Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has tasked a working group with studying and reburying the remains of two members of the Romanov royal family who were murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries almost 100 years ago.
Crown Prince Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria were executed along with their other siblings and parents — Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra — and family servants in the basement of a house they were being kept in in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg in 1918 as royalist forces closed in on the city.
A working group headed by deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko will oversee the reburial of their remains, according to a decree posted Thursday on the government's website.
Ministry heads and deputy heads and representatives of public and religious groups will join Prikhodko in the interdepartmental group, the decree said, along with representatives of the St. Petersburg government, suggesting the remains will be buried with those of the rest of the family in that city's Peter and Paul Cathedral.
“The working group's actions will be targeted at preserving the historical heritage of the Russian peoples and forming a civic identity of the Russian nation," read the decree signed by Medvedev.
The remains of Alexei, who was 13 when he died, and Maria, 19, were discovered in the Sverdlovsk region in 2007, and their remains are currently being kept in the country's state archive, Lenta.ru news website reported Friday.
The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia for more than 300 years before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that saw the tsar abdicate and the royal family executed along with other Romanovs.
The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra and their other children Olga, Tatyana and Anastasia were discovered in the Sverdlovsk region in 1991 and were reburied amid great ceremony in the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998.
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