I got to the part of the Revolutions podcast where the royal family died. He said the consensus is that Moscow ordered the death of the whole family. Is that pretty much agreed on by serious historians nowadays or is that Cold War historiagraphy?
It seemed kind of split when I looked in some Ask Historians thread on Reddit from years ago, but I also might just be seeing what I want to see. What do historians think? What do you think? If Lenin and company in Moscow ordered it, why?
Local soviet ultimately. Soviet government wanted to bring tsar to Moscow to trial, directed that multiple times, ultimately they send Trotsky to bring tsar to Moscov, and if impossible to conduct trial on place as the representative. But Trotsky didn’t managed to get there before white army surrounded Yekaterinburg (which later fell so they would certainly take the Romanovs with them).
The only source about Lenin ordering shooting of Romanovs is of course Trotsky who said that Lenin and Sverdlov talked to him and ordered him to do so. But of course, typical for Trotsky, he only pulled out that revelation after becoming renegade when Lenin and Sverdlov were both long dead, so we could safely assume that did not happen in reality.
The narrator of the podcast said there was plenty of contemporary evidence that Lenin and Sverdlov ordered the execution and lied about approving it ex post facto, but the only evidence he directly referenced in the podcast itself was the fact that they had a history of lying because the lie that only the tsar died (that they only kept up for just a little while), and that quote from Trotsky.
Then the fact that he said it was years later when Trotsky said this and he had his own motivations at the time, and then ignored this contradiction, made me wonder if there’s other evidence out there that made him so sure about this version of events. There’s also the vague idea that the Ural Soviet wouldn’t dare execute them without Moscow permission, but I’m not sure why he’s so sure of that. It seems to me things weren’t nearly so centralized at that time, especially with a civil war going on and all.
I appreciate the additional detail that not only was the quote from when the people who could counter are long dead, but it was after he was going rogue. It makes me more and more sure that the narrator was a lot more positive of one version of events for some random personal reason, like anti-Soviet bias, and not for any solid historical reason. And thanks the book recommendation! I’ll be sure to check that out.
I’m likely not as knowledgeable as some comrades about the Civil War period, but I will say that the amount of discretion given to local soviets even during the Stalinist era, which was considered by many to be the most harsh, was and is inconceivable to most contemporary Americans, even modern liberalism has harsher incentive structures due to contract law than the soviets did.
Hell, part of the problem of the Soviet Union was a distinct lack of extreme federal centralization, which allowed regions to vary greatly in how they governed themselves and enforced or didn’t enforce production quotas created by the politburo. Like if you didn’t meet your quotas it was difficult to advance your career, unless you were well connected or bribing people, but if you didn’t care, it was only really during the Stalinist era that you had to justify why you didn’t meet quota (like, if an essential machine broke down you had to have eyewitness verification from other plant workers this actually happened, so if you weren’t liked people could 100% screw you over) or be detained, which is what led to alot of blackmarket graft during and prior to Peristrioka.
I would imagine during the Civil War even more political latitude was given to the soviets, but ultimately I am not very familiar with that period of history.
Who cares? The Romanovs were monsters that lived in opulence off the backs of their people who they forced to live in poverty and ignorance.
Monarchies are a crime against humanity.
I mean the best situation is if you can do a Puyi like the Chinese, if only so fuckers aren’t complaining a century later.
Still blows my mind that they made a le wholesome children’s cartoon about Princess Anastasia. Like damn, imagine if they made a Disney movie about Hitler’s daughter escaping from the mean old allies.
Hands off the lathe, there’s already a critically acclaimed alt fiction they could adapt
what the fuck
Is that supposed to be fucking 1990s Anne Frank on the right?
Anna finishes her story with Heidi [Hitler’s daughter] escaping from the ruins of Berlin and emigrating to Australia, where she grows old and eventually reveals the truth to her granddaughter.
Damn it, Australia.
What’s funny is that the creator of Anastasia also made another movie in which the inciting incident is the pogroms and cossack raids.
Who cares?
/thread
I don’t know who ordered the deaths of the Romanovs but I can inform you on their likely reasoning. In the most simplistic sense Russia was a monarchy for centuries and its populations, ESPECIALLY the peasantry were very used to this and did not have the educational basis to understand organized society beyond this format. This, combined with the fact that historically speaking leaving a member of royal blood alive after seizing power leaves room for counter revolution heavily informed the decision to straight up eradicate the Romanovs. From the perspective of the Bolsheviks, leaving Romanovs alive was too risky and honestly, with the counter revolution that insued after, I think they were right to do so. I cannot imagine how the civil war would have proceeded had the whites had a Romanov.
Eh. The Tsar Nicholas was pretty hated by the time of his abdication. Had a white warlord rescued him, they wouldn’t have restored him, rather just used him to help themselves be Tsar.
Likewise there were not shortage of noble whites to make Tsar with the family gone, had the Bolsheviks been less successful.
I’m team better scenario would have been trial and execution for Nicholas. Rehabilitation for the rest (under close scrutiny in Siberia).
The whites never attempted to restore Nicholas. The attempts to do monarchy were centered on Nikolaevich during the civil war and Kiril post war.
Every Romanov was a potential nerve for the tissues of the White army and international reaction to weave themselves around, so the survival of any was unacceptable
IIRC, it was a local decision, but Moscow approved it post factum. Also Moscow did explicitly order the shooting of other Romanovs after recieving news about the shooting of the tsar.
I think it’s harder for us to understand now as the era of kings is (mostly
) dead, but it makes sense to end a dynasty like that. The historical norm at that point was even a 3 year old would be used as a sovereign and the white army would have drawn authority from the Romanov line.Without that lineage, their claim to power was incredibly weak and the only alternative was the communists who had the mandate of the workers and production on their side.
From memory it is debated how much Moscow knew and at what point they gave their permission. The whole Civil War was a mess and the fog of war was dense.
This seems to be what I’m leaning towards, but it does counter the narrator of the podcast who was extremely positive about the Moscow Soviet ordering it. He made it sound like there’s tons of evidence they did it. Which if they did, I’d get it, and wouldn’t even care, it was a crazy civil war going on, and the Whites were on the move. Shit happens. I just like history and am curious and wanted to know, and I guess it does reveal some of the mindset of the narrator that i can keep in mind going forward (a bias towards believing in Trotsky and a bias against official Soviet version of events).
I believed it was the local soviet that gave the order since there were afraid to lose territorial control after some white army victories
As a sidenote: good luck with the rest of the podcast from this point foward. The quality drops a lot, he starts mixing up a lot of key facts and becomes way too reliant on anti-communist sources like “A People’s Tragedy”.
Damn that’s too bad. I was warned that would happen at some point, but up to now, it has been entertaining hearing him get radicalized more and more every season just from reading straight facts from history lol. It’s going to be disappointing if that trend reverses now. But it’s been part of the reason I’ve been slow rolling the end of this season so much, because I’ve been apprehensive of when that will happen =(
I think what gets missed here is that in the context of revolution, executing the monarch isn’t shocking—it’s standard. Historically, revolutionaries don’t leave kings alive. So whether Moscow directly ordered it or not almost doesn’t matter—it was a move to secure the revolution, and everyone complicit probably knew it had to happen.
What bothers me more is how much the narrative around this moment was shaped by the Cold War and the Red Scare. Lenin gets turned into this cartoon villain in Western historiography, like this was a uniquely cruel act, when in reality? Monarchs fall in revolutions. That’s not a Lenin thing—it’s a history thing.
I just think we’ve been fed a really distorted lens for so long that people forget how common this is in global uprisings. It’s not a morality play—it’s a power shift.
Stuff like this is what I get stuck in for days—I’m deep into exploring how narratives get shaped after the fact. Especially how power rewrites history to serve itself.
I think the thing that people usually frown on is the death of the kids, at least on the left side. Personally, I don’t even blame them that much for that either because it was during a Civil War, at the beginning of a delicate time in the new government’s period of rule. It’s hard to tell what decisions will come back to you bite you or not in that kind of environment, plus fog of war and all that. Wish they did the trial like planned, or even better some sort of reformation like the last Chinese emperor, but oh well, that’s real life history for you. It’s messy sometimes.
