Tsar's mother comes home

RUSSIA - A 31-gun salute rippled across St Petersburg's Tsarist-era skyline yesterday as Russians reclaimed a part of their history that they were told to forget for 70 years.

In an exercise branded as the righting of a historical injustice, the mother of the last Tsar, Empress-Dowager Maria Fedorovna, was reburied in Russia's former imperial capital 87 years after she fled the country in fear of her life.

Hers is the last body expected to be interred in the cathedral of St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress. Her original funeral took place in Denmark in 1928 where she died in exile and was buried, 1600km away from the remains of her husband, Tsar Alexander III, and son, Tsar Nicholas II, against her final wishes.

Maria Fedorovna chose to live out her last years in Denmark because it was there that she was born as Princess Dagmar in 1847 before marrying into the Russian royal family, converting to the Russian Orthodox Church and learning Russian.

President Vladimir Putin pushed for her remains to be posthumously repatriated in order to draw a line under one of the country's most tragic episodes - the murder of her son, Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II.

He stepped down in 1917 as revolution swept Russia and was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad with his family in a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. Remains thought to be those of the Tsar, his wife and three of his five children were found in 1991 and laid to rest in St Petersburg in 1998.

For the Romanovs the ceremony was an emotional point of closure that they hope will foster a renewed sense of respect for an institution whose reputation was systemically destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

For the Kremlin it was the latest in a long line of reburials of Tsarist-era figures that are part of Russia's quest to forge itself a new identity that draws on its entire past as opposed to selective highlights.

After mourners, including descendants of the Romanovs, European royals, and government officials, had finished sprinkling earth on her coffin and Maria Fedorovna was laid to rest alongside her husband and her son in the Romanovs' family vault, a 31-gun salute thundered across St Petersburg.

Prince Michael of Kent, who bears a striking resemblance to her murdered son, said her reburial was a moment of catharsis for Russia.

- INDEPENDENT