Russia's bones of contention

ST PETERSBURG

WITH 11 tsars already buried in the Petropavlovsk fortress at St Peters­burg, Russia's former royal capital, it is hard to imagine that a 12th royal tomb could make all that much difference. But a row over how and where to bury the pre­sumed remains of Tsar Nicholas II, killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, has rattled on for six years now since the bones were discov­ered near Yekaterinburg. That city in the Urals (Sverdlovsk, in Soviet times) and Moscow have, out of civic pride, been disputing St Petersburg's claim to the re­mains. And the Russian Ortho­dox Church has been worrying whether the bones are really those of the tsar at all.

This has been a dismaying spectacle, but the overdue end of it may at last be in sight. Royal and republican impatience to lay the bones to rest has reached enough of a pitch to overwhelm even the hesitations of the church. With increasing confi­dence, a date of March 1st 1998 is being pencilled into official dia­ries for the solemn burial of the last tsar—in St Petersburg.

The royal pressure has come from the (arguably) highest ranking of the tsar's living relations, Duchess Maria Vladimirovna Romanova. In a strongly worded letter to the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, she says Nicholas had wanted to be buried in St Petersburg; it would be "sacrilegious" to have him laid to rest anywhere else.

The republican pressure has been corning from President Boris Yeltsin. He has put a first-deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov, in charge of finding a speedy conclusion. Mr. Nemtsov has told Russian scientists to perform a further round of testing on the bones by January 15th, to confirm that they are indeed those of the tsar and his family. This will dupli­cate work already done by for­eign scientists, but the church, and other conservatives, may think that Russian findings are more persuasive.

Why should Mr. Yeltsin care? One answer is that he has given himself a mission of "reconcil­ing" the national divisions caused by the Bolshevik revolu­tion; a decent end for Nicholas forms part of that process. And he nurtures a complementary but less advanced ambition to re­move the embalmed body of Le­nin from Red Square for conven­tional burial elsewhere.

Perhaps, too, Mr. Yeltsin may be atoning for his earlier, less be­nign, incursion into the tsar's posthumous affairs. As Commu­nist Party secretary for Sverd­lovsk, he ordered the destruction of the house in which the royal family were murdered. Belatedly, he is at least providing a small shelter for their remains.

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