MOSCOW, August 7 (RIA Novosti) - The Moscow City Court on Monday granted a complaint from a descendant of the Russian imperial family against a lower court that refused to recognize the nation's last monarch as a victim of Bolshevik repression.
In May, a district court rejected Maria Romanov's request to pronounce Nicholas II a victim of a political killing. It ruled that the killing of the emperor and his immediate family in 1918 was a premeditated murder rather than an act of repression, as the plaintiff claimed.
The Tverskoi court said "there is no credible evidence proving the existence of any official decisions by judicial or non-judicial bodies to exert politically motivated repression" against the tsar or his family members.
According to Great Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, who heads the Russian Imperial House in exile, Nicholas II, his wife and their two children had been killed on orders from the Bolshevik government.
Lawyer German Lukyanov, representing her interests in court, substantiated the claim by documents from archives of the Federal Security Service. He said the documents made it quite clear that the Romanovs had been executed by firing squad.
The remains of Nicholas II, killed 1918 outside the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, were buried in 1998 with honors in the former imperial capital, St. Petersburg. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized him two years later.
