The interment of the bones of Russia's imperial family was billed as the conclusive chapter in an 80-year-old mystery. The story had all the ingredients of a bestseller: an Emperor and his Empress gunned down with their children in a cellar, a mad sexually-depraved monk who contributed to their downfall, and claims that two of the family had survived as heirs to the throne of the world's largest country.
All that was due to end in the St Peter and Paul fortress in St Petersburg yesterday in the presence of some members of the intensely fractious Romanov family and, at the last minute, of President Boris Yeltsin who had previously declared his intention to stay away.
The ceremony was planned too as a symbolic entombment of Russia's past in which millions died: some because of their Christian faith, others because of their ethnic origins and others still as purged members of the communist party, who were perceived as a threat by Stalin.
But the simple ceremony performed by a local priest, Fr Boris Glebov, the haunting Russian hymns and the pervading sense of faded empire will have done little to achieve the two main purposes for which the ceremony was staged. The mystery will live on and so too will the bitterness engendered by Russia's past.
Only the die-hard members of Russia's old aristocracy and their monarchist supporters continue to claim that the bones buried yesterday were "false relics" planted as a communist plot. DNA testing has shown that the remains undoubtedly belonged to Tsar Nicholas II and members of his family. But which bones and which family members?
Several bones of "Skeleton Number Four", that of the Tsar, had already been stolen from the Yekaterinburg morgue before they were delivered to St Petersburg for burial. One finger has emerged in a Russian church in the United States. Two entire skeletons were missing right from the start and one of them has been definitively shown to be that of the Tsarevich Alexei. Russian and German scientists believe the other missing skeleton was that of the Grand Duchess Maria, but one of America's leading pathologists is convinced that it is the bones of Grand Duchess Anastasia which have not been found. As all of the Romanov daughters would have had identical DNA, no definitive scientific proof is available one way or another.
What took place yesterday, therefore, was the burial of the partial remains of the Tsar, the German-born Empress Alexandra, three of their five children and their servants. The mystery of the whereabouts of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters, either Maria or Anastasia, remains unsolved.
Bitter divisions remain too, not least among the Romanovs and their relatives. Some branches of the family attended the burial in St Petersburg; others went yesterday to Sergiev Posad, the spiritual capital of the Russian Orthodox Church where a parallel ceremony was conducted by His Holiness Alexiy II, patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias. As a gesture of reconciliation towards the emigre "Russian Orthodox Church in Exile", which has declared the "true remains of the Romanovs" to be those embedded in the walls of the Church of St Job in Brussels, Patriarch Alexiy and his Holy Synod stayed away from yesterday's burial. Ironically, many scientists believe that the Brussels Bones and the those of Yekaterinburg are both genuine Romanov relics.
President Yeltsin, when Communist Party boss in Yekaterinburg, had overseen the demolition of the Ipatiev House in which the Romanovs were killed, in order to prevent it turning into a monarchist shrine. Not a man to stay away from a big occasion, he succumbed to the temptation to attend yesterday's burials and played a major role in the day's events. Rumours are strong in Moscow that he wishes to run for a third term.