The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation has, it seems, put a final stop to the unsuccessful attempts of the Grand Duchess Maria to find a way around the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and allow the courts to rehabilitate her ancestors.
One feels deep compassion for the Grand Duchess, for the prosecutors and for Russian history, in which there are still so many knotty problems to be untangled.
A grave crime was committed in the basement of the Ipatyev house. There were children among the victims. A rehabilitation certificate is poor consolation, but still...
One could feel sorry for the Prosecutor-General's Office, which cannot grant the Grand Duchess's petition under the current Criminal Code because what happened in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918 is not covered by the 1991 Law "On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repressions." The refusal, couched in dry legalese, reads: "A premeditated murder, even with a political tinge, was perpetrated by persons not vested with the relevant judicial or administrative powers. No charges, if only formal, have been brought against the Emperor and members of his family. On the strength of that, the perpetrated murder is a general crime from the legal point of view." How do you expect the prosecutors to find a way out of that labyrinth?
With all due respect for the Grand Duchess there are many more questions to her and her lawyers than to the Prosecutor-General. Take one example. The issue of rehabilitation has been mooted for ten years, ever since the remains of the Tsar's family were buried at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg in 1998. It was then that the Duchess managed to get from a district register office in St. Petersburg an official document confirming that Nicholas II and his family had been executed. Formally, that was already grounds for launching the legal rehabilitation procedure. However, the Grand Duchess took seven years to make up her mind. Her explanation for the delay is that she was very keen to know the opinion of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The position of the ROC is well known. The attitude of the Church to the Prosecutor General's Office decision is "calm", according to Bishop Mark of Yegoryevsk, Deputy Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate's External Church Relations Department. And no wonder, because the ROC has long canonized the Tsar's family, and anyway, the decision of the secular authorities does not make any difference for a believer. In a nutshell, the Church's position is that martyrs do not need rehabilitation. The question suggests itself: why did the Grand Duchess have to wait so long for the opinion of the ROC only to challenge that opinion by going to the court and the Prosecutor's Office?
Another contradiction. Bishop Mark, among others, thinks that by giving a solemn burial to the Tsar's remains in the Russian Tsars' Crypt (attended, by the way, by the first Russian President) the state has expressed its attitude to Nicholas II. One may well ask, why does the ROC consider the rehabilitation issue closed, but the Grand Duchess, who sets great store by the opinion of the Moscow Patriarchate, does not?
Come to think of it, the rhetoric of Grand Duchess's lawyers is also somewhat off-putting. "If regicide is qualified as a crime and not as repression, one of the lawyers muses, does it mean that the present (Russian) state is a successor to criminals?" True, he hastens to add: "Even we, the monarchists do not say that. We say that the state had made mistakes, and they have to be admitted." That pre-emptive strike was delivered at a press conference preceding the Supreme Court session.
That again prompts a question. Now that the Supreme Court has not dared break the Russian laws even for the sake of the Grand Duchess, has Russia suddenly become "an heir to criminals"? Will that be the position of the Grand Duchess and her lawyers when they take the case to the International Court, as they promised to do even before the Supreme Court ruling, in case Russia declined their petition?
By the way, Nicholas's descendants deny that rehabilitation is but a first step to demanding restitution of the Tsar's property. But who can guarantee that it will not happen? Before the Revolution the Russian Imperial House had the rank of a government institution. At present the imperial house, according to its official website, "continues to exist on its immutable legal foundations" (?) even though it is formally in exile.
Finally, there is one more problem. The Russian Orthodox Church has its position and the Supreme Court has its own position. But there is also something called the judgement of history. What would a "political rehabilitation" of Nicholas II mean for history?
Have we finally sorted out the role played by the last monarch in the horrors of Khodynka, which resulted in the death of 1,389 people? Or the ignominious defeat in the Russo-Japanese War? Or Bloody Sunday? Or the 1905 Revolution? The First World War? The circumstances that provoked the February 1917 Revolution?
For all we know, the issue of rehabilitation of other members of the Tsar's family may be raised. We know even less about them. And yet they were a mixed lot: true gentlemen and crooks (one was caught stealing family diamonds), model husbands and lascivious homosexuals, workaholics and loafers. The family produced some good soldiers, good seamen and even talented historians and poets. But what the Romanovs failed to produce by the end of the 19th century was a worthy monarch. Yet that was the whole point of the dynasty's existence.
The dynasty may have survived if it had made room for others on the Russian political Olympus: by agreeing to reign and not rule. Many European monarchies have gone through that. The Romanovs chose not to.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
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