Even by the grisly standards of the Romanov dynasty, it was a terrible death. In the white heat of the Bolshevik revolution Tsar Nicholas and his family were first shot in their bodies, then bayoneted and finally shot in their heads.

The problem that has concerned the Russian courts for the best part of a decade has been: was it a simple murder committed by a few out of control revolutionaries, or was it ordered from above as a political assassination? Again and again, courts have dodged out of admitting that the Bolshevik state was responsible.

But the Russian Supreme Court ruled yesterday - much to the surprise of Romanov descendants - that the killing was a political act and that the Tsar's family should be considered victims of Bolshevism.

“The presidium declared as groundless the repression of Tsar Nicholas II and his family and rehabilitated them,” said Pavel Odintsov, of the Russian Supreme Court.

Times Archive, 1920: The murder of the Tsar

Loyal Russians wished to save the Tsar from the Soviets, knowing full well the danger of treachery that he incurred

• Archive Topic: The Russian Revolution 1917

• Archive Topic: Rasputin

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They were innocent of any crimes and should be legally rehabilitated.

The move does not presage any attempt by the Romanov family to reclaim their palaces or regain a foothold in the constitutional order of Russia. But they were delighted nonetheless.

“The protracted rehabilitation process has come to a successful conclusion,” German Lukyanov, the Romanov family lawyer, told the Interfax news agency. “Justice has triumphed.” The case has been fought largely by Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, a senior member of the royal house.

The ruling may not change the lives of the family, but it does represent a milestone: it is the closest that any post-Soviet government has come to accepting the criminal nature of Bolshevik rule.

Westerners may see that as a truism. But present-day Russia is still in the thrall of the iconography of Lenin. His image is emblazoned on schools and underground stations; his embalmed body is still visited in Red Square, even if not by the thousands of Socialist pilgrims who turned up in the Soviet days.

If the Romanovs were innocent of any crime, and if their death was an execution ordered from above, then Lenin could in theory be an accomplice to murder. It is at the very least the beginning of a debate. And Russian school textbooks will have to go into more detail about the last day of the dynasty.

The shootings occurred on July 17, 1918, in the cellar of a merchant's family in Yekaterinburg. The Tsar's family was told to stand as if about to be snapped for a group photograph. Their guards then shot them, but the Tsaritsa and the girls had jewels sewn into their corsets and these appear to have deflected the bullets.

This reportedly terrified the killers, who had been brought up to believe that the royal family ruled by divine right and was therefore somehow shielded by God. The bayoneting also failed to kill all the group, so they were shot in the head at point-blank range.

The decision to rehabilitate the imperial family showed every sign yesterday of polarising Russian society. The Orthodox Church welcomed the ruling and plans to offer special prayers on Sunday for the souls of the family - Nicholas, the German-born Tsaritsa Alexandra and their five children.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the parents and three of the children were found in a pit where they had been secretly buried by the Bolsheviks. They have since been reburied in the imperial crypt of the St Peter and St Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg, where hundreds of Russians pay tribute every week.

“This strengthens the rule of law, restores historical continuity and one thousand years of State tradition,” Georgi Ryabykh, spokesman for the Orthodox Church, said. The Communist Party, now garnished with democratic credentials and sitting on the opposition benches in parliament, has always been suspicious of the moves to rehabilitate the Tsar. Whitewashing the Romanovs, they argue, is just another way of trying to criminalise the Communists and rewrite history.

“It was not the Bolsheviks who eliminated the Tsar,” Ivan Melnikov, deputy leader of the Communist Party, said, “but all of the working people.” It was, after all, the obduracy and brutality of the Tsar's regime that triggered the revolution in the first place.

The Communists have been arguing that there was no direct order to execute the Tsar and that it was done in the heat of the moment. This until now has been the argument accepted by the courts: since there was no proof that the order had come from the top Bolsheviks, one had to assume that the crime was not a political murder. Lenin was in the clear.

“Yes, it cannot be denied,” said Viktor Ilyukhin, a Communist member of the Duma, the Russian parliament. “It was a monstrous crime. But it is absolutely wrong in my view to treat it as a political crime.” At the time of the massacre Russia was in chaos, in the throes of a civil war.

“There was no judicial system, no system of rule in the Empire and Bolshevik rule had not yet been established,” he said. “If you are rehabilitating someone you have to be able to say who was carrying out the repression.”

Road to redemption

— 1918 Nicholas II shot without trial with his wife, Alexandra, their four daughters, son and servants

— 1981 Family recognised as martyred saints by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, though the issue splits them

— 1998 Bodies finally interred at St Peter and St Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg. Neither Patriarch Aleksiy nor any other bishop attends. President Yeltsin attends at last minute

— 2000 Recognised by the synod of the Russian Orthodox Church as passion bearers

— 2005 Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, representing a branch of the Romanov dynasty, lodges an application to clear the Tsar’s classification as “state-criminal”

— 2007 Moscow City Court rejects application

— July 2008 Nicholas II comes tenth in The Name of Russia show, in which the public votes for the nation's greatest hero. On anniversary of his death 35,000 collect at site of murders

— Oct 2008 Moscow court rules that family were killed illegally

Source: Times archive

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