Burying the Czar

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 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. Watching the television clips, I wondered what was actually being buried here, and decided that it was more likely bolshevism than czarism. But this wasn’t the proper burial for either one.

The killing of the czar and his family was a typical Bolshevik act. The Jacobins wanted to kill Louis XVI in the same summary fashion (though they probably wouldn’t have included the w...