Czar

MOSCOW -- When they lower the bones of Nicholas II into an imperial vault in St. Petersburg tomorrow, solemnly laying to rest the czar whose murder symbolized Russia's most terrible century, Vladimir Kopytov won't care.Kopytov is a Ural Mountain coal miner who has other things to worry about -- he hasn't worked since January or been paid since September.Nadya Zernina won't care, either. She's a 20-year-old university student from Perm, and she'll be enjoying a chance to study abroad this summer in Oxford, England.

MOSCOW -- Faith brought a thousand people to an old war monument here yesterday, faith in the redemptive power of a man who in life was loving, mild and inadequate.In death, the murdered Czar Nicholas II has become something else altogether. Above the priests and uniformed Cossacks and kerchiefed old women who came to mark his 130th birthday, the banners flapping in the warm breeze bore his likeness as if that of an icon."I think the czar fulfilled his mission, which was like Christ's," said Valentina Shatskaya.

PARIS -- Russian church authorities have called on the Moscow government to examine claims that Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered in 1918 on the orders of an international Jewish conspiracy.The Holy Synod, the Russian Orthodox Church's ruling body, announced that it was making the request in order to demonstrate the falsehood of such an allegation.But, noting the close ties between some Orthodox clergy and extreme nationalist groups known for their anti-Semitism, French historian Georges Minc said it was "inconceivable that, after so many years, the church leadership should revive charges of this nature unless the intention was to stir up a fresh wave of anti-Jewish feeling among many Russians who now look on the murdered imperial family as martyrs."

Washington -- It always was a high stress job.In 1817, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the brilliant but frustrated second Architect of the Capitol, almost throttled his boss, who repeatedly criticized him.Seizing Col. Samuel Lane by the collar, he shrieked: "Were you not a cripple I would shake you to the atoms, you poor contemptible wretch!"George Malcolm White, the current Architect of the Capitol, hasn't tried to strangle anybody yet. Which is not to say he hasn't had his share of frustrations and criticisms.

MY great-grandmother sold all-American, workingmen's "hhhhits." A "hhhhit" is something that you wear on your "hhhhid."My great-grandparents, Jacob and Bessie Sass, fled the pogroms in Odessa, Russia, about 1886. They left behind their elegant restaurant on the Black Sea, and a beautiful house with servants and a nanny. Jake gave all the credit for their success to Bessie's pastries (crust so thin you could read through it). They started with a deli, then a cafe, then the restaurant. Jacob always said, "They came for Bessie's pastries."

JANET Reno was vague in her congressional testimony last week about how the government might go about censoring violence in movies and television. I think they will need a czar.Writing law to cover every conceivable form of violence to be banned is obviously impossible. Screenwriters' imaginations will always be 10 miles ahead of the plodding congressman.Until young men began copying a nutty movie stunt by lying down in traffic to prove their manhood, who would have thought to fatten a kinder-gentler-entertainment law by forbidding movies to show scenes of people supine on the highway?

The idea that there should be a national horse racing czar has a new advocate.George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees who also owns stables of thoroughbred and harness horses and who used to race greyhounds, told a group of executives assembled in Baltimore for a pari-mutuel gambling conference yesterday that the industry needs a centralized national office headed by a person with "guts, vision and persistency" to bring the ailing sport out...

THE LAST TSAR: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NICHOLAS II. By Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by Marian Schwartz. Doubleday. 462 pages. $25.TWENTY years ago, Vera Leonidovna Yureneva, a formeactress, was living out her life in a two-room apartment in Moscow. Edvard Radzinsky, then a young student at the Historical Archival Institute and a budding playwright, rented one of the old woman's rooms. Evenings, when he returned home, the two had long talks in the communal kitchen.It was during one of these kitchen conversations that he heard the legend of Czar Nicholas II's execution in July 1918; how the czar was the first to die; how the bullets bounced off the czar's four daughters who had sewn the crown jewels in their corsets; and how the czar's young son, Alexei, exhibiting a "strange vitality," warded off the assassin's bullets with his hands.

A country's constitution is its platform of ideals. Some countries live up to those lofty goals, others cynically and brazenly violate the spirit and letter of their basic law. The most glaring example of the latter is the 1936 Soviet constitution. It presented a framework for a caring human-rights society at a time when Stalin's executioners were in the midst of one of the bloodiest purges in history.President Boris N. Yeltsin is now proposing a constitution for his country that would erase the much-amended Soviet-era document.

TCHAIKOVSKY: THE QUESTFOR THE INNER MAN.Alexander Poznansky.Schirmer.679 pages. $39.95. "The lives of great men inevitably become encrusted with a mythology that they themselves, their relatives and friends, their contemporaries, or their posterity produces, inadvertently or intentionally. . . . This is not a study of Tchaikovsky's music. [It] is devoted to the man as God created him, to his education, to his circumstances, to the character of the age and country in which he lived and worked."

Corporate America is shocked at pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. That Washington appointed him to oversee compensation at companies getting bailouts? Nah. That he thinks people who abused shareholders and crippled the economy don't deserve pay of tens of millions in some cases? Not really. People are flabbergasted he has the stomach to do anything about it. CEOs figured that Feinberg would be like every other paymaster they ever had. That he would rub his chin, act concerned about doing the right thing and then wire the gross domestic product of Nicaragua into their bank accounts.

BULGARIA'S monarchy is not old, traditional, legitimate or even Bulgarian. Never mind. To many Bulgarian voters, its heir offered clarity, hope and nostalgia for the good old days. Well, anyway, the old days. After Russia liberated Bulgarians from the Turkish empire, the powers of Europe in 1878 installed a German princeling, Alexander of Battenberg, as prince under Turkish suzerainty. His successor, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, took advantage of Turkish distraction in 1908 to proclaim Bulgaria independent, with himself as czar.

MOSCOW -- When they lower the bones of Nicholas II into an imperial vault in St. Petersburg tomorrow, solemnly laying to rest the czar whose murder symbolized Russia's most terrible century, Vladimir Kopytov won't care.Kopytov is a Ural Mountain coal miner who has other things to worry about -- he hasn't worked since January or been paid since September.Nadya Zernina won't care, either. She's a 20-year-old university student from Perm, and she'll be enjoying a chance to study abroad this summer in Oxford, England.

MOSCOW -- Faith brought a thousand people to an old war monument here yesterday, faith in the redemptive power of a man who in life was loving, mild and inadequate.In death, the murdered Czar Nicholas II has become something else altogether. Above the priests and uniformed Cossacks and kerchiefed old women who came to mark his 130th birthday, the banners flapping in the warm breeze bore his likeness as if that of an icon."I think the czar fulfilled his mission, which was like Christ's," said Valentina Shatskaya.

PARIS -- Russian church authorities have called on the Moscow government to examine claims that Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered in 1918 on the orders of an international Jewish conspiracy.The Holy Synod, the Russian Orthodox Church's ruling body, announced that it was making the request in order to demonstrate the falsehood of such an allegation.But, noting the close ties between some Orthodox clergy and extreme nationalist groups known for their anti-Semitism, French historian Georges Minc said it was "inconceivable that, after so many years, the church leadership should revive charges of this nature unless the intention was to stir up a fresh wave of anti-Jewish feeling among many Russians who now look on the murdered imperial family as martyrs."

MY great-grandmother sold all-American, workingmen's "hhhhits." A "hhhhit" is something that you wear on your "hhhhid."My great-grandparents, Jacob and Bessie Sass, fled the pogroms in Odessa, Russia, about 1886. They left behind their elegant restaurant on the Black Sea, and a beautiful house with servants and a nanny. Jake gave all the credit for their success to Bessie's pastries (crust so thin you could read through it). They started with a deli, then a cafe, then the restaurant. Jacob always said, "They came for Bessie's pastries."

Washington -- It always was a high stress job.In 1817, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the brilliant but frustrated second Architect of the Capitol, almost throttled his boss, who repeatedly criticized him.Seizing Col. Samuel Lane by the collar, he shrieked: "Were you not a cripple I would shake you to the atoms, you poor contemptible wretch!"George Malcolm White, the current Architect of the Capitol, hasn't tried to strangle anybody yet. Which is not to say he hasn't had his share of frustrations and criticisms.

A country's constitution is its platform of ideals. Some countries live up to those lofty goals, others cynically and brazenly violate the spirit and letter of their basic law. The most glaring example of the latter is the 1936 Soviet constitution. It presented a framework for a caring human-rights society at a time when Stalin's executioners were in the midst of one of the bloodiest purges in history.President Boris N. Yeltsin is now proposing a constitution for his country that would erase the much-amended Soviet-era document.

JANET Reno was vague in her congressional testimony last week about how the government might go about censoring violence in movies and television. I think they will need a czar.Writing law to cover every conceivable form of violence to be banned is obviously impossible. Screenwriters' imaginations will always be 10 miles ahead of the plodding congressman.Until young men began copying a nutty movie stunt by lying down in traffic to prove their manhood, who would have thought to fatten a kinder-gentler-entertainment law by forbidding movies to show scenes of people supine on the highway?

The idea that there should be a national horse racing czar has a new advocate.George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees who also owns stables of thoroughbred and harness horses and who used to race greyhounds, told a group of executives assembled in Baltimore for a pari-mutuel gambling conference yesterday that the industry needs a centralized national office headed by a person with "guts, vision and persistency" to bring the ailing sport out...