REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
The Fate of the Romanovs
Greg King and Penny Wilson
John Wiley & Sons, 2003
657 pages, $49.95 (hb)
The telegrams from Ekaterinburg to Moscow were brief and to the point — the former Tsar of Russia (Nicholas II) had been shot "by a decree of the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet", and his family "had suffered the same fate".
For nine decades, the execution on July 17, 1918, of the Romanovs by the Bolsheviks has fuelled a massive industry of anti-socialist publishing and film-making with one message: see what comes from putting "rough proletarians" into power — everything fine, decent and good is drowned in blood.
From Hollywood (Dr Zhivago) to shelf-buckling biography to gushing internet site, we see the family (Nicholas and Alexandra, their son, Alexei, and their four elegant daughters, Olga, Marie, Tatiana and Anastasia) as tragic victims of Bolshevik monsters. In The Fate of the Romanovs, however, Greg King and Penny Wilson opt for "reason before passion" and manage (despite some routine anti-Bolshevik prejudices) to avoid yet another hysterical contribution to the Romanov-execution industry.
The Romanov dynasty had clocked up 300 years of autocratic rule in Russia by the time Nicholas inherited the crown. He met all the job criteria — vicious opposition to democracy ("alien to the Russian soul") and hatred of reformers, socialists and Jews.
He had spilled the blood of millions of Russians in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and World War I. Nicholas ran a repressive police state ("don't spare the bullets") in which jail, torture, exile, pogroms and massacres were staples for dealing with peasant unrest or workers' strikes. Five per cent of the population owned nearly everything, while 150 million peasants and workers toiled, starved and froze to death.
Alexandra had enormous influence over her husband and was even more reactionary — exhorting Nicholas to "be more autocratic", and finding in the charlatan monk, Rasputin, mystical support for her extremism. "Russia loves to be caressed with a horse-whip — such is the nature of these people", she wrote.
Their world ended in February 1917 when the Tsar was forced to abdicate by a revolution which took power from the monarchy and shared it between a bourgeois parliament and the workers' soviets. Fearing a monarchist counter-revolution, the provisional government arrested the Tsar and his family, beginning 481 days of house imprisonment.
After the Bolshevik-led socialist revolution in October 1917, Lenin and Trotsky prepared to bring the Tsar to trial in Moscow.
The Ural Bolsheviks, however, did not trust Vassili Yakovlev, who was despatched to bring the Romanovs to Moscow, and they hijacked the Romanovs. Detained in Ekaterinburg, the Romanovs brought along with them four servants, and three million rubles worth (US$14 million today) of smuggled diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires and pearls concealed in the belts, hats, buttons and clothes of the four duchesses.
Monarchists and counter-revolutionaries, and Western and Russian anti-communist historians, have portrayed the last 78 days of captivity in Ekaterinberg as a period of humiliations, abuse, torture and rape by the Bolshevik guards. Newly released archival documents, however, as well as the Tsar and Tsarina's own diaries, shatter the lurid propaganda tales.
Food from the soviet soup kitchen was not "scarce, bad and often forgotten" and the prisoners were not forced to eat from a communal bowl with a wooden spoon. The food was sometimes late, but it was fresh and plentiful. Food rationing was later introduced — at a time when all citizens in Ekaterinburg were being rationed.
Doors were not removed, infringing the privacy of the Romanovs. The family was not forced to use the toilets accompanied by a guard. They exercised twice a day for up to two hours, not a mere 15 minutes a day. The daughters were not forced to play the piano to accompany revolutionary songs. The guards were not "coarse, drunken, criminal types" but ordinary factory workers, some Bolshevik Party members, most not.
The issue of what to do with the Romanovs was soon forced by the Civil War. The counter-revolution had the Bolsheviks under seige. A British Expeditionary Force had landed at Archangelsk, the Czech Legion had conquered western Siberia and White generals butchered their way towards Moscow. Monarchist plots to free the Romanovs were plentiful and the guards were becoming unreliable. They were friendly with the flirtatious daughters and, displaying a generosity of spirit common to the revolutionary working class, many had come to view the family with sympathy, as scared and vulnerable people.
To the background of cannon, the Ural Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg resolved to execute the Romanovs, but sought Lenin's sanction. Rebuffed, they strengthened discipline with new guards under a new commander until a further deterioration on the military front saw the Ural Bolsheviks again seeking last minute sanction from Moscow for execution. Erratic cable communication delayed receipt of their request until after the event.
The seven Romanovs and four servants were called into the basement. All 11 guards assigned to the execution squad disobeyed orders to shoot their nominated target and fired only at the Tsar, instinctively sparing the others. This led to chaos and a messy execution. Guards vomited at the screams and blood. The bodies were buried in a mineshaft. Nine days later, Ekaterinburg fell to the counter-revolutionaries.
The Romanov-execution industry has claimed that the top leadership of the revolution, in particular Lenin, ordered the execution. At no stage, however, did Lenin sanction the Ural Bolsheviks' requests. The execution was a decision of the regional leadership of the Ural Bolsheviks under the pressure of a fast-moving civil war front which generated very real fears that the Tsar might be freed, a Tsar who would not hesitate to execute a popular, democratic socialist revolution with incalculable carnage for the workers and peasants of Russia.
Was Bolshevik perfidy, however, demonstrated by the execution of the innocent children? Whilst their execution went against every humanitarian feeling of the Bolsheviks, from Lenin to the factory worker in the execution squad, the institution of the monarchy made such an outcome, in the panicky throes of civil war, almost unavoidable.
As Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher, wrote, the children "fell victim to that principle which constitutes the axis of monarchy — dynastic succession". Instead of secreting jewels in their dresses, the girls could have renounced the privileges of birth. Ignorance, privilege and class prejudice, however, condemned these unfortunates.
The Romanov execution has subsequently evolved into a pathetic, quasi-religious cult. Fantasies of Anastasia's survival, and Anastasia claimants, have proliferated. The official exhumation of the bodies in 1991 instigated a circus of forensic testing. The Orthodox Church in and outside Russia has canonised the family.
Apart from anachronistic monarchists, anti-Semitic bigots and religious reactionaries, however, the cultification of the Romanovs has failed to ignite popular interest within Russia. A lavish state funeral in 1998, planned as a public atonement for the "communist crimes" of Russia's past, was drastically scaled back because of public indifference and objections that it would honour a discredited despot.
Nevertheless, buckets of romantic nostalgia are used to whitewash the Tsar's crimes by celebrating his private life as husband and father — as if dangling haemophiliac, sailor-suited Alexei on his knee can excuse decades of anti-democratic persecution; as if their daily prayers can absolve the Tsar and Tsarina for the massacre of millions of their subjects; as if the "tragic love story of Nicholas and Alexandra" can make up for the crimes they committed against those who didn't live in palaces.
Millions of adulatory words have been devoted to the Romanovs, as is to be expected in capitalist societies where the wealthy ruling class determine that the lives of the wealthy ruling class are more deserving of acclamation, and their deaths more worthy of grieving, than the lives of those they persecute, exploit and kill. King and Wilson have added another quarter of a million words on the Romanovs but, unusually, many of these words show that the fate of the Romanovs was "people's vengeance".
From Green Left Weekly, March 24, 2004.
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