Yeltsin, in short, faced more by way of elite resistance to relocating the Romanovs than to doing the same with Lenin. But this time he was willing to use his plenary powers to steamroller it and follow his conscience, and without much head-scratching about mass reaction—Kremlin pollsters seem not to have surveyed the population. It was decided in February 1998 to lay the royals to rest in the chapel of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. The stout-walled fort on the bank of the Neva had been the burial place for all tsars from Peter the Great in 1725 to Alexander III, Nicholas’s father, in 1894. Yeltsin, having said he would not attend out of deference to the patriarch, changed his mind twenty-four hours before the observance—setting himself up once again to catch his political competition short. Foreign ambassadors, who had planned to stay away unless Yeltsin came, had to make plans on a few hours’ notice. Aleksii boycotted, as did communist spokesmen and Yurii Luzhkov, who was mad that the city of Moscow was not the site.65 The reburial took place on July 17, 1998, the eightieth anniversary of the murders. A church choir sang and twelve white-robed priests and deacons officiated without mentioning the deceased’s names. After the coffins were lowered into a crypt under the floor, more than fifty members of the Romanov family who had flown in for the occasion threw fistfuls of sand on them. Yeltsin said the final rites were an act of atonement and not of vengeance. “The gunning down of the Romanov family was the result of the implacable schism within Russian society into one’s own and the others.” Those who put them to death and those “who justified [this crime] for decades”—and the former first secretary in Sverdlovsk was surely one of them—were equally at fault. “We are all guilty. . . . The burial of the remains . . . is a symbol of the unity of the people and an expiation of our common guilt.”66 A commemoration service was held the same day on the vacant Yekaterinburg lot where Ipat’ev House had stood. A five-cupola Church on the Spilt Blood was to be built as a memorial on the site and consecrated in 2003.
The second Yeltsin administration resembled the first in that the daily grind was about down-to-earth issues of power and policy, especially economic policy, and not primarily about ideas and symbols. Its rhetorical beginning was Yeltsin’s annual address to parliament on March 6, 1997, his first presentation after returning to work. Wanting to get off to a fast start and not to have the scene stolen by Duma deputies, his staff worked with a director of stage plays, Iosif Raikhel’gauz, to plot and rehearse his every step and word on the Kremlin stage. Lights were dimmed in the hall before the president and the chairmen of the two chambers entered from the wings, with a break before Yeltsin’s appearance to draw the crowd’s attention. Were legislators to try to make statements at the end of the speech (none did), Raikhel’gauz was poised to pipe the national anthem over the loudspeakers to drown them out. He also had a teleprompter installed, which Yeltsin ordered removed.67
The talk itself was as alarmist as some of Yeltsin’s jeremiads against the Soviet regime a decade before, only now the choler was directed at
