July 17, the 80th anniversary of the killings. "We knew this case would be political," says Nikolai Nevolin, the coroner of Yekaterinburg, the Urals city where in 1977 Yeltsin, then a regional party boss, razed the house in which the Romanovs were killed, "but no one ever expected this." Since the remains were exhumed by a team of archaeologists, medical examiners and policemen in 1991, Nevolin has been their curator, suffering a flood of monarchist pilgrims and the scrutiny of conspiracy theorists near and far. "It was never just about the bones," says Alexander Avdonin, the geologist and amateur historian who discovered them in 1979. "This is a battle between the Church, the State, the regions and the center." To the dismay of Nevolin and Avdonin, who have painstakingly teased the mystery out of the bones, their discoveries have yielded neither repentance nor healing, but division. "The way we've treated the remains is barbaric," says Pyotr Gritsayenko, a medical examiner who helped unearth them. "To some they're holy relics, to others they're just bones. But whatever you call them, the time to bury them with respect is long overdue." For starters, the business of making a positive identification stretched seven years. Even in Russia's lean times, no expense was spared. Chief investigator Vladimir Solovyov and his team raised dead Romanovs and bade living ones donate DNA for testing by leading U.S. and U.K. experts. Britain's Prince Philip, a relative through his mother, provided a gene sample to help authenticate Alexandra's remains. Nicholas' brother George was exhumed to provide another DNA sliver. In the end, the forensic department delivered a 750-page report, and by January, Solovyov announced, "Without a doubt, we have the remains of Nicholas II." Still, the doubters persist. There's talk of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy behind the murders, that the executioners' memoirs are kgb fakes, that the blood tests were fixed. A final mystery, the whereabouts of two Romanov children, Alexei and Marie, remains unsolved. Some believe their bones were burned, yet this summer U.S. Army experts (veterans of MIA searches in Vietnam) will travel to Yekaterinburg to comb the earth for their remains. Once certified, the bones were subjected to a political tug of war. Moscow's ambitious and publicity-savvy mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, yearned to acquire a set of world-class relics for his new $300 million Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Another regional power-broker, Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region, contended that the Romanovs should be buried where they were killed, and vowed to build a church on the murder site to house them. Russian Orthodox people believe martyrs' bones can produce miracles, but Rossel's plan stems more from his dream of turning his grim metropolis--one of the largest ruins of the Soviet military-industrial complex--into a tourist destination. St. Petersburg, however, the city of the czars, had long claimed rights to the Romanovs. A line of czars is interred in the imperial chapel inside the Peter and Paul Fortress. Few doubt these Romanovs will soon join them. A room has been off-limits for months while a new crypt is prepared. "Everything's ready," a guard confides. "The marble's been cut, the ceiling's gilded--we're just waiting for the remains." Yeltsin promises to set the funeral arrangements soon, and Patriarch Aleksei II will discuss canonizing the Romanovs and their retainers at a Holy Synod this week. Yet many believers aren't waiting for ecclesiastical formalities. To them, the Romanovs are already saints, and icons with their images adorn churches across Russia. The bones, meanwhile, remain in the Yekaterinburg morgue, sealed in display cases, protected by armed guards. "I'll be happy to be rid of them," Nevolin admits. "There's too much history in them." Indeed. To some historians, the murder of the Czar marked the start of Soviet terror. "Once you've killed the Czar," says Edvard Radzinsky, Nicholas' biographer, "murder just becomes part of the job of keeping order." With the dark history they tell, the bones have become symbols of Russia's struggles to move forward. As a source of political friction, the Romanovs rival Lenin, whose corpse Yeltsin yearns to evict from Red Square. He may also hope that the burial will also put to rest Russia's fascination with the monarchy. Yet some of his aides find the monarchy attractive. "Without a czar in Russia," Nemtsov warned recently, "there is discord." Russia's preeminent historian, 91-year-old Dmitri Likhachev, agrees. "A czar will rule again in Russia," he predicts, "but not any time soon." Society, he says, has yet to mature. Neither has the top candidate for the job. "That boy," Likhachev says with indignation of the 16-year-old would-be heir to the dynasty, Georgi Romanov, a distant relative, "is not fit." Young Georgi, Likhachev argued in a letter to Yeltsin, is "more Hohenzollern than Romanov." Moreover, when he led Georgi on a tour of the Hermitage, the former imperial palace, Likhachev was shocked. "The pudgy little fellow ran right over to the throne and tried it out for size. No, he won't do at all." It is not only fear of a false pretender that promises to keep the Romanovs' throne empty for some time. The men in the Kremlin, anxious guardians of a weakening President, are only too aware of the possible cost of returning a prodigal Romanov. If the long march toward an imperial funeral caused such acrimony, they can well imagine the furies a living Romanov could unleash.
time-webmaster@pathfinder.com