RUSSIA GIVES ITS LAST CZAR ROYAL FUNERAL.

Byline: Michael Wines The New York Times

The Russians buried Czar Nicholas II on Friday in true imperial fashion, beneath a ceiling of cherubim peeking from clouds, in a cathedral of mountainous oak and linden carvings sheathed in gold, and among the white marble tombs of the czars who bestrode his empire for three centuries.

And they buried him in the style of modern Russia, too: under imitation marble markers because there is no money for genuine stone, in a cathedral plundered by revolutionaries decades ago and half-restored today, and at the center of enduring conflicts over whether the nation was venerating a monarch, a tyrant or even a fraud.

President Boris Yeltsin had planned the ceremony in the hope that it would bury those conflicts, too, and reunite the present with a past that its old Soviet rulers had suppressed and rewritten for 75 years. By its end, he had scored a personal triumph with a brief but powerful speech about reconciliation in a Russia forever split into ``us and them'' - czars and peasants, Communists and workers, haves and have-nots. But his ultimate goal seemed still out of reach.

The two Russias briefly came together inside a thick-walled fortress on the bank of the Neva River, where the remains of Nicholas, most of his family and four of his servants were lowered into a single white crypt in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral.

It was 80 years to the day since the imperial family and its retinue had been shot, doused with acid and dumped into a pit on a Ural Mountains road on the personal order of the Communist leader who had seized the czar's kingdom - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

A state secret

The town where they died - Yekaterinburg, named after Nicholas' ancestor Catherine I - was renamed Sverdlovsk, after Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik who signed the telegram ordering the deaths. The whereabouts of the bodies was tantamount to a state secret until the Soviet Union collapsed and Yeltsin ordered them exhumed in 1991.

Friday's somber service laid to rest all but two of the executed Romanovs: the czar's heir, Alexei, and a daughter, Marie. Their bodies are believed to have been burned and buried near their parents, but have not been found.

Yeltsin was first among 400 dignitaries and members of the Romanov family, the imperial dynasty that ended with Nicholas, who watched silently from among the tombs of past czars and czarinas during the elaborate, 90-minute service.

Beneath enormous chandeliers in the brick-and-stone church, a choir sang as Russian Orthodox priests robed in gold waved balls of burning incense over the Caucasian-oak coffins, topped with crosses, that were arranged on a pedestal in the building's center.

Then, one by one, the undersized coffins were lifted, carried into an adjacent room and stacked in the freshly dug vault - the remains of the servants on the bottom, then the family and finally the czar himself atop them. They were nine in all: Alouzy Tropp, the czar's valet; Eugene Botkin, the royal physician; Ivan Kharitonov, a cook; Anna Demidova, a lady-in-waiting; then three of the czar's four daughters - Anastasia, Olga and Tatiana - and Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra. The final two coffins were draped in yellow banners bearing the imperial spread eagle, which were removed for historical safekeeping.

19-gun salute

More than 50 surviving members of the Romanov family slowly entered the room, each throwing a handful of white sand on the coffins in a traditional Russian gesture of farewell. To the peal of cathedral bells that Czar Nicholas had ordered installed 95 years ago, cannons fired 19 earsplitting blasts - two short of the normal 21-gun salute, because Nicholas had abdicated his throne before his death - and the service ended.

Yeltsin's appearance was both an act of repentance and a moment of supreme irony. As the Communist Party boss in the Ural Mountains city of Sverdlovsk, he issued an order in July 1977 to raze the house in whose cellar the executions were carried out. Soviet leaders feared then that the home might become a shrine of sorts for those who resisted Communist rule.

In an emotional speech Friday, Yeltsin said it was time for the Russian people to confront fully what he called ``one of the most shameful episodes in our history.''

``Those who committed this crime are as guilty as are those who approved of it for decades,'' he said. ``We are all guilty. It is impossible to lie to ourselves by justifying senseless cruelty on political grounds. The shooting of the Romanov family is a result of an uncompromising split in Russian society into `us' and `them.' The results of this split can be seen even now.''

Yeltsin's remarks seemed directed mostly at the Communist regime that executed the czar in July 1918 and controlled Russia for 73 more years. But he did not spare the Romanov dynasty, whose members could rule Russia with an iron hand and scant regard for the lives of their subjects.

``Many glorious pages of Russian history were connected with the Romanovs,'' he said, ``but with this name is connected one of the most bitter lessons: Any attempt to change life through violence is condemned to failure.

``We must end the century which has been an age of blood and violence in Russia with repentance and peace, regardless of political views, ethnic or religious belonging.''

Justice for tyrant?

Yeltsin could have been talking about the funeral itself. Conceived as an act of reconciliation, it had become such a political and religious battleground in recent weeks that the president himself had said he would not attend it. Yeltsin relented only Thursday, barely 24 hours before the service was to begin.

The Communist Party, the major force in both houses of Parliament, attacked the ceremony as undue justice for a tyrant who was justifiably executed. Unspoken was the concern that the next burial might be that of the executor, Lenin, who doggedly clings to his honored spot in a display case in Red Square.

And the Russian Orthodox Church refused to endorse the funeral on the grounds that the bones being interred might not be those of the czar. The church is mending relations with a splinter sect, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which insists that it has the only true remains: a finger from the czar's wife or one of his daughters.

The Orthodox Church agreed to conduct Friday's service, but its priests never mentioned the victims by name. Its position has profoundly influenced ordinary Russians, many of whom now agree that the remains are frauds, though most experts accept the DNA evidence identifying the remains. The distrust has led to an exodus of political support for the service that only Yeltsin's appearance managed to stem.

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color) President Boris Yeltsin and his wife, Naina, pay their respects during Friday's burial ceremony for Czar Nicholas II and his family in St. Petersburg, Russia.

(2) The coffins of the czar, his family and four servants rests in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral.

Anatoly Maltsev/Associated Press