Today in History, July 17, 1918- Czar of Russia and Family Executed

Today in History, July 17, 1918, Execution of the Romanovs, the Czar and Czaritsa of Russia and their Children by the Soviet Government.

Today in History, July 17, 1918, Execution of the Romanovs, the Czar and Czaritsa of Russia and their Children by the Soviet Government.

By July 1918, Russia was engulfed in a hellish civil war which would cost millions of lives and damage a country already reeling from the devastation of World War I. Swept away in this hellfire was the old Tsarist monarchy, last headed by Nicholas II.

Nicholas had abdicated in 1917 as the Russian Revolution swept through the nation. Since then he had been a prisoner of successive governments, first the Provisional Government and then the administration run by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The Romanovs were shipped from place to place, eventually coming to Yekaterinburg in April, in the Urals, an area known for its hard Communist sympathies. As the White Russian forces grew closer, Lenin and his associates ordered the murder of the family to prevent them falling into anti-communist hands.

On the night of 17/18 July 1918, Nicholas, his wife Alexandra and their children Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia as well as several of their staff were executed in the basement of Ipatiev House. Their bodies were removed, mutilated and burned before being buried in a forest.

The remains of the family were discovered in stages - all except Alexei and Anastasia in 1979, and the bodies of the remaining children in 2007. Before the discovery of their bodies, rumors spread that some had survived, particularly Anastasia who would posthumously become the most famous of the Tsar's children.

---source, "On This Day"

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I would like to add a few salient points, bearing upon the circumstances of turmoil in Russia leading to The Czar's abdication and the Romanov's imprisonment and execution.

Nicholas II inherited the keys to the Kingdom, but with them, little of his grandfather's intelligence or humanity (Alexander II, assassinated March 1, 1881) and all of his father's (Alexander III) vindictiveness, rage and paranoia. Alexander II freed the Russian serfs in a limited way and allowed for an array of liberal reforms, many of which were reversed by his son Alexander III and his even more reactionary son Nicholas. Personality-wise, Nicholas II was a kind of Richard Nixon in Russian history. 

The Romanov's downfall began with his awful decision to fire his former Finance Minister and Prime Minister Count Sergei Witte, who was a Russian devotee of the economics of Alexander Hamilton, and German-American Hamiltonian, Friedrich List. Witte organized and financed the Trans-Siberian Railroad which transformed Russia economically and culturally. (Started under Alexander II, and finished under Nicholas II) The context of Witte's removal was the conjuncture of financial and political crisis beginning in the late 1890's in the aftermath of a growing trend of revolutionary movements, some of which conducted a series of internal domestic terrorist attacks and assassinations. This occured in the context of destabilizing British run acts of economic warfare against Russia, and extreme hoarding by the top-heavy Russian oligarchy.

Extremely destructive was the deliberate crashing of the Russian grain price by British allied speculators, bankrupting Russian farmers, which exacerbated the weather related crop failures of 1891 causing a horrific famine, which forced people literally into eating the thatch off their roofs. Britain was the main broker and buyer of Russian grain at the time, (aside from domestic consumption) treating Russia as their personal granary. Witte instituted countermeasures in response, including the creation of a gold backed Ruble to protect their economy, and using the Russian Treasury to buy enough grain to push the price back up. This put him at odds with the Russian nobility which objected to spending Treasury money which they saw as theirs, but he had the support of his Czar, Alexander III in so doing. Unfortunately, the damage was done and Russia was badly hurt by these attacks. 

Secondly, Czar Nicholas disregarded the advice of his military advisors and Witte, and blundered into a Pacific War with Japan in February of 1904, nominally over Korea's Port Arthur and the sphere around it. It was a logistically impossible fiasco which bankrupted the Treasury, caused shortages, casualties, and discontent,  leading to growing opposition at home, and was, in a way, Russia's Vietnam in that time, an extremely unpopular foreign war. The growing domestic opposition demanded representation and the creation of a Duma, which the intransigent Nicholas rejected. 

The popular anger resulted in a mass protest in 1905,  at first peaceful, led by Russian Priest Gregory Gapon (discovered later to have been an Okhrana agent) in front of the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, which became infamous as "Bloody Sunday," after the Czar's soldiers opened fire on an unarmed crowd. It is likely there were provocateurs in the crowd who wanted a bloodbath and started the violence, but regardless, Nicholas mishandled the entire affair, and unleashed his Ohkrana (secret police) on the democracy activists in a bloody crackdown afterward. (This is certainly something worth thinking about for today!) The Monarchy itself was deeply discredited by this, and in the meantime, Russians increased modernization and exposure to Western ideas introduced into Russia various rapidly influential socialist movements, and for the first time, real questioning of the validity of a Monarchy itself. 

Finally, the most well-known tragedy of the Romanovs was the story of Crown Prince Alexei, the Czarevich, heir to the Russian throne. Alexei, was as most people know a hemophiliac, which was a bleeding disorder which he inherited from the British Royal line of Victoria, who were cousins of the Russian Royals. After a number of near death bleeding episodes, the Czaritsa, Alexei's Mother Alexandra, brought in the insane Russian mystic, Rasputin, who claimed to have healing powers. Rasputin, a self-styled and ordained Russian Monk, had cut a large swath through Russian society, bedding numerous noblewomen, bilking them for money, throwing  extravagant parties for Russian "High Society," and peddling quack cures. 

However, there is a credible series of accounts that the "Mad Monk" did have a gift, aside from his sexual prowess and his ability to play upon superstition and ignorance, which was a facility for hypnotic suggestion. There are many who speculate that when brought into the Royal household to help the Czar's young son, that Rasputin had the ability through hypnosis to lower his blood pressure, slow his metabolism, and reduce the internal hemorrhaging. So, more and more, Alexandra turned to Rasputin in desperation, and as a result, she began to believe he was the holiest man alive. Thereafter, he worked his way into the family, and indirectly influenced the Czar through his wife, though the Czar was distrustful of him in the beginning. 

There were rumors of a sexual affair between Alexandra and Rasputin that were never proven, but for certain there was an extreme psychological dependence, including on Rasputin's "soothsaying," and "healing powers." The whole situation was insane.

The final downfall of the Romanovs was Czar Nicholas allowing himself to be played by his cousin, King George V, against his other cousin Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, with the trigger being the assassination of the ruling Hapsburg's Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo by a Serbian terrorist, (a member of the secret society "The Black Hand," Gavrilo Princip) pitting Russia and Germany against each other in the conflict which soon escalated into "The Great War." Germany was aligned with the Austrian Hapsburg Empire, and Russia was the protector of their Orthodox "little brother" Serbia in the Balkans. Nicholas blundered in, and stupidly led the war effort from the field near the front, putting himself in a situation where his commitment to the war was intractable and he could not allow an armistice. 

Most people know what happened afterward. The Russian people turned against the Monarchy over the war under conditions of extreme shortages, given that Alexandra was hated due to her German birth, her dalliance with Rasputin, and the Czar's arrogant refusal to allow democratic institutions until too late in the game, which he himself overrode in order to have his war. His position of crushing dissent hardened when his Prime Minister, Pyotr Stolypin was assassinated in front of him earlier in a theater by a terrorist, causing him to flash back on his grandfather's assassination by a terrorist bomb. 

The final outcome was the demand by the Duma under its leader Kerensky, the Menshevik, for the abdication of the Czar in the Revolution of 1917. This was preceded by Rasputin's assassination, (quite a story in itself) by a member of the Russian nobility. Ironically, Rasputin who was blamed for the War and accused of manipulating the Royal Family, was very against the war, and wrote an impassioned letter to his "Papa" and "Matuschka" begging them to not go to be drawn into it in which he made prophetic warnings of what would happen if they did. 

What followed soon was the collapse of Kerensky's government, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the famous "sealed train" ride by the reported German agent V. I. Lenin into Moscow station, where he was greeted as the new head of state. Lenin's dramatic arrival in Moscow then precipitated the so-called "Ten Days Which Shook the World", the Bolshevik takeover chronicled by American John Reed in his famous book by that name, reporting from the scene the events of those days. (made into a film starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton, "Reds")

Lenin withdrew Russia from World War I on March 18th, 1918, having taken power in October the year before with the promise of "Peace, Land, and Bread". However, the Czar and his family which had been under house arrest, had been moved around Russia under Kerensky to keep them safe from the Bolsheviks or others. When Lenin took power, Russia descended into civil War, between the Reds, (Bolsheviks, their Army led by Leon Trotsky) and the Whites, who represented the nobility, landowners, and those who wanted to restore the monarchy. 

The Royal family's bodyguards were replaced by Bolsheviks, and not long after Lenin ordered them all executed, to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Whites and being used for propaganda, or being restored to the throne in the event the Whites had won. 

Pictured below is the room where they were shot dead, having been brought together for what they thought was a family photo, but they were likely aware of their fate. 

Think of how the 20th Century devolved into a "Century of War." It all started with the manipulation of an entitled, egotistical and arrogant paranoid, who was unfit for the Russian throne, and who was played like a violin by those imperial powers out to destroy both Russia and Germany, to "make the world safe," not for democracy, but for the expanded operations of the British Empire system and it's allies worldwide, much of which was done under the rubric of "geopolitics" and as part of a strategy rooted in the politics of oil. 

Luckily, in the United States we still have a Constitutional system which allows for the removal of an incompetent and destructive head of state, so we today need not go down this road.

This isn't "history repeating." This is nations and people making the same foolish mistakes over and over. Hopefully, some day we will learn.

Sources;

Nicholas And Alexandra- Robert K. Massie

Dreadnaught- Robert K. Massie

Count Sergei Witte, Memoirs

Sergei Witte And The Twiglight of Imperial Russia-- Sidney Harcave

To The Edge Of The World, The Story Of The Trans-Siberian Railroad-- Christian Wolmar

Alexander II And The Modernization Of Russia-- W. E. Mosse

The Black Hand-- Wikipedia