An old post of mine:
***
I have never seen a less important question (politically [1]) get so much attention as that of the fate of the Romanovs after their overthrow.
One thing that a lot of people don't seem to understand is that as of 1917-18 monarchism was not very popular among even anti-Bolshevik Russians. Indeed, it was precisely the murder of the Imperial Family that made them heroes to the Whites; a
living Nicholas Romanov would probably be more of an embarrassment than a blessing to them. (BTW, to show how out of touch the Imperial Family was about current politics, their greatest fear was that Nicholas would be coerced by the Bolsheviks into approving Brest-Litovsk!)
The fact is that not a single White government during the Russian Civil War ever proclaimed restoration of the monarchy as a political objective. (Their official position was always that the form of government of a future Russia would have to be decided by a Constituent Assembly.) "In the civil war none of the White leaders, whatever their private views, called for the restoration of the monarchy because they knew that to do so would be to jeopardize public support for their cause."
https://books.google.com/books?id=CDMVMqDvp4QC&pg=PA28
"As Denikin wrote in one of his letters, 'if I raise the republican flag, I lose half my volunteers, and if I raise the monarchist flag I lose the other half. But we have to save Russia.' For this reason the army's slogan was not any specific form of government, but 'Great Russia, one and indivisible.' "
https://books.google.com/books?id=NAZm2EdxKqkC&pg=PA209
As I have suggested before: If the Bolshevik leaders were smart, they would allow--or rather force--Nicholas to flee abroad and then claim that he (along with foreign governments) was masterminding every anti-Bolshevik movement in Russia (including Left SRs and Anarchists) and for that matter all oppositionist movements within the Bolshevik party. (In the show trials of the 1930's, ex-Trotskyists and "Rightists" confess to their recent contacts with the exiled Tsar..)
Seriously, did Lenin really think the Romanovs were a political danger in 1918? I doubt it. I agree with Adam Ulam when he writes in
The Bolsheviks:
"As to the real motivation behind Lenin's decision one must refer to his curious historical sense. Even before the Bolsheviks took over he had complained petulantly that the English and French revolutions executed their monarchs, and that the Russian one was being terribly backward in that respect. The same note was struck by Lenin after the executions: "In England and France they executed their Tsars some centuries ago but we were late with ours," he said in an appropriately homely language, speaking to the Congress of the Committees of Poor Peasants. 55 Yet another symptom of Russia's cultural backwardness.
"That he [Lenin] was genuinely worried about any political influence the ex-Emperor might exert if freed, is extremely unlikely. The rationalization given by Trotsky simply does not fit the facts of Russia in 1918. He writes: "The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only to frighten, horrify and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks." Yet to Lenin the Tsar was "idiot Romanov," [2] a person politically of no consequence...If anything, the physical presence of the ex-Emperor in the Whites' camp would have been an embarrassment to them and a political asset to the Bolsheviks. Why then did Lenin sanction the execution? Partly it was his historic sense of which we spoke above, and partly (here Trotsky's account is closer to the mark) for the effect it would have upon his own followers. Lenin was forever complaining to Trotsky, "Russians are too kind . . . lazybones, softies." Even the old terrorist tradition had elements of the "softness"; an assassin would often go to great lengths and run additional danger to avoid harming women and children, who found themselves in the vicinity of his intended victim. The murder of the Tsar and his family was probably thought to be a good lesson "that one does not enter the realm of revolution with white gloves and on a polished floor.."
Of course Charles I and Louis XVI had at least been given trials before their executions. Ulam writes, "The revolutionary etiquette would have required a great trial-demonstration, in which after a recital of the Emperor's iniquities the Russian people would duly send him to the scaffold. Trotsky in his recollections relates that he proposed such a trial to Lenin and that he, Trotsky, fancied himself as the public prosecutor.54 Lenin refused, pleading shortage of time. But no doubt he would have refused in any case: there was other business to be attended to in this summer of 1918 and Trotsky's proposal smacked of theatricality, which was entirely alien to his [Lenin's] nature. Most of all, he must have realized (and how strange that Trotsky did not) that from the Communist point of view Nicholas II would have made a very poor prisoner in the dock: his very lack of intelligence combined with his dignity and Christian resignation would have made him an object of pity rather than of popular indignation. Indeed, the former Emperor, an abject failure while on the throne, displayed while prisoner the kind of fortitude and equanimity that moved even his jailers..." Anyway, the approach of the Whites to Yekaterinburg made the question of a trial moot.
Maybe instead of asking why the Bolsheviks killed the Imperial Family, it would make more sense to ask why they should be expected not to--or to put it another way, why should the Red Terror, which claimed so many victims among people with unsatisfactory (to the Bolsheviks) "class origins" have been expected to *exempt* the Imperial Family?
[1] Not of course that I don't recognize the human tragedy. To quote the émigré poet Georgii Ivanov:
Emalevyi krestik v petlitse
I seroi tuzhurki sukno…
Kakie pechal’nye litsa
I kak eto bylo davno.
Kakie prekrasnye litsa
I kak beznadezhno bledny –
Naslednik, imperatritsa,
Chetyre velikikh kniazhny…
Not-quite-literal translation, quoted from memory from Markov and Sparks, *Modern Russian Poetry*:
Enameled cross in the buttonhole,
The grey fabric of his coat,
How very sad the faces,
And the era--how remote.
What lovely faces, and yet how pale
In utter hopelessness-–
The Tsarevich, the Empress,
The four Grand Duchesses…
There's a reading of this poem at
See
http://www.thenabokovian.org/sites/default/files/2018-01/NABOKV-L-0026476___body.html for another translation.
[2] Lenin to the Moscow Soviet in March, 1918, defending Brest-Litovsk: "It was one thing to struggle with that idiot Romanov or that boaster [Ulam's own translation is "windbag"] Kerensky, but here we have an enemy [Germany] which has organised all its forces and the economic life of its country for defence against the revolution."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/12.htm