Burying the czar
Walzer, Michael
THIS PAST summer the bones of Czar Nicholas II and his family, dug out of the basement in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg in 1918), were solemnly reburied in St. Petersburg according to the rites of...
...Suppose the czar had been fairly tried in 1918—publicly charged with specific crimes, defended by attorneys of his own choosing before a jury of his (new) peers...
...And perhaps President Yeltsin would not be popularly known in Russia today as Czar Boris...
...In fact, they weren't ready to treat anyone like a fellow citizen in the democratic sense of that word—as an equal member of the sovereign people, with full rights to participate (and full security while participating) in the making of political decisions...
...Watching the television clips, I wondered what was actually being buried here, and decided that it was more likely bolshevism than czarism...
...Petersburg prayed for all the "innocent victims of the Bolshevik revolution," the dead czar is not the best surrogate for the real victims of bolshevism—not for the Ukrainian peasantry, or the oppressed nations of the Baltic, the Crimea, and central Russia, or the whole of the political opposition, or the Jewish intelligentsia...
...When Stalin turned on the Old Bolsheviks, however, he decided on trials—trials so foul (I won't try to describe them here) that noone who watched them or read about them can hear the words "political justice" without wincing...
...Perhaps, after trials and truth-telling, it would not have been as easy as it was in the 1920s to create a new political apparatus even more brutal than the old one...
...What might have happened after all that...
...It is not . . . nothing...
...In Russia there hasn't yet been anything like a full encounter, a public reckoning with communist crimes...
...Petersburg according to the rites of the Orthodox Church, with Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic and former Communist boss of Sverdlovsk, in attendance: the nearest thing to a state funeral...
...Any new political regime is decisively shaped by the way it deals with the old regime...
...This refusal of the hard revolutionaries in France and Russia to treat the former ruler as a fellow citizen was an ominous sign of things to come...
...The great reluctance to bring the Communist tyrants of Eastern Europe to trial after 1989 probably has a great deal to do with that memory...
...But this wasn't the proper burial for either one...
...And so the killing of the czar was the first of many summary executions...
...Perhaps a more decent, a more open and tolerant, politics would have developed...
...Moreover, this enemy was as dangerous in captivity as in the field: so long as he was alive, so long as any possible heir was alive, the revolution was in danger...
...Not even 8 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 their closest associates...
...he probably didn't have a stronger appreciation of bourgeois justice than Lenin and the other revolutionary leaders...
...The killing of the czar and his family was a typical Bolshevik act...
...For the moment, though, all that the Russians have managed is this funeral...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...
...A fantasy, no doubt, but possibly a useful fantasy, so let me continue it...
...At least here, in the pages of Dissent, these are the ones whom we should remember...
...Suppose that in the end the czar and some of his henchmen (but not all his relatives) had been found guilty and punished, the czar himself executed and buried—a convicted criminal, not a murdered martyr...
...The Jacobin/Bolshevik argument against a trial was that the ruler of the old regime wasn't a criminal but an "enemy of the people...
...And yet...
...Though the Orthodox priest in St...
...First of all, there might never have been a reburial like the one we have just seen...
...Suppose that a Truth Commission had been set up to investigate the whole repressive apparatus of the old regime, with former prisoners testifying, and also members of the secret police, in public hearings...
...The Jacobins wanted to kill Louis XVI in the same summary fashion (though they probably wouldn't have included the whole family), but they were prevented by the Gironde, France's Mensheviks, who insisted on a public trial...
...In Russia, Trotsky favored a trial, mostly, I think, because he imagined himself in the role of prosecuting attorney...
...There was, in any case, no point in according him the rights of a citizen: kings and czars are not citizens...
...But I would have preferred that Nicholas's bones had been handed over to some old friends or distant relatives, if there are any, for a more ordinary burial...
...I suspect that it will come, in COMMENTS & OPINIONS the history books and the schools, in the politics of monuments and museums, if not in the courts...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
