Whatever factual mystery still surrounds the fate of the Russian royal family in 1918 may finally have been resolved by its centenary last week, but how their deaths will be understood by Russians themselves seems more unclear by the moment.
It’s important to remember that the romantic mythology of the slaughter in Yekaterinburg—the Romanov family rousted in the night of July 17 and herded at gunpoint into a basement room; the little tsarevich, so crippled by hemophilia that his father had to carry him; the women invulnerable to bullets and bayonets (they’d sewed diamonds into their corsets)—is a mythology largely, if not exclusively, known in the West. In the upheaval of the ongoing civil war and the Bolsheviks’ consolidation of power, the Russian government disseminated conflicting accounts of the tsar’s fate, and it was nearly a decade—1926—before it acknowledged that the whole family had been shot.
By that point it had been made abundantly clear to the Soviet populace that curiosity could kill more than cats, and they had lots of other things to worry about anyway. But the investigations by a White Russian lawyer that forced the 1926 confirmation, and local memory in and around Yekaterinburg—where people had been involved in the murders and disposal of the bodies, and a rich vein of fact and rumor flourished—were sufficiently accurate that in 1979 a group of area geologists, under cover of doing scientific research, were able to locate three skulls. They concluded, though, that the matter was still so delicate that they reburied them, and so things remained until 1990, when one of them contacted then-Supreme Council chairman Boris Yeltsin and “asked him to help me bring [the bones] back to history.” The following year, investigators recovered nine skeletons from a single grave, and a forensic, political, and religious odyssey began.
Rediscovery of the remains, and government openness to investigating their provenance, coincided beautifully with forensic advances in DNA testing; in 1990 scientists were able to recover nuclear DNA from each of the nine skeletons and to conclude via familial comparisons that they indeed had the bones of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, three of their children, and (from other evidence) the four attendants known to have been murdered with them.
Almost as soon as the project began, it attracted emphatic detractors. Aged Romanov cousins around the world thought it might all be a KGB plot. (They’d seen a few at least as farfetched.) Some scientists and academicians second- and third-guessed the scientists and academicians who were testing and comparing DNA. Some of the dwindling band of Anastasia-lived enthusiasts were dubious that the bones were Romanovs because there were only five of them, not the seven that there should have been. (In 2007 a local historian returned to the area where the bones had been found, determined to locate the missing family members, and find them he did, only feet away from where the others had been buried.)
Fluctuations in Russian politics over the next decade—for example, the waxing and waning of anti-Soviet feeling that affected public nostalgia for both the Romanovs and the Communists—helped draw out the project. Despite this, by January 1998 a government commission headed by then-deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov reported that there were “no longer any doubts” of the bones’ authenticity and announced that plans were being drawn up for their permanent interment.
That may have been when it became clear that the institution most hesitant to accept the identification and its implications was the Russian Orthodox church. When the bones were first discovered and tested, the church hesitated to accept their provenance, citing the importance of certainty in regard to the physical relics of saints—plans had already begun for the 2000 canonization of the Romanovs, and the church wished to avoid an unseemly and theologically dubious mistake.
The upshot of this episode was that when an interment was finally arranged for July 17, 1998, in the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg where Russia’s rulers for centuries have been laid to rest, neither Boris Yeltsin nor then-patriarch Alexy II were in attendance, and the officiant didn’t name the dead, instead referring them to God. “You know their names,” he said.
If that early ambiguity can be explained as prudence, its survival is much harder to figure out. That service was 20 years ago, and the investigation of the remains has kept pace with scientific developments. Remains of Nicholas’s father and brother have been exhumed and their DNA matched with his, as has material from the bloodstained clothing of his assassinated grandfather Alexander II. At least one study is said to have found evidence of the famous genetic error that transmitted hemophilia through the family of Queen Victoria to the tsarevich.
The Russian Orthodox church, from time to time, has agreed that all this is very interesting and will be taken into consideration. As recently as last week its spokesman said that the latest findings (from a study the church itself ordered) will be examined “with attention”; he praised the investigation for its “atmosphere of openness.”
If that’s the case it’s a step up; a church-convened meeting last November agreed to investigate the theory, posited by a bishop close to Vladimir Putin, that the tsar and his family were victims of a Jewish ritual killing. Bishop Tikhon asserted that “a significant part” of the commission has “no doubt” that such is the case. Patriarch Kirill, though, was said to have expressed concerns that such allegations might “provoke uncontrollable outbursts of ultranationalism” and discouraged rapid acceptance of the idea.
Fear of “uncontrollable outbursts of ultranationalism”—positive or negative—is key to understanding the church’s irresolution about the Romanovs. While the theological question—relics or not?—is a real one, much more of its dilemma lies in its relationship to the state, and to Putin. Historically the Russian church and its state have been congruent in ways that are unfamiliar to Westerners; that remains the case in the Putin era, with the church inclined to avoid rocking the boat. Enthusiasms are dangerous things in an authoritarian arrangement—too much zeal for a royal martyr, too much nostalgia about anything, can unleash forces that would be better off restrained. When the state sends mixed messages about its preferences, or no message at all, temporizing is probably the best approach to the temporal realm.
Vladimir Putin has been circumspect in regard to any commemoration or observance of the events of 1917-18, revolutionary or royal. But he doesn’t seem to have discouraged the centenary observance in Yekaterinburg, a religious procession led as it has been for years by Patriarch Kirill, from the site of the massacre 13 miles to one of the initial burial sites. A reported 100,000 people from all over the world gathered for the pilgrimage, where the patriarch warned them against the temptation “to embrace some new, unknown happy future through the destruction of our life, our traditions, and our faith.”
Perhaps he was speaking of Bolshevism. In the meantime, the remains of Maria and Alexei await their reunion with their family, and they all await being given their names in this world. God knows all of them already.
