Translated material
Hereditary defect
The Supreme Court refused to rehabilitate Nicholas II
The heirs of the last Tsar Nicholas II, shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918, have little hope of repentance from the current Russian government for the actions of their predecessors . At least yesterday, the judicial panel of the Supreme Court of Russia determined “to recognize Nikolai Romanov and members of his family as not subject to rehabilitation,” which the head of the imperial house, Grand Duchess Maria Romanova, has been seeking for almost two years. Representatives of the royal family, however, still have one last attempt to challenge this decision in the Presidium of the Supreme Court. However, the Grand Duchess’s lawyer, German Lukyanov, believes that the time has come to show the whole world that in post-Soviet Russia, members of the imperial family are “deprived of access to justice.”According to Mr. Lukyanov, the domestic judicial system simply “ignores the arguments and evidence” of the plaintiff, relying entirely on the documents presented by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation. In particular, during a court hearing yesterday, a representative of the prosecutor’s office, Inessa Kovalevskaya, said that the criminal case into the murder of the royal family has been ongoing since 1993, but no court documents “on the execution of the Romanovs” have been found during this time. The “numerous letters, telegrams and memories of eyewitnesses” found during the investigation, according to her, cannot replace the official document confirming that Nicholas II and his family were convicted and sentenced to death.
According to Ms. Kovalevskaya, requests to both state and private archives not only in Russia, but also in the USA, Denmark, and Great Britain did not bring results. “The collected materials enabled the investigation to come to the categorical conclusion that no official decision was made to execute the Romanovs,” she said.
The prosecutor's office believes that rehabilitation implies release from charges, and since the members of the royal family “were not accused of anything,” they are not subject to rehabilitation. The fact that Nicholas II with his wife and five children, as well as persons close to the family, were shot by representatives of the executive branch is considered by the prosecutor’s office to be “excess of authority.” Apparently, after a 40-minute meeting, members of the judicial panel of the Supreme Court came to the same conclusion.
In a conversation with a Vremya Novostey correspondent, German Lukyanov argued that the judicial authorities turned a blind eye to the arguments of the plaintiff’s lawyers, in particular to the statement that the decision to execute the royal family “was made by the bodies that at that moment were endowed with judicial powers.” “The Bolsheviks took all power,” said the lawyer. - The courts could not then make decisions about execution. They could impose a maximum sentence of two years in prison or five. And the decision to execute could only be made by the highest bodies of state power.” The verdict on the royal family, according to Mr. Lukyanov, is essentially contained in numerous other documents. “For example, the decision to transport and detain the family of Nicholas II in the notorious Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg was approved by the Central Election Commission, the highest authority at that time,” the lawyer said, “isn’t this repression?” However, “belonging to the Russian imperial house” of the executed family serves, according to the lawyer of the Romanov family, as a basis for rehabilitation, since then this fact already “served as the basis for the use of repression against these individuals.”
Let us recall that, judging by archival documents declassified to date, no one has ever taken personal responsibility for the murder of the wife and children of the last autocrat. In the heat of the revolution, the decision to shoot the Tsar without any trial was made by the executive body - the Ural Regional Council. A few hours later, the decision to shoot the former tsar was approved by the Central Executive Committee, chaired by Vladimir Lenin. Moreover, both decisions concerned only Nicholas II himself.
Representatives of the royal family call the decision of the Supreme Court panel nothing less than “rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks” and intend to continue the fight - first in the Presidium of the Supreme Court in a supervisory manner, and in the event of another fiasco, in Strasbourg. “I’m an optimist, first we need to go to the presidium,” German Lukyanov told Vremya Novostey. “And then we have the right to appeal to the European Court.”
However, the investigation into the murder of the royal family is far from over. Thus, the head of the investigative group of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Solovyov, told ITAR-TASS yesterday that at the end of this week Russian and American experts will begin a genetic examination of the remains discovered near Yekaterinburg in the spring of 2007 and allegedly belonging to the son of Nicholas II, Tsarevich Alexei and one of his daughters to Grand Duchess Maria Romanova. As Mr. Soloviev said, the examination will be carried out immediately in Moscow, Yekaterinburg and the USA, which is due to the extremely poor condition of the material found. Russian specialists intend to use new methods for identifying remains. And in the United States, genetic research will be carried out on the basis of a military laboratory, which has long been involved in the identification of military personnel of the first and second world wars and has “rich experience in the study of DNA with poorly preserved remains.” An anthropological study that preceded the genetic analysis procedure showed that the found fragments belonged to individuals matching the age and gender of the prince and Grand Duchess Maria. In addition, in favor of the fact that the found remains most likely belong to the heirs of the royal family, according to Mr. Solovyov, data from the archives of the Russian special services confirm that there were no other executions in the place where they were discovered.
In addition to a thorough study of the materials, according to Mr. Solovyov, the study of documents that can explain “who made the decision to execute and how everything happened” will continue. “Now some new data has appeared, but, in my opinion, the picture of this tragedy will not change significantly,” noted a representative of the prosecutor’s office.