I got to the part of the Revolutions podcast where the royal family died. He said the consensus is that Moscow ordered the death of the whole family. Is that pretty much agreed on by serious historians nowadays or is that Cold War historiagraphy?
It seemed kind of split when I looked in some Ask Historians thread on Reddit from years ago, but I also might just be seeing what I want to see. What do historians think? What do you think? If Lenin and company in Moscow ordered it, why?
I don’t know who ordered the deaths of the Romanovs but I can inform you on their likely reasoning. In the most simplistic sense Russia was a monarchy for centuries and its populations, ESPECIALLY the peasantry were very used to this and did not have the educational basis to understand organized society beyond this format. This, combined with the fact that historically speaking leaving a member of royal blood alive after seizing power leaves room for counter revolution heavily informed the decision to straight up eradicate the Romanovs. From the perspective of the Bolsheviks, leaving Romanovs alive was too risky and honestly, with the counter revolution that insued after, I think they were right to do so. I cannot imagine how the civil war would have proceeded had the whites had a Romanov.
Eh. The Tsar Nicholas was pretty hated by the time of his abdication. Had a white warlord rescued him, they wouldn’t have restored him, rather just used him to help themselves be Tsar.
Likewise there were not shortage of noble whites to make Tsar with the family gone, had the Bolsheviks been less successful.
I’m team better scenario would have been trial and execution for Nicholas. Rehabilitation for the rest (under close scrutiny in Siberia).
The whites never attempted to restore Nicholas. The attempts to do monarchy were centered on Nikolaevich during the civil war and Kiril post war.
Every Romanov was a potential nerve for the tissues of the White army and international reaction to weave themselves around, so the survival of any was unacceptable