Russia's last tsar flew home to his old capital yesterday in a journey crowded with honour, ritual and a little sorrow, 81 years after being led away by armed guards from a revolutionary city which offered him little but hatred and contempt.
As the final journey of Nicholas II and his household began, the President, Mr Boris Yeltsin, in an extraordinary last-minute decision, announced he would attend today's funeral. Previously he had said he would not come, prompting a wave of call-offs by other senior figures.
There was widespread disgust in Russia with Mr Yeltsin's original decision not to attend the funeral, after having promoted it for so long as a grand gesture of national healing, burying the guilt and virtue of both executed and executioner, autocrat and communist.
The President was clearly taken aback by the decision of the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy, not to attend because of doubts about the authenticity of the remains. Mr Yeltsin was used to seeing the Patriarch as a reliable ally.
Now, more unpopular and isolated than ever, the President's canny sense of the national mood told him it was time to back down, even at the risk of offending the church.
It was the same sense of timing which led him, in 1977, as atheist communist party boss in Yekaterinburg, to bulldoze the house where the Romanovs were executed, for fear it would become a shrine for pilgrims.
Yesterday Prince Michael of Kent, on his way to attend the funeral, criticised the Patriarch. "This was a great opportunity to heal divisions in Russian society," he said. "It is sad that this is unlikely to be a grand state occasion and ironic that the Orthodox Church, for so long the bedrock of the people's faith, should now find it difficult to give this important ceremony the blessing the country had expected."
Last night the coffins containing the remains of the imperial family and their servants were in the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul on a fortified island in the heart of St Petersburg, a guard of honour of four soldiers with fixed bayonets ranged around them.
The remains, bones found buried where their Bolshevik executioners had left them 80 years ago today, were contained in half-length wooden coffins, laid out on a three-tier plinth made of wood covered in stick-on plastic with a black marble effect pattern.
On the top tier, the coffins of Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra; below them, their daughters Olga, Tatyana and Anastasia; on the bottom tier, with silver nameplates instead of gold, four household servants who were shot with them. The remains of the other children, Alexei and Maria, have not been found.
Earlier in the day, the remains were flown from Yekaterinburg - the city where the family were killed - after thousands of local people, a few tearful, most simply curious, had paid their last respects, filing past their coffins in a church.