AT LAST, CLOSURE FOR THE RUSSIAN ROYAL FAMILY

For most Americans, the killing 80 years ago of the Russian royal family is best remembered through the filter of books and movies about the mysterious Anastasia, the woman who claimed to be a daughter of the czar who survived the mass execution.

Certainly there are those who have studied Russian history a bit more in depth. For some, the killing of the royal family shortly after the revolution and the burial, finally, of the family's remains shortly after the end of the Soviet experiment serve as bookends for an era of history fraught with murder on an unbelievable scale, social upheaval and an attempt at socialism that collapsed under its own bad management.

The funeral last week for the czar and his family members, along with some servants, was made possible, of course, by modern scientific methods that permitted positive identification lo these many years later.

Officially, however, it is not the royal family whose remains have been placed in a crypt in a St. Petersburg cathedral. Even today the Russian government, struggling to find its post-Cold War way, and the Russian Orthodox Church, struggling to restore itself in a nation that has been officially atheist all those years, are finding it difficult to reconcile the past with the present.

Underneath all this, however, is a current outside official circles that closure has, in its own way, been accomplished.