My great grandmother was a victim of Stalinist repression - they were simple peasants at the wrong place at the wrong time, falsely denounced as anti-Soviet agents, almost died after being deported from home, struggled to rebuild their lives, etc. etc. When asked about communism in the 1980s, she said, "It's wonderful that everyone has bread to eat now, but they shouldn't have killed the tsarevich Aleksey." So her own suffering wasn't a systematic problem with communism for her, but the murder of an innocent child was.
You can chuck it up to peasants slavishly loving their Tsar and so on, but the centuries of the monarchs being symbolically linked to the peasants are not to be dismissed lightly. No one missed the aristocracy, few people missed the monarchy, but plenty of people were outraged by the murder. Whatever the crimes of the royalty, the treatment of Puyi was the smarter choice and made the transition smoother. (The emperor of Viet Nam endorsed Ho Chi Minh's original revolution too, by the way... before he was back in French hands and died as a useless drunken playboy.) It may have been deemed a necessity in the fog of war, but it's a shame that it happened - the spilled blood of children.
My great grandmother was a victim of Stalinist repression - they were simple peasants at the wrong place at the wrong time, falsely denounced as anti-Soviet agents, almost died after being deported from home, struggled to rebuild their lives, etc. etc. When asked about communism in the 1980s, she said, "It's wonderful that everyone has bread to eat now, but they shouldn't have killed the tsarevich Aleksey." So her own suffering wasn't a systematic problem with communism for her, but the murder of an innocent child was.
You can chuck it up to peasants slavishly loving their Tsar and so on, but the centuries of the monarchs being symbolically linked to the peasants are not to be dismissed lightly. No one missed the aristocracy, few people missed the monarchy, but plenty of people were outraged by the murder. Whatever the crimes of the royalty, the treatment of Puyi was the smarter choice and made the transition smoother. (The emperor of Viet Nam endorsed Ho Chi Minh's original revolution too, by the way... before he was back in French hands and died as a useless drunken playboy.) It may have been deemed a necessity in the fog of war, but it's a shame that it happened - the spilled blood of children.