Relics, Remains, and Revisionism: Narratives of Nicholas II in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

The story of the execution of the ex-Tsar and his family has spawned a vast and diverse literature about the fate of the Romanovs and their significance to Russia. Narratives mutate and multiply. Over the years, from fragments of evidence, writers have fashioned stories of death or survival; of bodies concealed, exhumed, and reburied; of revolutionary justice or ritual murder. The ‘tsarist affair’ is by no means the most significant development in contemporary Russia, yet it epitomizes the fault-lines within its culture. The disputed authenticity of the remains, the conflicting accounts of the death of the Tsar and his entourage, and the controversial decision to canonize the imperial family, indicate profound schisms in contemporary Russia about ways of viewing and making sense of the world. One could characterize these schisms as a set of binary oppositions: post- versus pre-Enlightenment thinking; rationalism versus mysticism; modernity versus archaism. Yet to interpret the figure of Nicholas II simply as a site of competing modernizing and archaizing discourses fails to historicize culture. Perhaps, then, it is more productive to examine the ‘tsarist affair’ through its various narrative forms. These narratives are not strictly historical, in that they often contradict or disregard the evidence; some, indeed, are completely implausible as history to a modern, rational sensibility. In Russia, however, they do seem to make sense to their audiences. What are these narratives? I have identified four which I label generically as, first, the detective story—a mystery resolved by amateur sleuths and forensic medicine. Secondly, the Gothic horror story, complete with becloaked villains, grisly murders, storms and gloomy castles. The third genre is hagiography, including miracle-working icons of the Tsar. Finally, the historical romance—in effect, secular hagiography. Evidently, this conceptualization of the ‘tsarist affair’ derives from Hayden White's concept of the ‘content of the form’. However, White discusses the imposition of story types on ‘a given set or sequence of real events’. The narratives that I discuss in this article impose a story type on both real and fictional events, and therefore function in contemporary Russia as national myths.