One thing I've yet to see, but it would extremely funny to see: Polish nationalists defending either the Bolsheviks or Romanovs depending on what the worm parliament in their brain decides. Death to those who subjugated Poland under brutal imperial rule, or death to the evil commies who they also think subjugated Poland under imperial rule.
i don't condone child murder, but if you don't want uncontrollable violent mobs of people to seek bloody retribution and vengeance upon you and your family, perhaps don't personally lead murderous pogroms against minority ethnicities and political dissidents for decades, and maybe don't keep your entire nation in poverty and famine for generations while you and your family live in the finest luxury available to man.
There are certain moments in history where there's just too much at stake. The end of the various monarchies of europe was one of them. If you don't want a monarchy to come back you almost always need to put an end to it thoroughly.
Hereditary systems of power are stupid and cause this scenario.
It's bad that the kids were killed, it's their parents that killed them.
If you claim that God says your kids get to rule over everybody else there's one really obvious thing that's going to happen to them if people decide they don't want to be ruled by monar hs anymore.
Also their parents were so concerned with their safety instead of just fleeing they loaded the kids clothes down with giant jewels to the point it caused the kids to take longer to die because they had a rudimentary ballistic vest on.
Yeah, I consider it like the Israeli children who died in the crossfire that came from Hamas, i.e. that it's the fault of their guardians involving them in a monstrous political project where such things are not only possible but somewhat likely.
From 1963 onward, the re-educated former of China Emperor Puyi regularly gave press conferences praising life in the People's Republic of China, and foreign diplomats often sought him out, curious to meet the famous "Last Emperor" of China. In an interview with Behr, Li Wenda told him that Puyi was a very clumsy man who "invariably forgot to close doors behind him, forgot to flush the toilet, forgot to turn the tap off after washing his hands, had a genius for creating an instant, disorderly mess around him".[280] Puyi had been so used to having his needs catered to that he never entirely learned how to function on his own.
He tried very hard to be modest and humble, always being the last person to board a bus, which meant that on one occasion he missed the ride, mistaking the bus conductor for a passenger. In restaurants he would tell waitresses, "You should not be serving me. I should be serving you."During this period, Puyi was known for his kindness, and once after he accidentally knocked down an elderly lady with his bicycle, he visited her every day in the hospital to bring her flowers to make amends until she was released.
I don't really feel bad for the tsar or tsarina, and I definitely internalize that Mark Twain quote people (including myself) like to post about revolutionary terror, but I think a case can be made that the tsar's kids were young enough to be re-educated and proletarianized. Also it was just ruthless witness-silencing to kill their servants. Anyway, it's all speculative anyway. The whole reason the family was killed was because a white army legion was closing in on Yekaterinburg and Lenin didn't want the royal family falling into their hands.
I've heard it argued that it might have actually sowed chaos in the white army if the tsar fell into their hands, since the white army was already split between Absolute Monarchists, Constitutional Monarchists, Liberal/Conservative Republicans, and even some Right-SRs (agrarian socialists) that were purged later. The question of what to do with the tsar would have possibly caused a lot of white army infighting. But we can never know because it didn't happen.
Trotsky, with his penchant for showmanship, wanted to be the prosecutor in a trial against Nicholas, similar to what happened with the French revolution, but he never got to have that dream fulfilled. Doing it in public that way certainly would have legitimized it more than what actually happened, which is that they did it quietly, tried and failed to destroy the bodies, and then wouldn't admit it for a long time. I don't understand the "kids had it coming because they had jewels sown into their clothes" argument. Yeah. Their parents were using them as human shields like all reactionary parents do. And? If our society is wrongly structured to treat children like the property of their parents, then shouldn't children be liberated from their reactionary parents, rather than killed alongside them? I think a lot of people just say "fuck them kids" for shock value to trigger the porkies.
Those kids had dozens of pounds of precious gems stuffed into their clothes because their parents were so concerned for their well being and weren't trying to cling to their wealth to their last breath.
Yeah, I get why it's funny, and I understand why it happened, but I don't think we in this day should use it for lols. It would be like making wojaks of children getting killed during the Haitian revolution - I don't think there's a purpose to that kind of humor other than being edgelord shit.
Although the massacre of the Romanovs was a moral failing, it does not delegitimize the right for the workers, peasants, and soldiers who suffered under the feudal class dictatorship that saw them as expendable, to rise up for their freedom from such a system and towards their own self-government. Denying this is like condemning the end of slavery in North America because of slave revolts.
I wouldn't call it a moral failing of the revolution but an act of necessity to defend themselves from the wolves that would use any one of these children as a symbol of the Russian Empire to revive it with the support of every monarchy in the region. I mean just look at Miami and how bloodthirsty the children of gusanos are for losing their plantations, I can only imagine how bloodthirsty a child denied their right to an empire would be.
I don't know what kind of calculus exists to actually prove this or that. I'm skeptical since the reactionaries will invent their own justification absent an actual living Romanov anyway. But all I wanted to state is that this act, unsanctioned by the Bolsheviks themselves, doesn't delegitimize the revolution
After reading a bit about what mobs of peasants did to nobles and military officers in the early days of the revolution in Losurdo's book on Stalin, killing the family via firing squad seems humane in comparison.
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
We are taught that the deaths of one royal family was a terrible tragedy, and never asked to think about the uncountable people that family had slaughtered at their behest. In other words, something something trolley problem something something pull the lever and kill the royals
Somehow read some article somewhere talking about this, then tries to make this argument while simultaneously trying to convince you Putler wants to rebuild the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire.
They let PuYi live because he was literally too pathetic to kill and just keeping him around allowed for living proof of how weak and corrupted the Qing dynasty had become towards its end. That and House Aisin-Gioro had like 29k members while the Romanovs were on the verge of inbreeding themselves to extinction already.
What people feared would happen had the Romanovs been allowed to live was also exactly what happened to PuYi. The Japanese used him as a puppet in the Northeast.