Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/July 2018/Op-ed
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Requiem for the Romonovs |
- By TomStar81
In May 1894, Emperor
This act would set Nicholas II up to follow in his father's footsteps. Initially, as Imperialists were inclined to do, he worked with the other "Great Nations" of Europe to advance political and geographical goals - in particular, Nicholas II had played a major role in organizing the Hague Convention of 1899, which would help lay the groundwork for the modern-day Geneva Conventions. Despite these early, limited successes the Russian Empire still lagged sorely behind its European counterparts in a technological and industrial sense, and this lag began to catch up with Russia as Nicholas' reign progressed. In a time when steam trains, gasoline cars, and flying machines were wowing the world in the west, Russia was still making use of horses and wagons, still had a disproportionately large lower-class working demographic and, thanks to an absence of advisors with actual field experience, the Russian monarchs had managed to snuff out most of what was at the time considered the middle class, arguably the most important in post-industrial revolution societies. Nicholas II in particular had a nasty habit of not understanding the ins and outs of Russia's manufacturing, production, agricultural, and commercial businesses or the people that ran them; either due to innocence, misplaced trust in bad advisors, or perhaps a certain naivete in matters of the state Nicholas always seemed to be misguessing, underestimating, or overlooking signs that his Russian Empire was in dire straits. The first sign that Nicholas II's reign was in trouble came when socialist sentiment began spreading across the Empire, fueled in part by personnel affiliated with the Constitutional Democratic Party, Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. These parties advocated for governmental reforms which upset Nicholas, who was determined to retain the autocracy his father had left him. Despite these efforts to undermine Imperial rule, the Russian Empire remained one of the world's great powers.
Nicholas II's reign began to crumble in 1904-05, when the
By the time of World War I, the citizens of the Russian Empire had gotten over the 1905 revolution and greeted the conflict with enthusiasm and patriotism, with the defense of Russia's fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs, as the main battle cry. Initially, the Russian army invaded Germany's province of East Prussia and occupied a significant portion of Austrian-controlled Galicia in support of the Serbs. Military reversals and shortages among the civilian population soon soured much of the population. German control of the Baltic Sea and German-Ottoman control of the Black Sea severed Russia from most of its foreign supplies and potential markets. By the middle of 1915, the impact of the war was demoralizing. Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties were increasing, and inflation was mounting. Strikes rose among low-paid factory workers, and there were reports that peasants, who wanted reforms of land ownership, were restless. The Tsar eventually decided to take personal command of the army and moved to the front, leaving Alexandra in charge in the capital. As the government failed to produce supplies, mounting hardship created massive riots and rebellions. With Nicholas away at the front from 1915 through 1916, authority appeared to collapse and the capital was left in the hands of strikers and mutineering conscript soldiers. Despite efforts by the British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan to warn the Tsar that he should grant constitutional reforms to fend off revolution, Nicholas continued to bury himself away at the Staff HQ (Stavka) 600 kilometres (400 mi) away at Moghilev, leaving his capital and court open to intrigues and insurrection.
By early 1917, Russia was on the verge of total and utter collapse. On 23 February in Petrograd, a combination of very severe cold weather and acute food shortages caused people to start to break shop windows to get bread and other necessities. In the streets, red banners appeared and the crowds chanted "Down with the German woman! Down with Protopopov! Down with the war! Down with the Tsar!" Police started to shoot at the populace from rooftops, which incited riots. The troops in the capital were by this time poorly motivated and their officers had no reason to be loyal to the regime, and as a result they began to side with the populace.
The Tsar's Cabinet begged Nicholas to return to the capital and offered to resign completely. Some 500 miles away the Tsar, misinformed by the Minister of the Interior,
On 12 March 1917, the
With no faith or confidence in the Emperor, and with order broken down across the Russian Empire, members of the Duma and the Soviet formed a Provisional Government to try to restore order. They issued a demand that Nicholas must abdicate. Faced with this demand, which was echoed by his generals, deprived of loyal troops, with his family firmly in the hands of the Provisional Government and fearful of unleashing civil war and opening the way for German conquest, Nicholas had little choice but to submit. He thus abdicated on behalf of his son, and drew up a new manifesto naming his brother, Grand Duke Michael, as the next Emperor of all the Russians. With this blow the Russian Empire was irreversibly compromised. Grand Duke Michael declined to accept the throne until the people were allowed to vote through a Constituent Assembly for the continuance of the monarchy or a republic.
Meanwhile, members of the Duma and the Soviet formed the Provisional Government to try to restore order to the nation. This transitional period came as welcome development initially, as the people were finally working on a government in which in the Czar and his family would not be a key part. However, as is the case with all transitional periods, the elements that worked together cooperatively to beat the greater threat broke off into independent fiefdoms when that threat was neutralized. Here, in Russia, the people who had stood so firmly together to oust the Czar would break into smaller units with their own goals and agendas, and more importantly their own ideas about what the government they were going to create should look like.
The Provisional Government at the time was composed of two large factions and a small, distant third faction that collectively brought three different ideas to the table concerning the future of the Russian Government. The smallest of these factions advocated for a return of the Czar to the throne so as to restore the Russian Empire, while the largest two factions (broadly) advocated for turning Russia into a constitutional republic or a socialist state. Hampered by hardliners on both the left and the right, the Provisional Government attempted to find some sort of middle ground between the factions that would leave all relevant groups content at least with the role their groups could play in this future government. However, the provisional government struggled to gain traction in its efforts to move forward in the months following the abdication. It was forced to accept the resignation of the foreign affairs minister over his statements in support of continuing the war and then had to ride out a
Meanwhile, the deposed Nicholas II, now held as a citizen along with the rest of the imperial family, were taken to Tobolsk, then to Yekaterinburg, where they were interned at the Ipatiev House. During this time the guards began to whittle away at the family's privileges, depriving Nicholas of the use of ceremonial paraphernalia, reducing the family to soldiers' rations which eliminated coffee and butter, micromanaging the time they had to themselves, and severely restricting contact to the outside world. The guards had also taken the more ominous step of quietly murdering certain retainers to the royal family such as Klementy Nagorny and Ivan Sednev. Taking advantage of an attempted takeover of the city by anarchists which had been violently put down by red guards, the Government in Russia had claimed that Monarchists had attempted to rescue the Emperor which was then used as an excuse to further restrict the already severely restricted privileges of the Romanov family.
On June 29, 1918, it was agreed by the Ural Regional Soviet that the Romanovs should be executed. This decision was sent to Moscow for approval, and on July 3 seven members of the Central Executive Committee concurred with the decision, electing to leave the details of the execution up to the Ural Soviet. For the next two weeks the Ural Soviet worked on a plan of execution along with both pre- and post-execution details to ensure that the execution was carried out efficiently and that as much evidence as possible could be destroyed as quickly as possible. This was also done to prevent any member of the execution team from raping the women or attempting to make off with any jewelry hidden on the bodies. On July 16, word came down that the Red Army contingent in the area was retreating on all fronts and that the executions could be delayed no longer. Accordingly, Yakov Yurovsky ordered the executioners assembled and then gathered the Romanov family together, explaining to them that they were to be evacuated for their own safety. Once in the basement, Yurovsky abruptly declared: "Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you." Nicholas II was caught entirely off guard. It was reported that he swiftly turned around and asking "what?" prompting Yurovsky to repeat the declaration before opening fire on Nicholas. This precipitated a roughly 20-minute period during which the Romanov Family was systematically murdered by bullets and bayonets, permanently removing the Romanovs from any place in Russia's future government.
With the executions completed, the bodies were loaded on the back of a military truck and then shipped to a disposal site, although the truck twice got stuck on the boggy and muddy roads. Following the second incident in which the truck got stuck in mud it was decided to bury the bodies at the location rather than attempt to press on to the intended site. Clothes were removed and jewelry which had earlier acted as a primitive form of body armor was seized from the corpses. In a rare moment of dignity for the now deceased royal family, Yurovsky refused to allow the men selected for the job to loot the bodies and dismissed at gunpoint two men who had fondled Empress Alexandra Feodorovna's genitalia. The bodies were then dissolved with acid and lime save but for two which were burned, and the bone remains for all family members were repeatedly smashed prior to burial to make it more difficult for anyone to positively identify the royal family's remains.
For a number of years the Soviet government kept quiet about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the Romanov family, only officially revealing the deaths of the Romanov family in its entirety in 1926 and then only reluctantly in light of the publication of an investigation by a White émigré. To protect Lenin, the blame was placed entirely on the Ural Soviet, but the subject in its entirely would be suppressed by Joseph Stalin in 1938.
Today, the Romanov family has been somewhat rehabilitated, owing in part to modern forensic analysis and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russian authorities have been able recover what little remains of the Romanov family and lay to rest the stories of the various
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