A Moscow metro station named after one of the last Tsar's executioners should be renamed, Russian monarchists said on Friday, a week before the 90th anniversary of the royal family's killing. Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and five children were killed on July 18 1918 by a Bolshevik revolutionary firing squad acting under Pyotr Voykov.
A metro station in the north of the Russian capital was named in Voykov's honour by Soviet authorities. "We are not against having places named after Soviet figures, we're just against naming the station after an executioner," Alexander Zakatov, head of the Imperial House of Her Imperial Highness Great Princess Maria Vladimirovna.
Zakatov said local authorities said it would be expensive to change, but he said it was an example of Russia's failure to fully confront the darker side of its Soviet past. "If in Germany, people went on to the streets with portraits of Hitler they would be punished, but in our country it happens at every step," he said.
In Russia, Communist groups frequently hold marches and parades featuring Soviet symbols like the hammer and sickle and portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Voykov, a revolutionary activist, played a key in arranging for Bolshevik troops to shoot the Tsar and his family in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in order to prevent them being rescued by advancing counter-revolutionary forces.
His executioners tried to destroy the remains by throwing sulphuric over the bodies and dumping them down a well. Monarchists say they will use the 90th anniversary to press their legal case for the Tsar and his family to be recognised as the victims of a politically-motivated murder.
Last November, the Russian Supreme Court rejected a request for the royal family to be rehabilitated. "We are sending the case for the rehabilitation of the tsar's family back for a new trial," German Lukyanov, the monarchists' lawyer said on Friday. Attempts by Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, a claimant to the Russian imperial throne, to win legal rehabilitation for Nicholas and his family in lower courts have already failed.