Susan Buckland: Russia's last emperor

COMMENT

Poor Tsar Nicholas II. Nearly a century after he and his family were murdered in the cellar of a house in Siberia, scientists are arguing afresh about whether the bones laid to rest in St Petersburg in July 1998 really are those of the last Russian emperor.

American scientists from Stanford University say the bones dug from a bog near Yekaterinburg in 1991, and subsequently identified by British geneticist Peter Gill in 1994, may not be those of the Romanov emperor and his family. But on what evidence, asks Dr Gill, who states that he has matched DNA in an adult set of bones with relatives of the Tsar's, and also that he has matched the DNA profile of three children and one adult, tentatively identified as their mother the Empress Alexandra, with a living sample provided by Prince Philip, Alexandra's great-nephew.

Not long ago in St Petersburg I had a guide who looked uncannily like Lenin. He won't be surprised by this latest question mark raised over the remains of the last Tsar. When he showed me the tomb of Nicholas II in St Petersburg's Saint Peter and Paul Cathedral, he said I should not assume that this drawn-out argument relating to Russian imperial history was closed.

Sergey Yablochkin was his name. He approached life with a kind of world-weary objectivity. I exclaimed how splendid were the canals, that the church domes gleamed like golden onions against the blue sky, that Count Stroganov lived in the most elegant of palaces and that the sunbathers stripped to their scants on the banks of the Neva, despite passing ice drifts, must be made of stern stuff.

On each occasion Sergey would look pleased for a second but then he would remind me of the dark side of life and refer to some latest problem weighing down his people. Certain people had become very rich in post-communist Russia but many of his friends hadn't been paid for months. His attitude, I needed to understand, was shaped by a city that has been struggling for generations.

The first struggle of the imperial city was getting it off the ground more than 300 years before. Its creator, Peter the Great, was determined to replicate the best of Europe's cities. Thousands of serfs slogged on the swampy banks of the Neva to turn his daring vision into reality. Then, to get his showcase off the marsh, Peter taxed everything that moved, from the beards of mourning pall bearers to the coffins they bore.

The 18th-century empress Catherine the Great (rumoured to have had more lovers than a serf had hot dinners) was a lover of the learning and the arts and embellished Peter's city with added cultural and artistic riches. Many are now part of the spectacular collection at the Hermitage Museum.

Sergey, an art historian, had worked out that it would take three and a third years to give 30 seconds to each of the 3.5 million pieces on display at the Hermitage. He accepted my "mother of all museums" description with good grace. After all, the Hermitage occupies about 1050 rooms of the Romanov's opulent winter palace and leaves Buckingham Palace far behind.

St Petersburg's golden years as the imperial seat of Russia ended with the revolution that replaced the rule of the Tsar with communism. Then came World War II and the infamous, three-year siege of St Petersburg by the Germans during which nearly a million Russians were killed or starved to death.

I noticed how many of St Petersburg's architectural gems were crying out for a good scrub when I was there. But despite the sustained battering for much of last century, she still rides like a beautiful queen above the decades of struggle.

Flakes of snow were falling when Sergey took me to the Alexander Palace. It was there, in 1917, that Nicholas II and all his family were arrested. Now, following the interment of bones in St. Petersburg in 1998, many, including philosophical Sergey, believe his earthly remains are home again in the city where they belong and where the last Tsar once ruled in imperial splendour over 100 million subjects.