RUSSIA took a step closer to rehabilitating its Royal Family yesterday after prosecutors were ordered to review the murder of Tsar Nicholas II.

A court in Moscow granted an appeal by a descendant of the Romanov dynasty against a refusal to declare the Royal Family victims of political repression.

Tverskoi district court ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office to reconsider the case, ruling that its rejection of an application to exonerate the Tsar was illegal. The appeal was brought by Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, who lives in Spain and whose claim to be the Tsar’s legal heir is disputed by other members of the Romanov family.

The court had upheld the official view that the execution of Nicholas II and his family in 1918 was unauthorised rather than an act of state policy. Moscow’s highest court later ordered a fresh hearing after representatives of the Grand Duchess unearthed documents that they claimed showed that the Bolshevik regime had sanctioned the killings.

Boris Yeltsin, then the President. described the deaths as “a monstrous crime” when the Romanovs’ remains were reburied in St Petersburg in 1998, in what he said was an act of atonement for Russians’ shared guilt. The country’s judicial system has never acknowledged that a political crime took place, which would open the door to rehabilitation under legislation to clear the names of victims of Soviet repression.

German Lukyanov, a lawyer representing the Grand Duchess, said: “We disagree with the position of the Prosecutor General’s Office that the Royal Family fell victim to common criminals but were not victims of political persecution.

“We think that the court’s decision is a step on the road to justice and legality in our country. The question of rehabilitating the Tsar is, above all, one for the State, to demonstrate that Bolshevism has been removed from our soil.”

Supporters of the campaign have been encouraged by President Putin’s efforts to reconcile Russia with its bloody history. The return from Denmark in September of the remains of Tsaritsa Maria Feodorovna, Nicholas II’s mother, was a personal initiative of Mr Putin.

Alexander Zakatov, a senior adviser to Maria Vladimirovna, told The Times that rehabilitation was a question of “historical justice and morality”. He insisted she was not seeking to restore the monarchy in Russia.

“The murder of the Imperial family should be recognised not only as an historical fact but also a legal one. We know that nobody is against it on the side of the President,” he said.

Sceptics believe that the case has as much to do with establishing a claim to former royal palaces as with setting the record straight. The Russian Orthodox Church, which canonised Nicholas II and his immediate family in 2000, also suggested yesterday that it was part of a feud over the Tsar’s true successor.

Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 shortly before Lenin swept to power in the Communist Revolution. The Tsar and his wife, Alexandra, four daughters and one son were killed by firing squad on July 17, 1918.

END OF A RUSSIAN DYNASTY

In 2000 he was canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church, which declared that he and his family had died as martyrs

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