DNA is evidence. It is not a story. And for some audiences, the story is what they want.
—
## The Russian Orthodox Church and Official Recognition
The Romanov identification has a dimension beyond genetics that is worth noting: its reception by the Russian Orthodox Church, which has been slow to accept the scientific findings.
The bones from the 1991 grave were reinterred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998, at a state ceremony. President Boris Yeltsin attended. The Russian Orthodox Church declined to officially participate, expressing skepticism about the identification.
The 2007 discovery and the 2009 DNA results renewed the question of official recognition. Russia’s Investigative Committee, which had reopened the case, confirmed the identifications in 2008. The Orthodox Church continued to reserve judgment.
By the early 2020s, the Church had still not formally accepted that the remains of the children included in the 2007 site were the missing Romanov children, though it had accepted the original nine for veneration as saints (the family was canonized in 2000 as “passion-bearers”). The canonical status and the forensic identification remained in a complex relationship that reflected institutional and theological considerations as much as scientific ones.
This is context for the Anderson story because Anderson’s claim had always been entangled with Russian religious and émigré politics, as well as with the practical question of what the Romanov legacy meant — spiritually, nationally, dynastically — to communities for whom the Tsar was not simply a political figure but a sacred one. The DNA science resolved the biological question. It did not, and could not, resolve what the Romanov story means.