Russia Closes a Chapter in Its History As an Empress Is Finally Laid To Rest
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ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Surrounded by one of the largest gatherings of her descendants on Russian soil since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the mother of Tsar Nicholas II was buried in the Romanov crypt yesterday, 78 years after her death. As cannonfire boomed across St. Petersburg’s Neva River, the dowager empress Maria Fyodorovna was lowered into a white sarcophagus to lie beside her husband, Tsar Alexander III, ending a week of solemn commemorations that began when her remains were exhumed in her native Denmark.
The ceremony marked both the fulfillment of the tsarina’s desire to be buried in the country she was forced to flee in 1919 and another step in Russia’s struggle to confront its troubled past.
“It has been a great feeling of closure for the family to have the empress finally brought back to Russia and laid next to her husband,” Prince Andrew Romanov, one of the most senior members of Russia’s former royal family, said.
But as the 69 members of the Romanov family filed past the tsarina’s sarcophagus to throw soil over her coffin, some may have been thinking of the future of what was once one of the world’s most powerful dynasties. Over the 16 years since communism collapsed, two goals gave purpose to a scattered and divided family: the funeral of Nicholas II and his family, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918, and the reburial of empress Maria Fyodorovna.
Both have now been achieved, and one felt the sense of the end of an era as the family began to pack its bags in St. Petersburg’s Astoria Hotel last night. A gathering like this will probably not happen again. The oldest Romanovs are in their 80s and family representatives said they were unlikely to return to Russia.
A younger generation will have to carve out a new role for the Romanovs.
The Romanovs, whose gilded carriages were once the envy of other royal houses in Europe, traveled through the streets of St. Petersburg virtually unnoticed in Russia’s equivalent of a National Express coach.
In a correction to our report on Wednesday, it was King George V, not Edward VII, who sent a ship to rescue his aunt Maria Fyodorovna in 1919 following the Bolshevik revolution.
