#43 | July 16 - 30, 1998  

By Abram Kalashnikov

If the air over Moscow is feeling a little cleaner to you this week, that's because one of the more malodorous segments of the city population has split town. That's right: the foreign press corps has evacuated Moscow, heading north en masse to lick the petrified coccyx of the late Tsar Nicholas II and his silly family before their remains are sunk in the ground, out of the reach of the cameras forever, at this weekend's royal funeral ceremony at Petropavlovsk. That the Western press corps has chosen to treat the burial of the Tsar and his family as a major story should come as no surprise: it is one. Not because it means anything today, but because it serves as the last chapter in one of this century's most compelling and portentous dramas. For the record's sake, anyway, it has to be documented.

Nonetheless, the Tsar story has turned out to be the Western press corps's latest great opportunity to show itself at its worst. Not because its members chose to flee town to cover the story in the middle of a crisis in Moscow; the Tsar's burial is a big enough deal that that can be excused on the grounds of historical necessity. No, it's the way the Tsar's burial is being covered that is infuriating-and what's even worse, you could see the offense coming from miles away.

Nothing exposes the weaknesses of reporters more effectively than a big story that is announced far in advance. From the very moment the date of the imperial funeral was released, reporters all over town started arming themselves with cliches, loading tired phrases into their journo-holsters and wetting their eyes with ready-made tears of canned bewilderment and "awe before history".

The Tsar story was so well-scripted that when it came time to cover the thing, reporters were able to just travel north and shoot their wads without having to turn up at the actual event. Contrary to popular belief, going to journalism school doesn't mean not having to say you're sorry. But it does mean never having to go to any parade you can describe from television instead. Not willing to sell the funeral scene as simply the finish line of a long melodramatic marathon, reporters are affixing to the Tsar's burial a plotline that even today "means something", one that revolves around the concept of the funeral as an act of "national redemption" or "reconciliation with the past". A good example of this can be found in a recent story by Carol J. Williams of the Los Angeles Times, who was so anxious to take the life out of this story that she started giving her version of it to the world a week early. Here's her lead from a piece entitled "Last Rites for Tsar Get Low Priority":

"MOSCOW- The funeral in St. Petersburg next week for the last czar of Russia and his ill-fated loved ones was supposed to be an occasion for national repentance and reconciliation."

Like most of the Western reporters covering the burial, Williams takes the line that Russians must demonstrate a renewed reverence for the Tsar in order to secure "national repentance":

"Instead of the lavish ceremony of atonement for the slain royals envisioned by President Boris N. Yeltsin, the funeral is proving a fresh source of friction between church and state."

Some of you may have noticed lately that the Russian state is broke. It's so broke, in fact, that it is no longer able to borrow enough money to meet the payments for its last loans. These days, Russia needs to offer people like Carol Williams's readers 100% yields every five months or so just to get its hands on any kind of cash to keep the state functioning at all. And yet, Carol Williams appears to favor the idea of a state-funded "lavish ceremony" to "atone" for the slain royals.

While a good number of journalists have spent acres of print space weepily detailing the "national tragedy" of the murdered royals, juxtaposing touching private photos of the Tsar and his family with the dark tale of their execution and disposal in a lonely pit in faraway Yekaterinburg (the Moscow Times even went so far as to print an interview with an elderly woman who fondly remembered the Tsar's reign, recalling in particular what a good family man he'd been), neither Williams nor anyone else in the Western press has taken any time to discuss why the Tsar was killed in the first place.

None of the Western chroniclers have discussed Nicholas's rabid anti-Semtism-the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were distributed on his order, and savage pogroms too numerous to count took place under his watch and with his approval. And none of these articles have contained any information at all about Nicholas's ruthless suppression of free speech, or his vast network of secret policemen, who pursued idiotic persecutions of writers and artists in addition to political oppositionists.

Contrary to what you might think from reading recent news reports, Nicholas Romanov was more than just a doomed nitwit who lived in a beautiful house, took long walks in pretty forests, and had a penchant for writing tender (if ungrammatical) love letters. In his professional life, he was a weak and stupid despot who was responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent people both through war and domestic persecution, and he remained unapologetic about it to the end of his life. In fact, when you think about it, if anybody in this world deserved to get shot, it was Nicholas.

But you won't get that from Western coverage of his funeral. Normally, about all you'll get is a broad blanket disclaimer like the following passage, culled from a February Reuters story about the funeral date announcement:

"Privately, some clerics say the church now has doubts about canonizing an autocrat who remains a controversial figure for many Russians."

A "controversial" "autocrat"-no different, apparently, than Boris Yeltsin. Now that's an understatement if there ever was one.

A few reporters, of course, have done their jobs when covering the Tsar story. Will Englund of the Baltimore Sun made himself the gentlemanly exception to the ignoble rule when he wrote:

"The majority of Russians see Nicholas as a victim but not a particularly admirable one. He was, after all, head of one of the most repressive regimes on Earth."

Now, how hard was that? Not that hard. Nonetheless, most Western reporters prefer to avoid even simple sentences like that and focus exlusively on the pageantry of the burial, and the pathos of the Romanovs' execution. 70 years after his death, Nicholas's tyranny is being quietly cleansed from the record, as the storymakers of our generation routinely choose to feature the Disney tragedy that was his family life over the violent idiocies of his reign. I can guarantee right now that in the dozens of news reports that will come out of St. Pete this weekend, passages describing the spledour of the burial site will outnumber Englund-esque reminders of the Tsar's record by a ratio of at least ten-to-one.

Why? Because the very nature of journalism dictates that the people who practice it are likely to be power-worshipping lackeys bent on sucking up to rich morons like the Romanovs. The ultimate aim of most journalists isn't to be rich and powerful, but to have access to people who are. They want to be invited to parties and given keys to the padlock on the family tennis courts. You don't get those privileges by being a sourpuss. You get them by licking bums. Even ones as old and calcified as the Tsar's.