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The Russian media showed no such restraint. In the days preceding the funeral, the country's largest privately owned network, NTV, ran a series of programs and discussions that all but canonized Nicholas and endorsed autocracy. His Russia, NTV told its viewers, was a country of "order and prosperity." One young historian argued that Nicholas was a statesman of almost supernatural insight, though he gave himself away when he went on to suggest that Rasputin--the Czarina's "spiritual adviser" whose scandalous reputation did so much to discredit the Czar--was given a raw deal. The guiding logic of the programs seemed to be that if the Bolsheviks hated Nicholas, he must have been a wonderful man.
In fact, Nicholas II is viewed by most historians as a mediocre personality, deeply flawed and sometimes sinister. Popular unrest was ruthlessly suppressed by his army in 1905 and again in 1917, until the troops themselves mutinied that February. The Czar presided over a court and political system so byzantine that several of his ministers were assassinated by "revolutionaries" who were in reality secret police, and a Prime Minister, Sergei Witte, suspected until the end of his life that the identities of those behind a plot to kill him were known to the Czar. These defects were erased in most people's minds by the manner of the Romanovs' death: the massacre in the cellar of the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg, the 12 bullet holes in the body of Alexei--"a beautiful child," one of the executioners recalled--and the way some of the women who hid behind cushions were finished off with bayonets. The killers took a certain pride in their work: in a 1964 interview taped for secret Communist Party archives, one of the execution party jovially referred to the corpses as golubchiki--the little dears.
Many networks--as well as a site on the Web--offered Russians live coverage of the events. But life in St. Petersburg went on as usual. The center of the city is turning into a smaller version of Moscow, with Gucci shops and bodyguards, hotels with London prices and unofficial landmarks of the new order--like the spot on Nevsky Prospekt, the city's most famous shopping street, where a top government official was gunned down last year in a highly professional contract hit. As the funeral proceeded, city streets were busy, shops and offices were open as usual and few people seemed touched by the event. "I'll catch it on the news," said Lyudmilla Petrova, a shop worker on Nevsky Prospekt. Tanya, a slender 19-year-old in a miniskirt waiting by a chauffeured Mercedes for her businessman boyfriend, said she had not missed a single TV program on the Romanovs all week. "It was so sad," she said, "but it doesn't seem like it happened here--it's like a miniseries." The muted response to the funeral, in political circles and on the street, suggests that Russians have not yet found a way of coming to terms with their past. The real question is whether they are even trying anymore.