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?
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?
Damn it, Australia.
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.
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
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.
