Top Russian law office rehabilitates the saint Great Duchess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna Romanova

Moscow, June 8, Interfax - Russia's Office of the Prosecutor General said on Monday that it had rehabilitated some of the members of Russia's imperial house of Romanov who fell victim to Bolshevik repressive rule.

The office rehabilitated Grand Dukes Michael Alexandrovich, Sergey Mikhailovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich and Igor Konstantinovich Romanov, Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna Romanova, and Princes Ioann Konstantinovich and Igor Konstantinovich Romanov, office spokeswoman Marina Gridneva told Interfax.

"An analysis of archive materials warrants the conclusion that all the persons who have been listed fell victim to repressive measures in the form of arrest, deportation and being under the surveillance of the Bolshevik security agency without being charged with any specific crime and for class and social reasons," Gridneva said.

Others who were rehabilitated by the same order were Yelena Petrovna Romanova, Vladimir Palei, Varvara Yakovleva, Yekaterina Yanysheva, Fyodor Remez, Ivan Kalin, Krukovsky, Dr. Gelmerson, and Nikolay (Brian) Johnson.

The Great Duchess Elisabeth (Yelizaveta Fyodorovna Romanova), a granddaughter of British Queen Victoria, has founded Sts Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy in Moscow in February 1909. She refused to leave Russia during revolutionary days and was arrested in spring of 1918 and martyred in a duffer not far from Alapayevsk. The convent existed until 1926. Restoration works started eighty years after.

The rehabilitation order followed an appeal to the Office of the Prosecutor General from Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, who claims headship of today's Romanovs' House.

Maria Vladimirovna had asked for the rehabilitation of Mikhail Alexandrovich, who was shot dead in Perm on June 13, 1918, and Yelizaveta Fyodorovona, Sergey Mikhailovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Ioann Konstantinovich and Igor Konstantinovich, who were thrown down a mine in Alapayevsk on July 18, 1918.

"The persons who are mentioned," said lawyer German Lukyanov, "were kept in custody, deported from St. Petersburg, and then put to death on behalf of the state because, from the viewpoint of the state authorities of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic], they were recognized to be socially dangerous for the Soviet totalitarian state and political system."

"All the persons who are mentioned were members of the Russian Imperial House. And the very fact that they were part of the imperial house was a sufficient reason for the Bolsheviks to put them to death," Lukyanov said.

On October 1, 2008, the Presidium of the Russian Supreme Court rehabilitated last Russian tsar Nicholas II and his immediate family, who were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad on July 17, 1918.