• happybadger [he/him]
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    They rose up anyway but without a common goal. The Syrian Islamists without ISIS are less cohesive than they were with that centralising force because all of the various factions have competing interests. I would rather face the latter than the former because they can't coordinate as well.

    You're assuming that the Romanov deaths happened in a vacuum, that there weren't conditions that resulted in that moment and conditions that could have been created from any action in that moment. What exactly do you think is going to happen the moment the Bolsheviks walk out with the Romanov children and say "Here you go, remaining royal families in Europe. Look how civil we are as we destroy everything you represent except for a status symbol."? Are those empires going to not immediately turn on the Soviets? Are the Whites going to respect Bolshevik family values? Is anyone going to be meaningfully swayed by that action other than armchair moralists a century later?

    Or are they going to say "yeah this is the rightful ruler of Russia" and then intensify a united effort to defeat the Bolsheviks, at which point they would install a leader whose regime is responsible for pogroms. If that's the case, are you willing to accept those civilian deaths somehow morally better and under what criteria? Because they aren't dressed in fancy clothes paid for with the blood of peasant children?

    edit: Found it. There was an early Soviet agitprop poster. "Learn to read and write. Children of literate mothers die less often." The desperation behind the need for that poster reflects a depravity that is accepted because it's background noise. How many of those children dead to their mothers' illiteracy as a result of Romanovs is one Romanov child worth? Children are dying either way so we're talking triage.

      • happybadger [he/him]
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        edit-2
        4 years ago

        I think any survivor could have fit the propaganda role as "orphaned boy/girl emperor/empress seeks to reclaim homeland from red terrorists". It sure does suck that their father chose to elevate them to the status of blood successors. It sucks that his choice for an undemocratic regime fueled by violence, which couldn't even provide basic survival for the people it spared, knowingly endangered his children because the stability of the state was tied to their survival rather than the survival of its citizens. It sucks he decided to create several million orphans in the pointless aristocratic war that preceded the revolution that was a consequence of his barbarism.