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"Old bones, new history, reshape national myths" |
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Monday, 10 October 2005 11:00 |
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Letter from Russia: Old bones, new history, reshape national myths "...Putin has stood accused of seeking to reclaim czarist splendor, if not tradition, for his own Kremlin. He has restored the imperial double-headed eagle as Russia's national symbol and revived the practice of martial parades on the Kremlin's Cathedral Square. But it was his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, who started it. Yeltsin ordered the reinterment of Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov czars, in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg in 1998. It was a moment of repentance and, for Yeltsin, one of paradox, since as a regional Communist leader in Sverdlovsk he had ordered the razing of the house where Nicholas and his family were slain in 1918. The restoration of the Romanovs is not over. Next year, Nicholas's mother and the wife of Czar Aleksandr III, Maria Feodorovna, will be reburied in the same cathedral...."
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