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By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 15, 2000; Page A20

MOSCOW, Aug. 14 –– The Russian Orthodox Church decided today to canonize Russia's last czar and his wife and children, who were brutally executed in 1918 at the order of the Bolshevik government shortly after the triumph of the Russian Revolution.

Proposals to make saints of Czar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and the children--Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia--had been a controversial issue both within and outside the church. Church leaders were divided about conferring such status on a ruler who, though a devout Christian, brought ruin on Russia through repression and by plunging it into the disaster of World War I.

Alexandra is also controversial for having taken the advice of the charismatic and controversial monk Rasputin on issues of state while Nicholas was prosecuting the war.

In the end, Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II and 150 bishops who are meeting in Moscow this week settled on a formula that recognized the imperial family's martyrdom without endorsing the czar's reign. The family was canonized as "people who sincerely tried to carry out the commandments of God" and who exuded "Christian faith" during their incarceration and execution.

Earlier, church officials had said that if Nicholas II were canonized, it would be "not for his life, but for his death." The family members are to be venerated as "passion bearers," the lowest rung in the church's hierarchy of saints.

The church leadership also had been restrained by the fact that the rival Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which split with the Moscow-based church during the Soviet era, had already canonized Nicholas and his family, the last in a long line of Romanov rulers.

Outside the Russian church, some observers viewed the possible canonization with suspicion. Efforts to rehabilitate Nicholas II, even on religious grounds, raised fears that the reputation of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, already revered by many Russians, would be reappraised. "Nicholas II will become the banner of nationalist movements within and outside the church," the Moscow News predicted.

The remains of Nicholas II, his wife and four of their children were ceremoniously interred two years ago in St. Petersburg, after being discovered near Yekaterinburg--the Ural Mountains city where the family was executed by Bolshevik gunmen 82 years ago. DNA tests authenticated the remains, but the Russian church has not fully accepted the determination and has called for more tests.

Nicholas II is the fourth Russian ruler to be declared a saint; the others were medieval figures. The bishops also canonized about 850 martyrs of the 20th century, many of whom died under Soviet rule. The bishops' conference is being held as a millennial event and will feature publication of new church social doctrine as well as opinions on issues ranging from homosexuality to genetic engineering.