Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 25, Number 15, April 10, 1998

The Miracle Field in the Land of Fools Roman Bessonov writes from St. Petersburg about the campaign to bury skeletons believed (by some) to belong to the last Romanov Tsar, Nicholas II.

Writer Aleksei N. Tolstoy, illegitimate offspring of the promi- Enforcement Bodies. nent noble family, returned from emigration to Soviet At the dawn of “democratic revolution,” Mr. Tolstoy, Ju- in the 1920s and soon became colloquially famous as the “Red nior and Mr. Artsishevsky were seen in the environs of St. Count.” Back in the U.S.S.R., he wrote several new books, Petersburg’s first “democratic” leader, Mayor Anatoli Sob- including the novel Peter I, reportedly ordered by Josef Stalin chak. Five years later, when the latter locked himself in a personally, and the Russian version of Pinocchio, known as Paris flat, fleeing from criminal prosecution for corruption, Buratino. Aleksei Tolstoy’s heir, along with his “enforcement” partner, In this fairy tale, the cunning fox and the cat lead the little are still to be seen around the St. Petersburg City Hall, busily boy made of wood to the Land of Fools, where money can organizing the burial of several skeletons, which have been allegedly be grown on trees in a place called the Miracle Field. “almost definitely” identified as the remains of the executed The materialistic Pinocchio did not get transformed into Tsar Nicholas II and his family. a normal boy, like his Italian relative. But he led other dolls, Ironically, the group that had dug up these skeletons was boys and girls, to the real land of happiness at the end of the deployed in 1979 by the infamous Brezhnev-era law enforce- story, while evil, exemplified by Alisa the Fox and Basilio ment minister Shcholokov, who, five years later, became the the Cat, was punished. major victim of the first post-Stalin anti-corruption campaign, The period of Gorbachov’s perestroika in the 1980s intro- and committed suicide. duced new thinking, and a new understanding of persons and Minister Shcholokov’s motives were related to the ten- events. Ogonyok magazine, in the vanguard of glasnost, pub- dency for the justification of monarchic rule, which emerged lished the story of writer Leonid Dobychin who perished in in Brezhnev’s later years, and involved a significant layer of an NKVD jail as a result of a report written by the Red Count. the “creative intelligentsia,” exemplified by Bulat Okudzha- The image of the nobleman converting to Communism, was va’s novel The Travel of the Dilettantes and Igor Volgin’s deconsecrated. Soon after, the founders of Communism were research on the last years of Fyodor Dostoevsky, published deconsecrated, and the Lenin Museum, in the city which lost in 1981. Okudzhava, who also wrote rhymes for children, his name, was shut down. appeared to be the author of the song “The Miraculous Field” But the bastard count was luckier. In the spirit of Stanislav in the screen version of Aleksei Tolstoy’s Buratino, produced Govorukhin’s monarchy-nostalgic film Russia We Have Lost, by theater manager Mark Zakharov. assemblies of nobility and nobility balls were revived in 1990s The burial of the remains, supposed to be those of the last Russia, with what human material was available. The material Romanov Tsar, has been scheduled for July, by decision of was as fake as Aleksei Tolstoy’s title of count. Like the figures the since-ousted Russian government. of saints on the restored Cathedral of Christ the Savior in , which appear to be made of plastic, the fake succes- A memorial Mercedes sors of the Russian noble class took up their posts, speaking Soon after climbed down from the tank from tribunes or living in mansions. where he took his stand against the would-be “putsch” of The Congress of Compatriots, designed to attract Russian August 1991—his version of Vladimir Lenin’s armored car emigre´s to support of the newly restored “historical Russia,” in 1917—theater manager Mark Zakharov became a member opened in Moscow just a few days before the failed putsch of of the Presidential Council, and the ideologist of revived Rus- Aug. 19-21, 1991, which spelled the end of the . sian historical greatness. His favorite Russian thinker, Fyodor This conference was organized and headed by Aleksei Tol- Dostoevsky, is now carved in bronze in Volkhonka Street, stoy’s grandson, Mikhail Tolstoy (president), and a certain replacing Yakov Sverdlov, the head of the All-Russian Cen- alleged nobleman, Ivan Artsishevsky. Five years later, the tral Executive Committee who had ordered the execution of same Mr. Artsishevsky was elected head of the St. Petersburg Nicholas II and his family in 1918. branch of the Support Fund for Special Services and Law Just at the moment when Okudzhava and Zakharov went

42 International EIR April 10, 1998

© 1998 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. into action to inspire the “creative intelligentsia” for Yeltsin’s This commission opposed the official expertise, question- fight against the first democratically elected parliament in ing also the validity of Prince Philip’s genetic material. It 1992, leading into the year of the parliament’s destruction in was not until the eve of the final decision of the Moscow 1993, a German post-modernist artist, visiting St. Petersburg, “funeralists,” in the winter of this year, that ROCOR’s leader- installed a Mercedes on the empty pedestal where Lenin’s ship claimed that the genuine Romanov remains are already armored car had been standing. For some reason, the authori- buried in Brussels. ties did not get the joke, though it was their own initiative to This last-minute scandal only contributed to the raging re-establish the Lenin Museum as the International Exhibi- brawl around the reportedly genuine Romanov remains. Edu- tion Hall. ard Rossel and Vladimir Yakovlev, the governors of Yekater- The same fall of 1992 was when Boris Yeltsin was warmly inburg (where the Tsar was shot) and St. Petersburg, respec- welcomed in London, and exactly then, Prince Philip offered tively, each insisted that the funeral should take place in his his blood as material for identification of the alleged monar- city. This heated discussion, swallowing a lot of budget funds chic remains. Philip is a close cousin of the Romanovs, on his for trips of the commission and parts (!) of the remains from mother’s side (see Figure 1). Yekaterinburg to Moscow and back, ended with “victory” for Five years later, a great effort by the ideologists of Presi- St. Petersburg, due to three persons: dent Yeltsin’s career, starting with Igor Chubais—the elder • Nikolai R. Romanov, grandson of Grand Duke Pyotr brother of privatization zealot Anatoli Chubais, and himself Nikolayevich, the brother of the infamous Grand Duke Niko- famous, first, as the most democratic Communist among lai Nikolayevich, chief of Russia’s Military Staff (which first Communists, founder of the “Democratic Platform” within pulled Russia into , and then destroyed the Rus- the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and then as the sian Army in this war); most monarchist democrat among democrats—was concen- • his friend Academician Dmitry Likhachov, a prisoner trated on organizing the great political event, called the Simul- of the NKVD in the 1920s; taneous Burial. The essence of the project, evidently imported • their permanent partner Ivan Artsishevsky, promoter of from London, was to deconsecrate Vladimir Lenin, by bury- assistance for security services and law enforcement bodies. ing his mummified body, which has been on display in the Before this result was obtained, the time for the Simulta- Mausoleum in Red Square for over 70 years, and to canonize neous Burial operation had expired—not because of the con- Nicholas II, also by means of burial. troversy between St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, and not The state leadership may have been saved from the dis- only as a result of the episode with Igor Chubais’s suitcase, grace that would have attended the implementation of this but due to the rivalry of two branches of the Romanov family, project, had it really taken place, by the unknown chauffeur of which obviously have been quarreling even since Nicholas II a hired car, who drove off in a Mercedes with Igor Chubais’s was alive (see Figure 2). briefcase, tightly packed with U.S. dollars, on the back seat The rival branch, representing the Hohenzollern-Bagra- (so says Chubais). tion family, intermarried with the Romanovs, and its teenaged heir Georgi, usually called Gogi by his half-Georgian mother, Veterans of the funeral battle was the official choice of London till late 1996. It might have In 1996, Queen Elizabeth’s birthday party was attended been at Queen Elizabeth’s birthday festivity, when the Tol- by two monarchists from St. Petersburg. One of them, the son stoy Foundation changed London’s sympathy in favor of the of a war veteran, had once been jailed for drawing swastikas “Nikolayevichi.” In 1997 in St. Petersburg, the favorites of in the streets on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, and the other was a Academician Likhachov were represented not only by Niko- retired Navy colonel. lai R. Romanov, but also by his distant relative Georgi Ro- The first, Nikolai Braun, represented the old emigre´ anti- manov-Yurievsky, a young Swiss citizen with rich experience Communist organization known as Russian Imperial Union- in military training. Yurievsky recently posed as the best Order (RISO). Shortly before his London trip, he had been friend of Bulgaria, at a Moscow event dedicated to an anniver- officially expelled from this organization, but for some rea- sary of Bulgaria’s liberation from the Ottomans by the Rus- son, the London Monarchist Society found nobody else to sian Army. represent the Russian monarchist movement. Later it was ex- A third would-be King was probably the most exotic per- plained that Braun was the personal choice of the Tolstoy son. Styling himself as a son of the allegedly survived son of Foundation’s Nikolai D. Tolstoy. Nicholas II, Aleksei, he managed to get himself crowned, an RISO’s ex-head Pyotr Koltypin-Vallovsky, who origi- effort in which Gogi Hohenzollern failed. The phony corona- nally appointed Braun to represent the Order in the new demo- tion was, moreover, performed by a phony Church, the so- cratic Russia, was the very person who headed the alternative called Kiev Patriarchate, which emerged from the failure of commission of experts on the Romanov bones, representing the Kiev Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) in the rivalry for the views of the emigre´ Russian Orthodox Church Outside the post of Moscow Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Russia (ROCOR). in 1990.

EIR April 10, 1998 International 43 FIGURE 1 Prince Philip and the Romanov dynasty Queen Victoria 1819-1901

Edward VII Alexandra William of Dagmar Alexander III Louis IV Alice 1841-1910 of Denmark Denmark of Denmark Romanov of Hesse 1843-1878 1844-1925 (George I of 1847-1928 1845-1894 1837-1892 the Hellenes) 1845-1913

George V Nicholas II Alexandra Victoria Louis 1865-1936 Romanov of Hesse of Hesse of Battenberg, 1868-1918 1872-1918 1863-1950 1st Marquess of Milford Haven 1854-1921

George VI Andrew Alice 1895-1952 of Greece of Battenberg 1882-1944 1885-1969

Elizabeth II Philip Mountbatten b. 1926 Duke of Edinburgh b. 1921

Prince Philip’s DNA was used for identification of the “Yekaterinburg” bones. Philip Mountbatten is Empress Alexandra’s great-nephew, on his mother’s side, and Tsar Nicholas’s first cousin once removed, on his father’s side. Queen Elizabeth is a first cousin twice removed of both Nicholas and Alexandra.

A rather remarkable dialogue took place in Moscow, at sian successors of vodka manufacturer Pyotr Smirnov. It ap- one of the events organized by the fake “Nicholas III.” “We peared that Gogi and his mother were actually on the payroll are supported by Russia’s military intelligence,” says an assis- of the “foreign” (U.S.-based) branch of the Smirnovs tant to the fake heir, proudly. Another guest, forgetting he is (spelled Smirnoff). a spy of the “Kirillovichi” (Gogi and his mother), turns pale In this way, the fate of state ideology appeared to be tightly and objects: “But Russian military intelligence supports us!” associated with vodka manufacturing. Who could have ex- Most likely, the first speaker was referring to promotional pected that the Hohenzollerns’ rivals and their official patron, support from Gen. Vladimir Platonov, better known as a dep- First Vice Premier Boris Nemtsov, known as a strong protec- uty of retired KGB Gen. Aleksandr Sterligov in the Russian tor of the Russian auto industry, would turn out to be engaged National Congress. “Law enforcement” is also probably in- in a commercial activity far less patriotic than the foreign volved, since Prof. Ivan Chabanov, representing Nicholas III Smirnoffs (who have traded their product for decades, with in St. Petersburg, is a member of the expert council of the no harm done to domestic producers for Russia’s bottomless local Interior Ministry department. vodka demand)! But, no sooner had the term, site, and subject of the long- Thighs and Kings discussed burial been defined as July 17 in St. Petersburg, The disgrace of the Hohenzollern branch in Russia was with interment of the Yekaterinburg bones, though they are evidently linked with President Yeltsin’s support for the Rus- not officially recognized as genuine by the Russian Orthodox

44 International EIR April 10, 1998 FIGURE 2 The Romanov heirs

Nicholas I 1796-1855

Alexander II Nikolai Nikolayevich 1818-1881 (the elder) 1831-1881

Alexander III Vladimir Alexandrovich Nikolai Nikolayevich Pyotr Nikolayevich 1845-1894 1847-1909 (the younger) 1865-1931 Chief of Staff in World War I 1856-1929 Nicholas II Kirill Vladimirovich Victoria Roman 1868-1918 1876-1938 “Ducky” Petrovich of Great Britain 1876-1978 1876-1936

Princess Vladimir Kirillovich Leonida 1917-1992 Bagration

Prince Franz-Wilhelm Maria Vladimirovna Nicholas Romanovich (Hohenzollern) b. 1953 of Prussia “Nikolayevichi”

Georgi (Gogi) b. 1981 “Vladimirovichi” or “Kirillovichi”

At the time of Tsar Nicholas II’s death, there were eight living Romanov Grand Dukes (sons or grandsons of Tsars). This diagram shows only the “Vladimirovichi” (or “Kirillovichi”) and the “Nikolayevichi” lines.

Church, when a series of publications in Novye Izvestia ex- again (or still?) serviced by Oneksimbank, which has been ploded the last and decisive media bomb on the whole expen- scandalously favored both by Russian “young reformers” sive effort of the monarchic revival. (Nemtsov and Anatoli Chubais), and by Russian arms traders. Novye Izvestia’s investigative team found out that Boris The latest results of Novye Izvestia’s investigation solved Nemtsov and the special government identification commis- the puzzle that was presented in the above-quoted conversa- sion were involved in the import of U.S.-produced chicken tion of two sincere adepts of the monarchical idea. One of the thighs—the notorious “Bush legs” that have undercut the na- board members of the mysterious trading company, with a tional poultry industry in Russia. The operations of the myste- name almost coinciding with that of the state commission, rious Committee for Promotion (!) of Burial of Monarchical appeared to be Nikolai Dalsky—the very person who styles Remains, existing since as long ago as April 1996, were cer- himself as Nicholas III. tainly overseen by intelligence officials, in this case, through Another series of expose´ publications featured Boris the watchdog department of the Customs Service. Simultane- Nemtsov, accompanied by a lot of naked girls in a fancy ously, the government’s PR head Igor Shabdurasulov was suburban mansion owned by Oneksimbank. The whole story forced to admit that the accounts of the State Customs Com- became known because the young reformers forgot to pay mittee, officially transferred to Russia’s Central Bank, are their ladies. Russian society is rather tolerant toward scandals

EIR April 10, 1998 International 45 associated with vodka and naked thighs. But the detail that crat” Sergei Stankevich, who used to inhabit one of the luxury the girls were not paid, in the context of the young reformers’ flats in the area, has found his Paris in Warsaw (out of reach agitation for saving budget money, portrays the heroes in a from Russian prosecutors, who are after him for taking bribes most amusing way—and humor is the most effective weapon when he was deputy mayor of Moscow), by styling himself against ideology. So, when in several days Boris Nemtsov now as a Polish nobleman and successor of a hero of the raised his voice against “oligarchs,” with the intention of cre- landowners’ Polish revolt. Lenivka (“Lazy Street”), which ating his own political party, even the truce struck between never changed its name, lazily rolls down to the glistening him and ORT Television did not save him. Mocking the didac- embankment of the Moskva River, by the gigantic plastic tic revelations that recently appeared on Mr. Nemtsov’s per- saint-decorated cathedral. The Moscow 800th anniversary sonal web page, Kommersant called it “Pyzhdyr maksymar- celebrations are over, and the entrance of the cathedral is dysh pyzh”—a solemn Soviet-era revolutionary slogan in the barred with wooden boards, as it was in 1918. Cellist Mstislav Volga Tartar language, which sounds comical in Russian and Rostropovich is invited to a pompous ceremony with cham- made every reader burst into laughter. pagne and caviar. Right before the event, he is told that it is The coins sown in the Miraculous Field have not grown postponed. The hall appears to be reserved for another party. up into trees with golden fruit. They disappeared, and not Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, seeking support from a leftist elector- even Sister Alice and Brother Vasili can tell where they are, ate, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the First Congress of themselves having been fooled by more skilled Russian swin- the Russian Social-Demoratic Labor Party. Guests applaud, dlers. Now they will have to think hard, what kind of mythol- and flatteringly recognize him as the leader of “Russia’s left ogy to introduce next. center.” Moscow officials can’t help grinning, calling the boss “a Spring on Spiridonovka Street smart Buratino,” the colloquial expression being derived from There is no longer an Aleksei Tolstoy Street in Moscow: Aleksei Tolstoy’s materialistic wooden boy. Others remem- It is again called by its “historical” name, Spiridonovka, al- ber that something of this sort has already happened with though nobody can tell you what landowner Spiridonov was another mayor, Aleksandr Rutskoy: released from custody, famous for, besides being a landowner. Professional “demo- where he was packed off by his former partner in the demo- cratic revolution (Yeltsin), he posed for a photo under the portrait of Nicholas II, but later the same month, renamed his political party the Russian Social Democratic Popular Party. (Neither mask helped him to win the Presidential elections.) In early March 1998, then-Vice Prime Minister Anatoli Chubais, whom the “revolutionary” Luzhkov ritually de- nounces, also felt somewhat anxious. The Vecheka, his own For previews and “evolutionary” invention, had evidently failed to fulfill its information on mission, in the face of the global financial crisis, and the LaRouche publications: sabotage of the IMF instructions he was supposed to imple- ment has consequences. The very idea of using Dzherzhin- sky’s threatening title (Chubais named the tax collection agency with the first acronym of the later KGB, Soviet intelli- Visit EIR's gence) for the task of improving tax collection did not work. Debtors just did not believe, as other don’t believe, Internet Website! in any word, gesture, or statement of apparatchiks turned dem- ocrats turned monarchists turned social-democrats, and vice versa. • Highlights of current issues of EIR A lot of clever imagemakers, running around with an im- • Pieces by Lyndon LaRouche portant air, are of no use: All their efforts with the same mate- rial, dressed in this or that, more and more evidently appear • Every week: transcript of the latest to be a zero-sum game. EIR Talks radio interview with The late Bulat Okudzhava once wrote a short verse, on LaRouche. why kingdoms die: “not because life is hard, not because the people suffer: kingdoms die, and with more pain, the longer http://www.larouchepub.com it takes, when people don’t respect their kingdom any longer.” At the time when this was written, its author identified e-mail: [email protected] himself not as a creative intellectual, not a democrat or monar- chist, but just as a soldier. For that reason, he was right.

46 International EIR April 10, 1998