As had happened before 1996, Yeltsin was unwilling to chance it. “There was not enough time” to prepare Russia for the move, he said in an interview in 2002, and the social tension raised by holding the referendum or moving Lenin without a vote would have been intolerably high. He pointed out that those still queuing to view the body were mostly pensioners who were raised in Soviet days to revere the founder—“and it is hard to accuse them of anything.”62
A second entombment issue had more of a connection with Yeltsin’s previous life. This one was settled positively, though not without soul-searching and disagreement. The mortal remains in question were those of Russia’s last monarch and his family, executed by Bolshevik riflemen in Yekaterinburg in 1918. The skulls and bones of Nicholas II, his German-born spouse (Alexandra), three of their five children (Olga, Tatyana, and Anastasia), and four royal attendants (a cook, two servants, and a physician) had been exhumed in 1991 from the unmarked forest grave at the village of Koptyaki, north of Yekaterinburg. Yeltsin knew the story only too well, as he had supervised the demolition of the place of their deaths, Ipat’ev House, while Sverdlovsk CPSU boss in 1977. Remorse at his part in the drama gave it an immediacy that the Lenin-in-Red-Square soap opera did not have.63 DNA analysis at the Yekaterinburg morgue by Russian, American, and British laboratories had verified the identities. Predictably, the KPRF, which no longer excused the killings but considered the Romanovs parasites, came out against the project. What was unexpected was that the communists’ political bedfellow was the Orthodox Church. Aleksii II met with Yeltsin twice, in May and June, to express opposition to the burial and spoke out openly against it. He and the Holy Synod thought the DNA evidence less than ironclad, and the relics were under discussion between them and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, a diaspora organization with which the incountry hierarchy was to reintegrate in 2007.64
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 his government. Russia was carrying, he said, “a heavy load of problems,” and there had been no improvement to speak of since the election: “Spinelessness and indifference, unaccountability and incompetence in addressing public issues—this is how Russian government is being assessed today. And one has to confess that this is correct.” Although the state was supposed “to soften the inevitable costs of the transformations” which Russia was in the throes of, “we have not done that.” Yeltsin in 1991 spoke of the transition being about finding and adhering to the pathway leading toward world civilization. He now chose a less cheery metaphor. It was as if Russia after communism was in a river whose fast-flowing waters run crosswise to the line of advance. The boat was “stuck halfway” in this uninviting and unforgiving stream. “We have shoved off from the near shore but continue to flounder midstream in a current of problems [that] carries us along and keeps us from making it to the far shore.”68
Yeltsin did not put forth a spic-and-span approach or methodology for resuming the passage from one shore to the other. The emphasis was on two more measured points. The first was the need to reinvigorate economic reform through a stronger effort to draw the line between the public and the private arenas. Over the five years since the introduction of shock therapy, “the state has not mastered effective methods for regulating the market” and was standing in the way of a resumption of growth. Government, the president complained, “interferes in the economy in areas where it should not be doing that, and in places where it should be doing something it is inactive.” The second moral of the March 6 speech was that national government had to put its own house in order. The executive branch needed fundamental reform and to learn how to coordinate its efforts within a range of duties narrowed down from the all-embracing socialist state. Without that, it would continue to act like a fire brigade, rushing from one minicrisis to the next.69