Russia's last emperor again in focus of attention 90 years after

MOSCOW, July 18 (Itar-Tass) - Commemorative events dedicated to the date of a brutal execution of Russia's last Emperor Nicholas II and his entire family were held in many parts of Russia Thursday on a day that marked 90 years since the tragedy.

Most members of the exiled Romanovs dynasty arrived in St Petersburg to take part in a traditional remembrance service in the Cathedral of St Peter and Paul.

Circumstances of Nicholas II's death, as well as his personality and role in Russian history have again gotten into the focal point of public and mass media attention.

The Russian Orthodox Church asks the authorities for the Czar's
political rehabilitation and popularity rankings put him on a par with
dictator Joseph Stalin and above the leader of the 1917 Revolution,
Vladimir Lenin.

On the night from July 17 to July 18, 1918, a team of executors under the command of local Bolshevik supervisor Jacob Yurovsky shot to death the last Emperor (who had abdicated the throne more than a year before that), Empress Alexandra, Crown Prince Alexis, and their four daughters.

The scene was set in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, in the basement floor of a mansion that used to belong to the local engineer and public personality, N. Ipatyev.

Four servants of the Romanovs were executed together with the Imperial Family.

Committee for Investigations at Russia's Office of the Prosecutor
General said Wednesday it had completed voluminous identification of the remains of people who supposedly were members of the Czar's family or were his close associates.

The remains were found on the Old Koptyakovskaya Road near
Yekaterinburg in July 1991and and July 2007. Most of the expert studies have confirmed that seven of the people, whose remains were discovered there, were members of the same family and were buried at the same time.

A criminal case over the murder of members of the Imperial Family may be closed in September if all the subsequent expert studies confirm conclusions of the Prosecutor General's Office. It will not get to the courtroom due to the demise of the defendants.

Yakov Yurovsky, the main defendant in the case, and his accomplices who organized and performed the murder remain the chief defendants in the case.

Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Alexis II has called the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family "an overture of the heinous crimes, the aftermaths of which affected the life of our people over decades."

The Church has asked for rehabilitation of the Czar's family but
lawyers say this will unlikely ever happen due to the absence of legal
grounds for rehabilitation and political will on the part of the state.

The Imperial House of the Romanovs has been making attempts to
rehabilitate the last Czar for the past three years but the Prosecutor
General's Office has persistently refused to recognize the status of
victims of political repressions for Nicholas II, his spouse and children.

The Supreme Court agreed with the prosecutors' claims that the shooting was a felony and not a political crime.

Spokespeople for the Prosecutor's Office told the Moscow-based
Kommersant daily Thursday the agency had not changed its viewpoint on the issue.

Representatives of the judiciary say there is no legal document
confirming the Bolsheviks' decision to execute the Czar.

However, prior to the destruction of the Ipatyev house in the early 1980's a memorial plaque placed on a wall of that building read: "Russia's last emperor Nicholas II /Nicholas the Bloody/ was executed here upon a decision of the Soviet of Workers, Peasant and Cossack deputies."

Still, Mikhail Barshchevsky, the Russian government's representative in Russia's highest judiciary instances told Kommersant a rehabilitation of the Imperial Family is impossible as there are no juridical grounds for this.

"The Czar's family was killed without indictment and that's why it's a criminal offense," he said.

Barshchevsky believes that the Czar's political rehabilitation did
take place in 1998, when the remains of the whole executed family were
placed to rest in the St Peter and Paul's fortress in St Petersburg.

The Russian Church canonized Nicholas II and his family as saints in 2000. They have been added to the pantheon of Martyrs for Christ.

In the meantime, a source at the Prosecutor General's Office who
preferred anonymity told the Russian edition of the Newsweek magazine that the verdict will be not be in favor of the House of the Romanovs' request this time either.

"Of course, they can file a lawsuit again but somewhat later, not
right now," the unnamed official said. "At his moment, Russian society it unready to rehabilitate the Romanovs, the same way it is unready to bury Vladimir Lenin."

Nicholas II has noteworthy popularity with the Russians although
historians say his activity played an immense role in the rise of
Bolshevism in this country.

An Internet project titled 'Russia's Historic Choice in 2008', which was held by the government-run Rossiya TV channel showed that Nicholas II occupies the top position on the list of fifty most influential personalities of Russian history of the past few centuries. Of the 2,739,611 votes cast in the format of the project, he got 739,611 votes.

Joseph Stalin was second with 362,947 votes and Vladimir Lenin, third with 200,434 votes.

Remarkably enough, the last Czar's popularity outstripped that of
Peter I and even the poet Alexander Pushkin, who is largely considered as Russia's national pride and who turned up at the sixth position in the ranking.

On the face of it, a similar poll taken by the liberal Echo of Moscow radio placed Nicholas II to the bottom of the list with a mere 349 votes /1.9%/ compared with 6,542 votes /35.8%/ the audiences gave to Stalin.

"Nicholas II cannot represent the Russian nation or the Russian state as a worthy personality," historian Roy Medvedev told Echo of Moscow. "He was one of the causes that unleashed the revolution in Russia and from the angle of view of a historian he cannot claim as big an attention as this one."

The last Russian Czar belonged to the dynasty that ruled Russia for 04 years, and some of the imperial government officials who had a good personal knowledge of him believed that his personal qualities made him least of all eligible for being the absolute ruler of a huge empire.

On the one hand, he sought to achieve social and political
stabilization along with keeping up the age-old class and government
structures. On the other, the policy of industrialization he pursued -- some sources indicated the output of industrially manufactured products quadrupled during his reign -- led up to huge social and proprietary gaps among the Russians.

World War I exposed in bold relief all the follies of the Czarist
governmental system.

The Court was plagued by various charlatans and spiritualists at the beginning of the 20th century. One of them, Grigory Rasputin, installed himself as an eminent sorcerer with his ability to stop bleedings of the hemophilic Crown Prince Alexis.

Rasputin's explosively controversial personality played a decisive
role in the loss of prestige and popularity by Nicholas II.

The last Czar abdicated peacefully and without bloodshed March 2,
1917. The Provisional Government that replaced him and that mostly
consisted of pro-Western nobility and industrialists was wiped out by the Bolshevik revolution seven months later.