MOSCOW. Sept 27 (Interfax) - Appeals for the political rehabilitation of the last Russian royal family are senseless, deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate's External Church Relations Department Bishop Mark of Yegoryevsk told Interfax on Thursday.

"No one thinks that Nicholas II and his family are criminals or traitors. People who are making rehabilitation appeals are knocking on an open door," he said.

One should remember that a huge number of people fell victim to the Soviet regime, he said.

"Everything was topsy-turvy in that Russia. Will the rehabilitation of the royal family help the understanding of the history and what can be done for many people tortured to death and executed without a trial?" the bishop wondered.

He disagreed with the opinion that the political rehabilitation of the tsar will be an act of repentance for the conduct of Bolsheviks.

"The administration of modern Russia is hardly responsible for what the revolutionaries did 90 years ago," he said.

"In some sense, the government has repented, because the mentality and ways of Bolsheviks have nothing to do with the mentality and ways of the current authorities," the cleric said.

As for the repentance symbol, one should recall the burial of "the Yekaterinburg remains" at the emperor's vault in St. Petersburg in the late 1990s. First president Boris Yeltsin attended that ceremony, the bishop said.

"True, the church did not recognize the authenticity of those remains, but the authorities buried them as if they were the remains of the royal family. That ceremony confirmed that the modern authorities severed connections with the administration, which perpetrated the dreadful crime, and totally changed the attitude to the past events and the family of the last Russian emperor," the bishop said.