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Thousands of
Russians commemorate murdered last czar's family with religious procession
Tens of thousands of Russians marked the 90th anniversary of
the slaying of the country's royal family with a religious procession Thursday,
starting out before dawn from the site where the last czar and his wife and
children were gunned down in a basement room.
Pilgrims from across the country have flocked to the Ural
Mountains city of Yekaterinburg to commemorate the death of the Czar Nicholas
II and his family, whose murder months after the Bolshevik Revolution helped
usher in seven decades of Communist rule.
Many made their way from a church built on the site of the
house where the family was secretly shot to death by a Bolshevik firing squad
in the early hours of July 17, 1918, to a wooded area where their bodies were
deposited. It is now home to a church and memorials.
Priests held icons aloft, and women in head scarves carried
children or towed them along.
Russian media said 30,000 to 50,000 people took part in the
procession.
"For me, the feeling is sadness for what happened and
nostalgia for what we lost," one pilgrim, Georgy Nekrasov, said on
state-run Rossiya television. Its news anchor described the killings as
"one of the most terrible crimes in the history of our fatherland."
Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept
Russia, and he and his family were detained and taken to Yekaterinburg, 1,500
kilometers (900 miles) east of Moscow, and held in the house where they were
later shot along with servants.
The Russian Orthodox Church made them saints in 2000, amid a
continuing church revival following the collapse of the atheist Soviet Union in
1991. The Russian czars were closely linked to the church in the centuries
before the Romanov dynasty's demise.
The remains of Nicholas, Empress Alexandra and three
daughters — Olga, Tatyana and Anastasia — were unearthed in Yekaterinburg in
1991. In 1998, they were reburied in the imperial capital, St. Petersburg, even
though the church has expressed doubts about the identification of the remains
made by scientists.
In declarations voiced in June and repeated Wednesday,
Russian investigators said DNA tests show that bone and tooth shards found
nearby a year ago belonged to the other children: Nicholas II's 13-year-old
heir, Crown Prince Alexei, and his sister, Grand Duchess Maria.
In rulings that human rights activists say fit in with the
Kremlin's reluctance to confront the crimes of Russia's Soviet past, courts
have thwarted efforts by descendants of the Romanov dynasty for official
recognition of the slain czar and his family as victims of politically
motivated Communist-era oppression.
During his eight years as president, Vladimir Putin, now the
prime minister, turned to Russian Orthodox and czarist-era symbolism to rebuild
Russian pride. But he and his government also fed on and fueled nostalgia for
the Soviet Union's might and glossed over the crimes of the Soviet state.
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