Yesterday once more

Yesterday once more

The wedding of Russia’s Grand Duke is simply an event, with no real significance.

Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov got married on Saturday in St Petersburg, Russia. A conservative newspaper said of the wedding, “The Romanovs are back”. The use of the word “back” may have embarrassed the 40-year-old great-grandson of a cousin of Russia’s last Czar, Nicholas II. His marriage, coming a century after the Czar and his family were killed, may have kindled memories of the Romanovs and nothing more. The Russian Orthodox Church may have since recognised them as near-martyr saints in 2000. The Russian Supreme Court may have rehabilitated the family in 2008 by ruling they were victims of political repression. However, these attempts were meant only to rehabilitate the Romanovs, not restore them. There was no will of the dynasty backing the Czar’s descendants or George’s marriage. It was an event, that is all, even though a part of Europe’s royalty and aristocracy was present at the cathedral, using the opportunity to dress in all their splendour, recounting how their world of pomp and ceremony looked all those years ago. The world has since passed them by. To be fair to them, the current Romanovs never sought to return either to Russia or to the throne. Most Russians of this generation may not even recognise the name. However, whenever the history of communism is written, and every time it is rewritten, it will begin with the Romanovs who, for Lenin, symbolised everything that the new, people’s world he was about to create would not be about.

The Russian Revolution shocked the Czarists. How can the Russian people run a Government by themselves when only the king or Czar has the “Divine Right” to rule? Lenin delegitimised the Czar’s legitimisation. That is what happened in 1917. If the association of the Czar, the Sultan, the Kaiser, or a Maharaja in India, with a Pope or the Patriarch of Constantinople or a God, gave them an unchallenged right to rule, Lenin’s populism erased it all, allowing for the assertion of the right of the masses to appoint, change or endorse their administrators. Russia is not rigidly Communist today, it’s a liberalised economy with a few vestiges of the Soviet era. The Revolution took it out of the feudal lag and catapulted it into modernity. Lenin’s success is installing a regime while having no battalions. His older brother was executed by the Czarist authority for dissidence. While that strengthened Lenin’s resolve to dismantle the monarchy, he had a larger ideological motive to put a participative, political order in place. Would George Romanov see it that way? His return to St Petersburg is as a private person. However, his elitist trappings were intact, stuck with the caprices of the rich, the shine of the diamonds, and the glow of the tiaras. Did he know that his great aunts, the daughters of the Czar, survived the first spray of bullets because they were protected by diamonds, collectively weighing over a kilo, sewn into their clothing?