spbtimes 19june98

State Addresses Burial Conflicts

By Alice Lagnado STAFF WRITER Photo by Sergey Grachev

For the first time since burial plans were announced in February, the government has made statements which clearly indicate its unhappiness with the stance church leaders have made on the July 17 funeral ceremony for Russia's last tsar, Interfax reported Wednesday.

"Of course it would be desirable that this event was on as big a scale as possible, but the way it will be reflects the state of our society, the country, the moral and spiritual state of its citizens," Interfax reported Viktor Aksyuchits, adviser to First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, as saying.

The government appears keen to justify the messy wrangling on all sides that has taken over the event in recent weeks.

"It's clear we haven't completely cured ourselves of many decades of totalitarianism, but the act of the funeral itself is more important than what form it takes," Aksyuchits said. "The main thing is that the funeral is not so pompous but reverential and pious."

He also referred to the split between the church here and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which does not believe in the authenticity of the bones.

He said the Holy Synod's decision was partly based on "the misgivings of the Moscow patriarchy, that if the patriarchy supports both the identification of the bones and the burial, then a number of parishes will go over to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad."

The church does not officially admit this might be a reason, stressing instead the genetic testing of the tsar's remains.

"I'm no genetics expert, but as far as I know there should be three experts [to conduct tests]," said Andrei Chizhov, spokesman for the Metropolitan Vladimir of St. Petersburg and Ladozhsky, in an interview Wednesday.

Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko did not wade into the murky waters of the church's participation during his visit this week to St. Petersburg, instead reassuring his audience that at least some money for the burial would come through.

"Because of the country's pensions and pay debt problems, even for this sort of ceremony, we should take into account financial considerations," he said, according to Interfax. "So the financial help we do give will not be great."

Despite the government's attempts to smooth over an embarrassing muddle of pre-ceremony confusion, numerous indications remain that the funeral may come off as a relatively graceless affair.

Not least among the snags is the fact that the last tsar will be transported to his final resting place by Aeroflot, which still retains its Soviet symbol of a hammer and sickle within a pair of wings.

The tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets has dubbed the event "the 20th century's strangest funeral," because of the announced absences of both President Boris Yeltsin and Patriarch Alexy II, as well as the continued squabbling between Romanov family members.

"The likelihood is that Russia will never again bury a tsar," Reuters reported the Moskovsky Komsomolets article as saying. "It's the last burial of the last emperor, even if he had abdicated. But we are unable to bury even the last one on an appropriate level."

Such blazing critiques of the burial preparations have been notably lacking in St. Petersburg's local newspapers, which have focused their attention on Peter and Paul Fortress' money problems.

Only Romanov relatives and very high-level visitors will be able to remain in the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul - which holds a maximum of about 150 - during the ceremony. The city's burial commission has scrapped a plan to put large television screens outside for the benefit of other guests.

Who these guests will be is slowly becoming clearer. About 45 members of the Romanov dynasty will attend, according to a statement to Interfax by the leader of the city's burial commission, Ivan Artsishevsky, on Tuesday. They will stay at the Astoria, the pre-Revolutionary hotel on St. Isaac's Square, which in October 1917 was stormed and taken over by soldiers of the Red Guard.

Artsishevsky also announced that members of the German and French royal families will attend, joining Britain's Prince Michael of Kent.