Russia's Last Czar Exonerated By Court

Ruling a Victory For Descendants

MOSCOW, Oct. 1 -- Russia's Supreme Court on Wednesday recognized the nation's last czar, Nicholas II, and his family as victims of "groundless repression," formally rehabilitating the Romanovs more than 90 years after their execution in a basement in the eastern Urals signaled the Soviet embrace of terror as state policy.

The court ruling is the latest act in Russia's reinterpretation of history following the fall of the communist government in 1991. Many of the tens of millions of people shot or sent to prison camps under communist rule were officially exonerated after the Soviet collapse, but the government had long resisted that step for the autocrat the Soviets once vilified as "Bloody Nicholas."

The decision, culminating a prolonged legal battle by the descendants of the royal family, reverses a ruling by the same court last November that the Romanovs were not eligible for rehabilitation because they had never been officially accused of a crime. The court said at the time that their deaths amounted to premeditated murder, not political repression.

The court often reflects the views of the Kremlin. Some analysts say the earlier ruling grew from worries there that exoneration might lead Romanov descendants to claim property confiscated by the Bolsheviks. Others have called that ruling part of a broader attempt to minimize Soviet crimes in schoolbooks and the media by a government that has been rolling back democratic reforms.

It was unclear what prompted the change of heart Wednesday. But the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and former president, has often tried to use Russia's imperial history to encourage patriotism, and it has forged close ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, which canonized the Romanovs as saints in 2000.

"Different people have sought this rehabilitation for different reasons," said Arseny Roginsky, a historian who chairs Memorial, a human rights organization that works to catalogue Soviet crimes. "We believe that all innocent victims of Soviet power must be rehabilitated."

Roginsky said the ruling opens the door to the rehabilitation of others executed by the Soviets without being accused of crimes by judicial bodies. More importantly, he said, it could force society to "think about how we should view our own past and whose successors we are."

"If a crime lies at the basis of our government, it raises a number of new and important questions," he added, noting that Vladimir Lenin is believed to have ordered the execution of the Romanovs -- and that his body remains entombed in a mausoleum next to the Kremlin on Red Square.

There is still significant nostalgia for the Soviet era in Russia, but it may be matched by a surge in interest in the old monarchy. In July, Nicholas II edged out Joseph Stalin for the title of the greatest Russian in history in an online poll in which more than 2 million votes were cast. Lenin was ranked third.

Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, and their children, Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia and the 13-year-old heir to throne, Alexei, were shot dead in the early hours of July 17, 1918, in the mansion where the Bolsheviks had been holding them in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg. Their physician and three other servants were also killed. Only the royal family's pet spaniel survived the carnage.

Sulfuric acid was poured on their faces to hide the identity of the corpses, which were buried in secret graves and not discovered until the collapse of the Soviet government.

The young Bolshevik government had originally considered putting the last czar on trial for the famines, wars and turmoil it blamed him for. But in the midst of a civil war that followed the revolution, it decided to put him and his family to death.