It was more dignified, and peaceful, than anyone could have expected two days ago. Nicholas and Alexandra were buried yesterday in an eye of history's storm, with the evil memories, the dire warnings, the doubts, the sneers, the accusations of hypocrisy, blasphemy and vulgarity stilled for an hour of family mourning and Russian atonement.
The funeral service was shown live on national television, yet it was as much a private event as a public one, trebly cut off from the world beyond - inside the 295-year-old Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, the oldest building in St Petersburg, itself inside a fortress, itself on an island.
Even President Yeltsin, who delivered a powerful, sombre speech expressing Russia's shame at the murder of the tsar and his household, slipped in and out of the cathedral by a side door, avoiding the media army encamped on the cobbled square beneath its belltower.
He stood in the Romanov family church, surrounded by living descendants of the Romanovs. "By burying the remains of murdered innocents we want to atone for the sins of our ancestors," he said.
Fragrant smoke rose from swinging censers and Orthodox priests sang a dirge as nine coffins were lowered into a double-chambered tomb. On the lower layer were the four servants shot with the family - a valet, Alozi Trupp, Alexandra's maid, Anna Demi dova, a cook, Ivan Kharitonov, and the family doctor, Yevgeny Botkin.
By next year the tomb will be covered by the same white Carrara marble as the graves of the other tsars buried there.
Romanov descendants took turns to throw white river sand, symbolising earth, into the grave. Afterwards Mr Yeltsin led other mourners in the same act.
"It was beautiful. It was perfect," said Rostislav Romanov, from Rye in East Sussex, the great-great-grandson of an earlier Tsar, Nicholas I. "I'm very proud of Russia and very proud of my family. They did it just right."
Nicholas himself might have preferred to be buried elsewhere than among his ancestors in the Peter and Paul cathedral. A deeply religious man, his passion for the Tatar-influenced, medieval Russia that existed before Peter the Great's Westernising reforms led him to prefer Moscow to St Petersburg. It is doubtful whether he would have liked the Germanic, baroque interior of the cathedral - still, technically, a museum.
Nor would he have been content to have his funeral organised by a regime calling itself a democracy. A stubborn believer in the divine right of tsars, he did all he could to undermine the parliament forced on him by the revolution of 1905.
He rejoiced in secret at the massacre of Jews by ultra-nationalists in cities such as Odessa. His disastrous decision to take over command of the army at the height of the first World War and his inability to prevent the scheming Alexandra and her favourite, Rasputin, running the country by whim and caprice led directly to the revolution of February 1917, his abdication, the Bolshevik coup and his execution.