Eighty years after Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the country's new communist rulers, they will have a long-awaited state funeral this week.
But what was planned as a reconciliation with a painful national memory has degenerated into an ugly political spectacle.
Senior Russian Orthodox Church officials will not take part in the ceremonies, which begin in Yekaterinburg tomorrow and end in the imperial capital of St Petersburg on Friday, arguing that the bones may not really be those of the royal family.
Neither will President Boris Yeltsin or many foreign dignitaries, even though the event is billed as a state funeral.
The head of Russia's Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexis II, went on national television to cast doubt on the authenticity of the remains. In a rare televised appearance, he launched a blistering attack on an official government commission which identified remains found in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg as those of Russia's last tsar and his family.
Bolshevik leaders, locked in a civil war with troops loyal to Nicholas, ordered him, his wife, their children and the family servants to be executed in Yekaterinburg, on July 17th, 1918. Their bodies were soaked in acid and tossed into a mass grave in a forest.
They were dug up 20 years ago and forensic experts in Russia, Britain and the United States, using DNA matching techniques, established that there was more than a 99.99 per cent chance that the remains were authentic.
"There is no doubt about it, these are the real remains," said Mr Sergei Kolotvinov, representative of the Russian Nobles' Assembly in Yekaterinburg and a reburial commission member. "But if there is disagreement in society, then I don't think it is the time for a funeral." Compounding the dispute over the authenticity of the bones has been the wrangle over where to bury them.
Mr Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region which includes Yekaterinburg, cited the Orthodox tradition of burying the dead in the place where they perished.
Moscow's Mayor, Mr Yuri Luzhkov, later joined the fray, offering the capital as the final resting place for the tsar before St Petersburg - home to the palaces and trappings of imperial glory - finally was selected.