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one of the comments is fantastic
Mother: ... and as the prince put the glass slipper on Cinderella's foot, she kicked him square in the jaw. 'All power to the Soviet!' she cried, as the mice ripped the prince apart. The revolution had begun, bathed in the blood of tyrants
Daughter: ...
Mother: Well, good night! Sweet dreams, comrade
The Romanovs were despicable even for monarchs, they kept serfdom in Russia until like 1860. Imo execution was more mercy than they deserved.
the kids didn't do that though
they had to die, because there was no viable alternative, but to say they "deserved it" because of what their psychopath parents did is pretty fucked upEh Alexi would've grown up to be as much of an asshole as his father was. If your governmental system practices hereditary rule, that comes with consequences. Obv. I understand that killing kids is upsetting, but I personally don't feel one ounce of pity for the children of a king.
almost certainly, but i'm not a fan of the whole "sins of the father" thing
but it's not sins of the father. it's the continuation of the monarchy.
fair point, they definitely had to die, don't get me wrong, but blaming them for what their parents did, even though they almost certainly would have continued it doesn't sit well with me
i'm drunk as fuck so this may not make senseI mean, we know what they would have done because we're analyzing them as people who would have filled a particular role in society. their heredity binds them to the role and their role ensures the awful things they would have done. it's not really about what their parents did but more what it means to be a member of the royal family in the line of succession.
That's why I've been saying that killing them was the necessary thing to do, but that it isn't something we should celebrate or be proud of. They were children. They hadn't committed any crimes yet. It was an unfortunate necessity and nothing more.
sure, I don't disagree with that take. that's probably true of all revolutionary violence, in the end - justified, necessary, and gruesome. the aesthetic celebration of it is useful for constructing identity but we should be wary of how far we take it.
Useful for constructing an identity? I'm not sure I buy into that. I cringe every time I see a post celebrating the execution of children, and I'm already a leftist, and a Marxist-Leninist at that. That kind of stuff doesn't appeal to anyone who isn't already a hardcore communist, and doesn't appeal to many who already are.
Our justification of the Romanov executions should be purely utilitarian, to explain why the Bolsheviks did what they did and why it was necessary.
right, it definitely excludes anyone who isn't already a communist. but the utility is that it separates committed communists from those who aren't and it happens because it allows us to identify who's with us in the in-group (and it paints a target on the out-group). that's not really enough by itself that we should step into the glorification of violence (that way leads to reactionary politics), but it's very hard to stop it from happening at all.
I'm more describing why it happens than I am trying to justify it. it's worth eroding, I'm with you on that.
Alright, it looks like we agree. That's why I make these comments on these kinds of posts -- It's important to justify the actions of the Bolsheviks, because most libs' take is "noooo evil commies killed the princess," but it should only go as far as utilitarian justification.
yes, i accept that, and the only good royal is a dead one, but the original post i replied to implied that the kids were also doing the bad things
i did, hence the post but yeah, to make my position clear, they definitely had to die, they were related to almost all of the royals in europe, they would have been a rallying point for everyone who wanted the tsars reinstated and imprisoning them in secret would have been impossible there was no alternative that would not have ended the revolution
Hot take alert:
Let's not glorify killing kids. Yes, it probably needed to happen to prevent the monarchy from being reinstated. That doesn't mean we should celebrate it. It's not something to be proud of. It was an unfortunate necessity, that's it.
EDIT: Fuck the king and queen, obviously. Celebrate that shit all you want.
Hot take alert:
Killing royals no matter what age is good. The reactionary whelps would've sent millions of Russian proles to die in some other pointless war if they could've. I only regret that Kirill Vladimirovich was able to escape to Finland and breed more R*manovs.
EDIT: Fuck the king and queen especially
The children of modern billionaires will almost certainly be just as terrible as their parents should they be allowed to inherit all of their parents' wealth. Should we kill the children of billionaires too by the same reasoning?
Obviously in this case the royal succession/restoration of the monarchy argument, which I feel is the only good reason for killing the Romanov children, doesn't apply.
The failchildren of billionaires will probably blow their family's fortune on lawyers to fight over money. The children of an absolute monarch inherit a nation filled with living people that they are allowed to treat like slaves. It's a hideously reactionary institution that needed to be ripped out root and stem.
So you agree that the execution of the Romanov family was necessary in order to completely eradicate the institution of monarchy. That's my take -- it was necessary, and that's as far as we need to justify it.
Correct me if I'm reading you wrong, but it seems like your take was that they, the children, born into circumstances outside of their control, actively deserved their fate through their own actions.
Lmao I thought I made it obvious I was doing a bit when I called them "whelps" and "R*manovs"
The Wikipedia article on Puyi is very complete, good for a start, you can also read his own book "From Emperor to Citizen" which details his life written by "himself" (Ghost writer actually, but yeah). Of course, one must understand that he might be trying to clean up his reputation in his book, but nevertheless it is a good read, especially when he details the fall of Manchukuo when the Soviets invaded in August 1945, how literally everyone panicked and deserted.
Is The Last Emperor a good movie? I'm assuming it isn't that bad since China let them film there (although it was Deng era).
I've read about Puyi on Wikipedia and saw the movie is on HBO Max. Might give it a watch after my midterms are over.
It was my favorite struggle session. I can only imagine the Feds reading that thread
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.
The end of tsardom in Russia was bolsheviks winning the revolution, not the killing of Romanovs. If Whites have won the war then they had like crap ton of options of preserving the tsardom. This wasn't the first case of royal family dying out. They could have picked from local aristocrats. Pick from previously ruling families. Ruriks were still around, that's who Kropotkin was the prince of as far as I know. Or they could have picked from European royal families. British and German royals were cousins of Nicholas. Pick Wilhelms son. Hell pick Willhelm himself, he was unemployed at this point and had an amazing resume. Worst thing you could just do a dumb move like Swedes picking Marshall Bernadotte to be their king.
If some Romanovs survived, they would be nobodies today. Maybe appearing in news every couple of years crying about their ponies and palaces. Probably trying to get some of their stuff back after 1989 and eating shit. No one cares about the current head of House Bourbon or the current head of House Bonaparte. They have about as much chance of getting their throne back as me winning a lottery. And I never buy tickets.
While I think the victory of the Russian Revolution and the establishing of the USSR is one of the most important victories in all human history, it is interesting to think what the world would look like if the Whites had won and then Wilhelm, last emperor of Germany, became the Tsar of Russia. That'd just be a really interesting thing to read in a history book. Maybe in this scenario the Nazis wouldn't rise to power and instead the Weimar Republic would continue (though, without knowing that much about the history, I assume in this scenario the Nazis would come about anyway since the pressure from France and Britain is still there).
Yeah it is fun to speculate. What is an underrated aspect is that the country would be very unstable after the Whites won. I would expect another revolution/civil war in a couple of decades, because the tensions in tsardom would be left unresolved. Bourbons got their French throne back after Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars, but they managed to only keep it for a very short while.
I also wonder how Lenin would be looked at in the alternative history. Maybe instead of a Kolchak movie from Russians we would get a Lenin one.
On Nazis it is also hard to know how they would look like without Soviet Union around. French and British empire would be probably more willing to quell them early to not upset the continental balance.
this yakov yurovsky guy sounds great but i dont want to judge him by only one deed
Tell your teacher I said princesses are evil
How they got all they money was they killed people.
