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Russia's top court refuses to rule last czar and his family political victims - November 8, 2007 - Russia's highest court on Thursday refused to recognize the executed last czar Nicholas II and his family as victims of political repression — a ruling Kremlin critics said was dictated by the government's reluctance to condemn the bloodiest chapters of the country's Communist past. The Supreme Court upheld repeated rulings by lower courts and prosecutors that the 1918 slaying of the czar, his wife and their five children by a Bolshevik firing squad was premeditated murder, not a political reprisal, said German Lukyanov, a lawyer for the royal family's descendants. "This is an illegal decision," Lukyanov told The Associated Press. "It states that the Bolsheviks did not violate the rights and freedoms of the czar and his family by locking them up and then executing them."

Prosecutors have consistently refused a petition by descendants of the royal family to recognize the killings as political, and a Moscow court earlier this year declined to order them to do so. After its latest decision, in September, the Prosecutor General's Office said an investigation found that no court or "extrajudicial body" had issued any sort of execution or repression order ahead of the killings.

Human rights activists said the ruling fit in with what they said was reluctance by President Vladimir Putin and his government to confront Russia's Soviet past. Putin, who has stressed the need for patriotism and pride, has restored Soviet-era symbols, such as the music for the national anthem, and said Western portrayals of the Soviet era were too negative. Declaring Nicholas a political victim "would be same as recognizing that the history of our state is based on violence and crime," said Arseny Roginsky, a historian and member of the human rights group Memorial. He said the court's ruling was politically motivated and followed an "obvious trend toward the left in the country. Lukyanov said the Supreme Court's ruling meant Russian authorities "do not want to condemn Bolshevism." Roginsky said a document showing that the execution of the czar's family had been ordered by the Bolshevik authority in Yekaterinburg could be found in state archives. In a further indication of political motives, he said, the slayings were carried out to prevent Nicholas from becoming a symbol of resistance against Bolshevism. "Of course the Romanovs were victims of repressions," the Interfax news agency quoted human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, director of the Moscow Helsinki Group, as saying. "They were shot by the people who held power. And now, as historians have found, the highest authorities knew about it."