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Real Communism
Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the massacre of the Tsar and his family. A sad day, but as Lenin once said: you can’t make an omelette without shooting terrified little girls, then stabbing them repeatedly before shooting them again in the head, to make sure. For the sake of The People.
We’re always told that the Soviet Union wasn’t really Communism, that it was corrupted by Stalin. Communism is a pure thing, idealistic, with only the best interests of everyone at heart. Well, the murder of the Royal Family seems to have occurred before the “corruption” set in, and I doubt you’d find Communists more pure of heart than the Ural Regional Soviet of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.
But we can’t disparage Communism, lest the wonderful idea of the enlightened collective –– gently directed, at first, until the wisdom of the people achieves its own consciousness — cease to be a shining goal. So here’s quartz.com‘s description of the event:
Russia’s last tsar, his wife, and their five children were murdered amid the tumult of the Bolshevik revolution 100 years ago today (July 17).
Amid the tumult.
One of those things that just … happened in the chaos of the times. When you have a lot of tumult, well, stuff happens. Somehow.
It would be inconvenient to note that Communism is born in killing, thrives in killing, exceeds at killing, and depends on killing. But that wasn’t real Communism! Really? In 1919, newborn and pure, not even that was Communism?
By all means, make the argument: tell me that a system of human and economic relations cooked up by some hairy unemployed guy with goat-strength BO scribbling in the public library got it right, and everyone who saw in his words the means to power got it wrong.
Published in General
Which might explain why our nation was intentionally not formed to be a democracy.
No matter how long they had an evil system, there is no legitimate excuse for it to continue to be evil.
That is not a quote from me, it appears to be a quote nested inside the original post.
I remember hearing Marvin Olasky telling about his Russian Grandmother’s political philosophy. “Best form of government, good Tsar, worst form of government, bad Tsar.”
And that makes it okay to murder children, apparently.
That remark doesn’t show careful reading of what Skyler actually wrote.
And turn the headless body into a public toilet.
Yes, the Tsar was a bad person and bears some (a lot of) responsibility for the deaths of his family. That doesn’t make it a bad argument.
You can go over the crimes of the communists ad nauseam: The famines, the purges, the invasions, the gulag, the environmental damage, the millions of corpses. But, as someone said, “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” The pointless murder of women and children is a microcosm of the barbarity of communism that affects people a lot more than “30 million died of starvation in the Ukraine.”
That “someone” was Josef Stalin.
The question you posed was “Why would anyone mourn the loss of the Romanovs?”
People could clearly mourn their loss based on what actually happened. 60 million dead.
Of course other paths existed without the Romanovs, it’s just that none of them were taken, hence nostalgia for a past that was flawed, but far less oppressive and bloody. That’s how nostalgia works.
When confronted with the fact that children were murdered, his initial response was to assert that their father was a terrible person sustaining an unjust system. He showed no trace of sympathy for the children who were murdered because of an accident of birth, and when repeatedly confronted with the fact that children were murdered, his response has been to double down on the, “Yabbut, their father was a bad guy,” excuse.
No, he didn’t make such an excuse. I just went back and checked his initial comment to be sure.
Foreign investment had been pouring into Russia, everything was changing so rapidly the authoritarian regime and the old order were disintegrating. The Tsar tried reforms but he wasn’t up to it, not even Ivan could have managed it. We look back at such tumultuous radical changes and wrongly see oppression and people responding to it and that seems to justify the reigns of terror and real oppression that follow. It was a tragedy and it began with murder and was sustained by murder, accompanied by a fantasy story to justify the murder. The story continues and as the tragedy retreats into the past of our unschooled population, it grows. That’s also a tragedy but a self inflicted one.
Giving him every benefit, the best that can be said is that Skyler kept referring to the evils of the Tsar, thereby making it fair to infer the he was giving Lenin an excuse to commit the murder. Such careless language, in my mind, is inexcusable and invites the sort of criticism that Umbra makes.
This is really great. He explains that he isn’t giving the Bolsheviks an excuse to commit the murder, so people who are presumably familiar with the English language and of higher than average intelligence say it’s fair to infer that he is giving the Bolsheviks an excuse to commit murder.
But if that’s the game you want to play, I’d be glad to give your words the same treatment. Except that I’d rightly be taken to task by the moderators for rudeness and bad faith.
I think you misread and misunderstand what I wrote and what I intended to mean.
These statements do nothing to undermine anything I’ve written. As far as saying anything bad about me? Do I care? Bring it.
And Nicky wasn’t a bad guy. He was as much trapped by his parentage as his daughters were. It’s a lot harder than one may think to change from autocracy to something else.
He saw his moral responsibility as the opposite. He had a moral responsibility to take that wretched throne and do the best he could for his people. I can understand his morals. But where do yours come from? You think it would have been more moral to refuse to rule an autocracy? To walk away from your duties as a son, a man, and a father born to the throne? Where has that ever worked before? At best, one of his male relatives would have been there in his stead. Perhaps they would have been more suited to rule than Nicky was. In other words, maybe the one who took his place would have been more ruthless and willing to kill those who opposed his rule. Would that have been more moral?
That is an important point, and it is where I would part company with Skyler’s words. I think the word for this situation is “tragic.”
I would agree with Skyler that the murder of the Romanovs is hardly the best point on which to criticize communism, since many such murders were committed on the way to establishing our own (non-communist) country, too, though not as a matter of official policy with official sanction at the top level. But on the 100th anniversary of the Romanov’s death, I’m not going to fault Mr. Lileks for having brought it up as he did.
I have no idea who you are and have said nothing bad about you.
the other person did. Forget it.
Being hard is no excuse.
It is immoral to be an autocratic and oppressive dictator. It is immoral to claim that this power devolves on someone by virtue of their birth. It is immoral to, as he did, sentence people to virtual death sentences in Siberia camps for “political” crimes. It is immoral, even were he a swell guy, to allow others to do those things in his name.
Where do my morals come from? I don’t have “my” morals. I have morals. There is only one set. People may disagree on what they are, but there is no disagreement among most people that being an oppressive dictator is immoral. If asked to be one, I would suggest they should refuse. They could use their position to encourage a better form of government and the people can choose such a form. That’s not their job, it’s the job of the people. What the people do is not for them to control.
Edit comment:
He did not see it that way. The people around him did not see it that way. He was the father of his people. Not oppressive. Autocratic? Certainly. That was right in his titles: Autocrat of All the Russias. How do you expect that he would become as enlightened as you when it was also his father’s title, and his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s, and his great-great-grandfather’s. (And depending on what one believes regarding the rumors, briefly also his great-great-great-grandfather’s title.) You judge a man for being born into Hell and not turning it to Heaven. May you be judged the same, sir.
Nicky was imperfect, as all men are, but he did his best given when and where he was born.
I demand it, sir.
I have to say I never know for sure what to make of you, Arahant. I thought you were kidding before, with his Nicky business.
I do think you have the better of this silly argument. The Tsar was not a good man in many respects but he did grow up that way. And in no way does what he did justify murdering his entire family.
And I don’t think anyone disagrees with that.
The other thing that a study of Russian history shows is that reformers died violently. Paul I? Reformer, and assassinated. Alexander I, Absolutist who died of natural causes. When he died, his brothers got into a dispute about who would be the Autokrator:
“You take it!”
“No, I don’t want it, you take it!”
Etc. Finally, Nicolas I stepped up. Again, conservative and lived out his natural life.
Alexander II (known as the Liberator) was a reformer who freed the serfs…and was assassinated.
Alexander III, conservative, and died of natural causes. One cause of his conservatism was seeing what had happened to his father, the Liberator. “So, this is what reform gets you? No thanks.” He had a deep fear of reform and passed it on to his son.
Nicky did not overcome his history. Would it have turned out better had he turned it into a constitutional monarchy when he came to the throne? Probably. Still, few men do overcome such a history. If he is no worse than 95% of men and better than many, did he do so badly?
I would throw in here that many of the Georgians and Russians I knew admired Nicholas II not as great man, he was not that nor do they think he was all the smart, but Nicholas tried to do his duty and rule Imperial Russia as fairly as he could. With a Empire as big as Russia and in the modern age he simply could not rule the country himself there was too much to do. He was afraid of bureaucracy because that would take away from the autocracy and he was afraid of the Duma for the same reason even though many would have helped him create a kind of Constitutional monarchy.
He also prevented the formation of political parties and infrastructure that would have then been able to fight and beat the Bolsheviks. He did all of though trying to fulfill his duty, bring culture and opportunity to his people and strove mightily to bring about a legitimate transition power to a more representative government.
Many probably most Russian people loved him if they could have restored him to the throne over the Bolsheviks or the White Russian Warlords they probably would have.
Most of people that Nicholas killed for political reasons came right after a dangerous revolution in 1905 that nearly overthrew his government. In that oppression he killed a little more than 6,000 people which was a slow week for Lenin or Stalin.
Without the Bolshevik revolt Nicholas would have gone down in history as the person that brought Democracy to Russia and made that transition peaceful. One of the reasons that he did not flee Russia was to support the the democratic government that followed him. He did not want to rally opposition to it.
Even today nearly everyone spoke to Russia thought the Communists had killed a good man and a fine family when they murdered the Romanovs. They do not think of him as a vile and ruthless dictator.
Not every culture can do representative democracy over night. If Nicholas II had actually refused to take the throne he would have thrown the whole country into bloody chaos which according to Skylar would have been the right to thing to do. I just don’t know how you get to place where that is the moral thing to do.
What Nicholas up to the task of running Russia, no. Was he too slow to realize that, yes. Did Nicholas make many mistakes, no doubt. Was he doing his best for his people, trying to hold his nation together and keep them from falling in chaos, yes. Neither he nor his family deserved to be killed the way they were.
And yet they ended up with more than seven decades of murder and even worse oppression. I don’t see how it could have been worse. Did he deserve to die? Yes. His wife? Not as clear, but probably. Did his children? Absolutely not. But he is at least partially culpable for their deaths.
Some people would put Alexander I in the reformer category. His adviser, Mikhail Speransky, is usually associated with such mild reforms as he accomplished. In later years Alexander I backed away (under pressure) from some of these reforms and sent Speransky to a job in Siberia. It was not a labor camp, but it was not a place for those in Alexander I’s good graces. When Nicholas I came to power, he undid any remnants of those reforms that had not already been undone. The Decembrist revolt was a reaction to his repression.
I would like to learn more about this because a legend from my own family history may have been a distant ripple effect from all this conflict. A g-g-g-grandfather supposedly had a position in one of the institutions associated with the reforms, and then ended up having to flee with his family overnight. He had asked too many questions. They left a daughter behind in Moscow, a fact which thereafter always bothered her mother.
I had never thought about it until just now, but I wonder if my g-g-g-grandfather had ever been presented to Alexander I, perhaps in a formal ceremony where he was given his govt job. Hard to say. I don’t know if it was that prominent a position. Like I say, I would like to learn more about this history. But so far haven’t found a lot in English. My g-g-g-grandfather was a well-to-do German, but I have wondered if his mother-in-law or father-in-law was Russian (and perhaps kept the granddaughter when the rest of the family fled). DNA results from the generation before me suggest that it is possible, but that’s pretty scanty evidence. By the time my generation comes along, any such signal is indistinguishable from background noise.
I think that there is a technical reason to differentiate communism and socialism. The Nazis were also socialists — national socialists. Communism is international socialism. There are both pathological, but there is a difference.