The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

gudkov's and his colleagues' research suggested that no message about the present and the future could capture the hearts and minds of Russians, who now had their eyes set firmly on the past. A year after failing to produce an idea for the future, Yeltsin addressed the past, finally introducing the concept of national penitence. On July 17, 1998, he took an apparently impulsive, unplanned trip to St. Petersburg to speak at the reburial of the remains of Russia's last czar and his family. It was the eightieth anniversary of the day when Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, their five children, and four other people had been executed in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, where they had been held for several months.

After the execution, the house had served as a museum of the Revolution, and later as a minor administrative building. Details of what had happened to Nicholas and his family were never made public. No one knew where they were buried. Soviet schoolchildren learned only that the last Russian czar had abdicated and the October Revolution had triumphed. To ensure that all memory of the execution was erased, in the 1970s the Party ordered the house razed, and Yeltsin, then the local Party boss, made sure the order was carried out. Local lore maintained an uncertain memory of the execution, however, and in 1991 remains that were thought to belong to the czar and his family were exhumed. Genetic analysis took seven years—the science of testing remains was just then coming into being —but in the end the remains were positively identified as belonging to the czar, his wife, and three of the five children. Now they would receive a proper Russian Orthodox burial.

Yeltsin entered a St. Petersburg cathedral, flanked by the local governor and Nemtsov, who had last chaired the government commission on identifying the remains. "Esteemed countrymen," said Yeltsin,

today is a historic day for Russia. It has been eighty years since the day the last Russian emperor and his family were killed. For many years we concealed this horrific crime, but the time has come to tell the truth. The Yekaterinburg massacre is one of the most shameful pages of our history. As we bury the remains of these innocent victims, we seek redemption for the sins of our fathers. The blame belongs with those who committed this act of violence and with those who, for decades, justified their actions. The blame belongs with all of us. We have no right to lie to ourselves, using political adjectives to justify senseless cruelty. The execution of the Romanov family resulted from an irreparable split in Russian society, into "us" and "them." We are still suffering from the consequences of that split. By burying the remains of the victims of the Yekaterinburg tragedy we commit, first and foremost, an act of human justice. It symbolizes the unification of our people and the redemption of our shared guilt. We are all responsible for preserving the historical memory of our people. That is why I had to

be here today. It is my duty as a man and as the president to be here. I bow my head before the victims of merciless killing.

Yeltsin lowered his head, and after a moment of silence the church choir stepped in. Rather, this was what happened on national television.¹⁶ In reality, Yeltsin continued for another two minutes:

As we build a new Russia, we must find our footing in its history. The Romanov* name is written on some of the glorious pages of our fatherland's history, but this name is also connected to one of history's most bitter lessons: any attempt to change our life through violence is doomed. It is our duty to bring closure to this century, which for Russia became a century of blood and lawlessness, through repentance and reconciliation, regardless of our political views, religious belief, and membership in an ethnic group. History is giving us a chance. As we enter the third millennium, we must do this, for the sake of those alive today and for the sake of the generations to come. Let us remember the innocent victims of

hatred and violence. May they rest in peace.¹⁷

Whether in its truncated or full version, it was a magnificent speech, all the more striking because Yeltsin, for all his charisma, had never been a particularly inspiring speaker.

Lyosha was thirteen when the czar and his family were reinterred. Four years earlier, he had read a book about the family and the execution and had decided that he hated the Bolsheviks for killing children. His mother had hidden away her desktop bust of Lenin a couple of years earlier, and had started bringing home books like this one. When school started again in September 1998, Lyosha's entire class discussed Yeltsin's speech. They concluded that now, after the ceremony, the Soviet era was finally over.