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Can a Czar's Receding Heir Line Return?

MOSCOW -- It's the fondest hope of Moscow's most wild-eyed street protesters and a cherished dream for a handful of nostalgia buffs who trace their ancestry to pre-revolutionary Russian nobility.

But is it possible that Boris Yeltsin, too, wants to restore a role for the Romanov dynasty as Russia's official imperial family?

Under a front-page headline -- "Yeltsin Welcomes Back Heir to the Czar" -- Britain's Daily Telegraph reported on Dec. 31 that the Russian leader had signed a secret decree to recognize Grand Duke Georgy Romanov, teenage heir to the Romanov dynasty, as head of Russia's imperial family.

Grand Duke Georgy, who has visited Russia a handful of times, is a 15-year-old who lives in Madrid, has been educated at English and French schools, speaks halting Russian and has a fondness for martial arts. He is the great-great-great-grandson of Alexander II, a 19th-century Russian czar.

The newspaper, citing an unnamed Kremlin source, said Yeltsin plans to welcome Georgy along with his mother and grandmother back to live in Russia early this year. The family -- which has been living in exile since 1918, when the Bolsheviks executed the last czar and his immediate family -- would be granted a "purely ceremonial" role, it said.

Improbable? Sure. Immediately denied by the Kremlin? Of course. But the report has nonetheless captured the attention of the Russian media and thrilled Russian monarchists. If the Romanovs are restored as Russia's imperial family, some say, Russia will finally have the unifying national idea it so obviously lacks now.

"There is a kind of ideological vacuum that is the result of the Communist regime," said Duke Vadim Lopukhin, a leader of Russia's Nobility League, a group that traces its ancestors to Russian nobility. "There is no national symbol; that's why the family's return could play a positive role in stabilization. . . . They could become a symbol, an ideal to live by."

That, said the Telegraph, is exactly the idea. Yeltsin himself complained last year that Russia -- whose national anthem has no lyrics, whose schoolchildren search vainly for heroes -- is a country in search of a national idea. Ever since, newspapers have been running contributions from readers volunteering their thoughts on what the new Russia should be about.

But it has been easier to identify what Russia does not believe in than what it does. Yeltsin himself is generally reviled. Mikhail Gorbachev, his Soviet predecessor, is widely regarded as a national joke. Lenin is out, and so is Stalin. Communism is a sour memory, but democracy in its current, twisted, uniquely Russian incarnation has inspired no passion in the Russian body politic.

So why not monarchy?

Well, plenty of reasons.

For one thing, there is not exactly a popular outcry in support of a Romanov return. When Georgy took a riverboat tour down the Volga in 1993 with his mother, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, and his grandmother, Leonida Georgyevna, they were ignored virtually everywhere. What's more, Maria Vladimirovna committed the unpardonable gaffe of neglecting to cover her bouffant hairdo when she visited a Russian Orthodox church near the city of Kostroma.

"Russia has always been united not on the basis of a national idea, but on an imperial idea, which presupposed that the state was superior to society," Igor Klyamkin, a sociologist, wrote in the newspaper Kommersant Daily last month. "[But] the peculiarity of the present moment is that for the first time a relative majority does not want to return to taking orders from the state. The priority now is personal interests and the interests of the family."

Masha Lipman, deputy editor of Itogi, a weekly news magazine, scoffed at the idea of reinstating the Romanovs in any capacity. There is nothing interesting about the Romanovs, nothing heroic or extraordinary that would lend them prestige or save them from instant irrelevance, she said. Nor would it help that in Russia's present lean economic condition, all three members of the Romanov family are quite pudgy, she said.

"If you're creating a myth -- which in itself is a failed attempt to form a state -- there should be something catchy about it," she said. "The fat boy isn't catchy."

Sergei Yastrzhembsky, spokesman for Yeltsin, was hardly less scathing in slamming the Telegraph story, which he called "not serious."

"It would be funny if it wasn't annoying," he said. "One has the impression that the British mass media have run out of their own monarchy stories and they want to expand -- including into Russian territory."

Yeltsin has said nothing to indicate that a restoration of a role for the Romanovs is in the works. In fact, he has been cautious about dismantling many symbols of the past, balking, for example, at moving Lenin's body from its tomb in Red Square and removing hammer-and-sickle emblems from government buildings.

Nonetheless, monarchists reckon, plenty of crazy things happen in Russia, and the monarchy is not entirely out of vogue, after all. A massive statue of Czar Peter the Great is rising on the banks of the Moscow River, as is a gargantuan copy of the 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Savior, built by the czars and destroyed by Stalin.

It was not possible to reach the Romanov family in Madrid for comment. Through a family friend in New York, however, Grand Duchess Leonida Georgyevna said there have been conversations "for months" with the Russian government but no definite plans for the family's return. She would not be more specific.

So will Russia be without a unifying national idea indefinitely? Some Russians fervently hope so.

"I have misgivings about any such idea," Pavel Gurevich, vice president of the Academy of Humanitarian Research, wrote in Rossiskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper. "Knowing what a sinister role ideology can play in people's lives, do we again want to assume this burden? Any idea will turn itself against us. In calling for a new idea, we are calling for demons!"