It’s official – the last Russian Tsar, Nikolay II, and his family have been declared victims of illegal political repression by Russia's Supreme Court. Now, as rehabilitated political prisoners, the royal family is legally entitled to the retur

Amongst the groups that consider the decision “delayed” or simply “reputation-boosting”, there are some that think that the whole process was a clever ploy. According to them the House of Romanov (now based in Spain, along with its head, the Great Duchess Maria Vladimirovna) is seeking to reclaim the ownership of a wide array of royal property which now belongs to the state.

The House of Romanov was one of the richest royal families in the history of Russia. According to Ivan Artsishevsky, a representative of the House of Romanov in Russia, they had an enormous amount of property, estates, houses and land all over the empire.

Amongst their most notable properties was the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, which includes the Winter Palace, both of which have since become key historic landmarks. During the Revolution of 1917, around 100 000 royal properties were seized by the Bolsheviks.

In his interview with the Russian newspaper “Novye Izvestiya”, Artsishevsky recalls walking with Count Nikolay, the grand-nephew of Nikolay II, near the Peterhof palace in St. Petersburg's Hermitage, when the Count exclaimed:

“I learned about these places, my dad told me about them. He went for walks here with the Grand Princesses”

However, according to Artsishevsky, speaking of the properties' return to the royal family is bordering on nonsense. The clan's irrefutable interrelationship with the country's history is not a valid enough reason to take the properties away from the state.

“Today, to speak of the return of all this property to the Romanovs is simply ridiculous. They understand full well that this is Russia, not the Baltic states, where people try to do just that,” said Artsishevsky in his interview with Novye Izvestiya.

Both Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna and the lawyer of the Romanov family, German Lukyanov, have confirmed that restitution is not something that they were aiming for when pushing for the court's decision. According to them, their sole aim was to restore the “good name” of Nikolay II and take another step towards the House of Romanov's return to Russia.

The potential return of the properties to the royal family is made even more unlikely by the unambiguous nature of the Russian law on the issue. The law “On the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression” does mention that all confiscated property must be returned to the owner, but does not stipulate for any compensation for the descendants of the deceased.

In her interview with the Interfax newsagency, Maria Vladimirovna confirms that restitution has never been her intention:

“There is no connection between the rehabilitation of Emperor Nikolay II and members of his family and any sort of property questions. I sought rehabilitation of the royal passion bearers so that the crime committed by the totalitarian theomachist regime is condemned, and there is no repeat of such horrors in Russia. I pity those who cannot understand that some things in this world can be done for truth, honour and dignity and not for financial gain”.

However, some experts tell us another version, according to which the heirs of Nikolay II could try to recover supposed deposits in European banks. There is a rumour that the royal family had large savings accounts in Swiss banks. Allegedly, this money was not returned to Russia when the Emperor was killed; instead, it’s remained “frozen” to this day.

However, Aleksandr Zakatov , the director of the chancellery of the House of Romanov, asserted that such accounts did exist, but the Tsar spent more of the funds during the First World War. The rest was, allegedly, liquidated during the Great Depression in the early 30s.

Zakatov points out that after the Great Depression, the closest surviving heirs of the royal family, Nikolay II's sisters, were notified of the remaining savings in the banks. While the Great Duchess Olga Aleksandrovna travelled from Denmark to collect her small sum of money, Great Duchess Ksenya Aleksandrovna did not make the trip as she lived in the UK at the time, and travelling to Germany would have cost more money than was left in the bank.

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