The last czar and his family were victims of political repression, Russia's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, formally restoring the Romanov name and furthering a Kremlin effort to encourage patriotism by celebrating the country's czarist past.
Nicholas II, his wife and five children were shot to death by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918, a year after the revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union.
For years, their descendants have sought rehabilitation in the courts claiming the executions were political repression. The argument was repeatedly denied until Wednesday when the country's highest court issued the final word, siding with the family.
According to critics, earlier rulings reflected Vladimir Putin's reluctance to condemn the Soviet government's crimes, in part to justify his own retreat from democracy.
But in recent years, Putin and his successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, have evoked the majesty of the czarist era in Kremlin ceremonies. And they have given a place of prominence to the Russian Orthodox Church, which has canonized Nicholas II and his family.
At the same time, Putin, now prime minister, and Medvedev also have continued to glorify the Soviet Union's achievements and celebrate the symbols of its power.
Oleg Orlov, a member of the human rights group Memorial, said the aim was to give Russians pride in their country by emphasizing the positive aspects of their history while glossing over the bad.
"In Russia, the tendency has been to say ... the czar was a good guy, Lenin was a good guy, Stalin was a good guy, the Bolsheviks weren't that bad," Orlov said.
"The authorities are always right," he said. "What they're telling people now is 'we have a great history and therefore we have a great country.'"
Wednesday's decision to "rehabilitate" the slain Romanovs won't change the minds of many Russians today. While Russian Orthodox believers share the church's veneration of the family as saints, die-hard communists see them as criminals and millions of other Russians place them somewhere in between.
But it is a step in the direction of condemnation of the Bolsheviks who killed the family and, by extension, of the entire Soviet era. And it is likely to put the Romanov family in a more positive light for coming generations of Russians.
Nikolai Romanov, a distant relative of the last czar, said the whole rehabilitation process was ridiculous.
"It's as if you suddenly thought that it was necessary to rehabilitate St. Peter or St. Paul because the Romans had judged them and sentenced them to death," he said on NTV television.
The ruling is also unlikely to have major legal ramifications, at least in the short to medium term, because there is no significant move to restore Russia's monarchy or compensate the imperial family for its losses.
There has been no material compensation for others who have been formally rehabilitated, most of them victims of Stalin-era repressionist.
Some historians had speculated that the Russian government was reluctant to reclassify the czar's killing out of fear that descendants would claim state property, such as the State Hermitage Museum, as compensation. The museum is housed in what used to be the Winter Palace.
Prosecutors, lower courts and even the Supreme Court had rejected all appeals to rehabilitate the family. In its ruling in November, the Supreme Court said they were not eligible for rehabilitation because their execution had been a crime. In reversing that decision Wednesday, the Supreme Court's presidium recognized their "unfounded repression."
German Lukyanov, a lawyer for the Romanov family, said the decision was based on law and said no politics were involved.
"In the end this will help the country, this will help Russia understand its history, help the world to see that Russia observed its own laws, help Russia in its development to become a civilized country," he said.
Orlov agreed that it was "a proper legal decision," but said the real decision was made at the political level. "In the Kremlin? I don't know," he said.
The czar abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia. Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their son and four daughters were shot on July 17, 1918, in a basement room of a merchant's house where they were held in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.
The remains of Nicholas II and Alexandra and three of their daughters were unearthed in 1991 and reburied in the imperial resting place in St. Petersburg.
Nicholas' heir, Alexei, and the other daughter, Grand Duchess Maria, remained missing for decades until bone shards were unearthed in 2007 in a forest outside Yekaterinburg, not far from the place where the rest of the family's mutilated remains had been scattered.
Officials said earlier this year that DNA testing had confirmed the shards belonged to Alexei and Maria.
The Russian Orthodox Church made all seven of them saints in 2000.
No comments:
Post a Comment