Killed the Czar and His Ministers
Russia has an official legal and judicial process by which people convicted of political crimes during the Soviet era can be rehabilitated. A move was made to do this for Czar Nicholas II and his family, but the Russian court initially ruled that they were ineligible on the ground that they’d been convicted on criminal charges. But now they’ve reversed course:
ussia’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of full rehabilitation for Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, and his family, officially recognizing the executed royals as victims of Soviet repression 90 years after their deaths.
Now obviously I can’t see any justification whatsoever for killing the Czar’s children. And I’ve come around to the view that the death penalty is wrong and therefore you can’t really justify putting Czar Nicholas himself to death. But operating under the assumption that it’s ever right to execute someone for their crimes, I have to say that I don’t have a ton of sympathy for this idea of rehabilitating the Czar. Having Josef Stalin as one of your successors has a way of making anyone look good, but I don’t think it’s all that reasonable to judge Nicholas on such a steep curve. At the end of the day, Czarist Russia was not a pleasant place. Indeed, one reason that many in the west initially underestimated how bad Communist Russia was is precisely that under the Czars Russia was already a byword for tyranny and repression. Meanwhile, it’s not as if the “we should depose the Czar” concept was an idiosyncratic notion of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks came to power by overthrowing a broad-based interim regime that had already — and quite rightly — overthrown the Czar.
81 Responses to “Killed the Czar and His Ministers”
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October 1st, 2008 at 11:51 am
“Having Josef Stalin as one of your successors has a way of making anyone look good, but I don’t think it’s all that reasonable to judge Nicholas on such a steep curve.”
Quote of the day.
- g
October 1st, 2008 at 11:57 am
“Now obviously I can’t see any justification whatsoever for killing the Czar’s children.”
Not to defend the Bolsheviks or this terrible act, but there was a gruesome political logic to the deed: if the children of the Czar had been allowed to live, there would always be the danger of a restoration of monarchy (as happened after the English and French Revolutions). By killing the kids the Bolsheviks destroyed any hope of such a restoration. So by their own logic, it was fully justified.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:59 am
Well, I’m no great expert on the Russian Imperial regime, but what’s the evidence for this claim?
Maybe Matt can provide some rough estimate of the number of people murdered by the Czar’s regime, or the number wrongfully imprisoned? And some credible documentation to support those estimates.
My guess is that it would be several orders-of-magnitude lower than that of the Bolsheviks, and also a tiny fraction of the number who’ve suffered under a lot of regimes Matt probably likes.
So what exactly make the Czar such a bad man? Admittedly, Russia lost WWI, but so did nearly all other other European nations.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:01 pm
If you are trying to overthrow a monarchy, you must ALWAYS kill all the offspring and possible heirs to the throne when you kill the monarch.
Otherwise, you can be guaranteed that at some point down the line, a rival political group will rally around a “rightful” heir to the throne.
Now granted, it is never “justified” to do so, but if you want to end rule by a royal family, you must end the family.
Just look at all the hub-bub around Anastasia, a person who claimed to be an heir to the Russian throne. And she was a fraud. Imagine if she really had been an heir.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Didn’t Stalin get his start in the Czar’s secret police? And we know Putin got his start in the KGB. I would love to see someone knowledgeable evaluate the idea that the Russian secret police apparatus has been truly in charge all the way through the nominal changes in government.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
If you are trying to overthrow a monarchy, you must ALWAYS kill all the offspring and possible heirs to the throne when you kill the monarch.
Historically, that’s generally been the case. On the other hand, there are living heirs to the houses of Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Bourbon, and yet monarchists don’t seem to be climbing back into power in any of their former empires.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
By the way, love the headline, but my hypothesis would refute the idea that he “stuck around St Petersburg / When I saw it was a time for a change”.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:14 pm
This is somewhat beside the point, but I’m technically Russian Orthodox but one reason I can hardly stand stepping foot into some Orthodox churches is that those churches often venerate the Czar as a martyr. I can understand the killing was unjust, but I don’t pray to Czars.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
You’re all missing the important point here–Matt made a non-Disposable-Alt-Rock-Crap musical reference!
October 1st, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Maybe Matt can provide some rough estimate of the number of people murdered by the Czar’s regime, or the number wrongfully imprisoned? And some credible documentation to support those estimates
RKU, you don’t seem to understand how this blogging thing works. Matt is not obligation to offer proof of the obvious to the ignorant. If you think Matt is wrong, and Czarist Russia was a wonderful place, and the Revolution some unhappy accident, then prove it. Most people with a basic grounding in the history of the last several hundred years know that Czarist Russia was a byword for repression long before the Revolution. You will not find a single reputable historian who thinks otherwise.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:22 pm
For those who are interested, this story should probably be read in context of the new more nationalist standards being forced on Russian history teachers, outlined in this (long) New Republic story last week.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Yes, it’s an ugly, awful thing. However, the whole conception of hereditary Monarchy is that power passes by right from the ruler to his/her children. The Russian Tsars had thoroughly established that rule (with the typical breaks and exceptions). It was a rotten deal for the children, who obviously did nothing to deserve death. However, by (1) torturing your people and mismanaging your country to the point of revolution, and (2) supporting the notion that your children have an inherent right to inherit yourown dictatorial powers, you’re very much putting them in the line of fire.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Was Nicholas II’s Russia more or less repressive than Putin’s Russia? (Obviously Russian people were alot poorer in 1914, though getting richer fast, but stripping the income difference out, if we can). Or to use MY’s terms, is Putin’s Russia a by-word for tyranny and repression?
October 1st, 2008 at 12:32 pm
My understanding of the Catholic Church’s opposition to the death penalty is that the sole exception would be the charismatic leader whose continued existence would pose a legitimate threat for more deaths down the road. I don’t think Nicholas II would be anyone’s idea of a charismatic leader. Extending guilt out to the children of the Tsar is a non-starter morally since there’s no end of potential claimants even when you get rid of all the kids.
At any rate, Russia obeyed blood succession in a pretty ad hoc fashion, and it’s likely that there was an interloper who brought non-Romanov blood into the line anyway.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Most people with a basic grounding in the history of the last several hundred years know that Czarist Russia was a byword for repression long before the Revolution.
Well, maybe…
Offhand, the most horrific Czarist Era massacres I’m aware of during the couple of decades before the Revolution involved pitifully small numbers, say 67 people here and 259 people there, and were frequently semi-unintentional, as when the police became nervous and attacked a huge crowd of demonstrators. Frankly, this sort of things happens all the time everywhere around the world in relatively poor countries, and nobody pays much attention.
By contrast, the Bolsheviks killed something like 20,000,000+ people, the vast majority of them with total intent.
Being from a scientific background, 20,000,000 seems a lot bigger number to me than 67, but perhaps Matt’s Harvard Philosophy professors have revealed this to be some sort of logical fallacy.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Matt made a non-Disposable-Alt-Rock-Crap musical reference!
The Rolling Stones aren’t “Alt-Rock”. That particular song is pretty craptastic since the lyrics don’t amount to much outside the chorus. They’re just pretty random historical moments written in rhyme.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:47 pm
The song is notable largely because of what happened at Altamont while the Stones were playing it. It’s my understanding they never played it again.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Jeffrey, that is why I used non-, meaning not Alt-Rock.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
To RKU in #15, I would identify the following logical fallacies:
(a) Adding 67 to 259 and coming up with 67.
(b) Reasoning that because the Czars murdered fewer than their successors that therefore the Czars were good.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Under feudalism it wasn’t a matter of the Czar directly killing people, but of landlords separating families, ordering people into the army for a 20 year term of service, forced labor, and the like. Even the children of aristocrats were routinely tortured (sometimes to death) in the name of education (in military academies). Arguably, this sort of thing also continued under the Soviet regime as well. Just saying
October 1st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
1) The REAL reason that the Bolshi gained power is that the
American Expeditionary Force North Russia and the
American Expeditionary Force Siberia were commanded by a pussy Democrat President who cut and ran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Bear_Expedition and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Force_Siberia
October 1st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
2) Well, that –plus the Czar had pissed off the Jews in New York City:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff
Ironic that the subject of Nicholas came up –given that Kuhn, Loeb & Co bit the dust when Lehman collapsed last month. It’s enough to make a Bolshevik shed a tear. No doubt Nicholas is rejoicing somewhere in hell.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:00 pm
And again, what you’ve given is an indictment of the Bolsheviks— not a defense of the Tsars. One could defend almost any tyrant on the same grounds.
It’s important to remember that it wasn’t an either/or choice between “bad Tsars” and “murderous Bolsheviks”. Rather, the conditions that led to Lenin and Stalin were a direct product of Tsarist oppression and mismanagement (i.e., centralization of power, ubiquitous violence, desperate poverty). The Bolsheviks would never have had a chance to take power had it not been for the Tsars (as evidence, witness the lack of Bolshevik-type takeovers in most other European countries).
Beyond this, I would argue that the principal crime of the Tsars wasn’t the massacres (which were /relatively/ small by 20th century standards), or even the political oppression (which was quite terrible, but also dwarfed by later regimes). Rather, it was the terrible impoverishment of the entire Russian population (particularly the serfs, who were basically legal slaves). This poverty no doubt led to a massive number of deaths and untold suffering. And we haven’t begun to discuss the disaster that was WWI.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Yes, I guess the Stones never played Sympathy for the Devil again, which is why I don’t have have 3 different live version of the song on my ITunes (Love you Live from 1977, Flashpoint from the early 90s and Shine a Light from 2007 or 08).
October 1st, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Rather, it was the terrible impoverishment of the entire Russian population (particularly the serfs, who were basically legal slaves).
Well, I’d again emphasize I’m no expert on pre-Revolutionary Russia…but even I know that the Russian serfs were freed over FIFTY YEARS before the Revolution. Maybe we should also be denouncing Eisenhower’s America for denying women the right to vote!
Also, from everything I’ve read, pre-Revolutionary Russia had the highest economic growth rate in its entire history, and one of the highest in Europe. Considerably higher by some measures than what the Communists later achieved, despite killing 20M people to “speed things along”.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:16 pm
OK, guess I was wrong about the Stones never playing it again. Geez.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Holding the Czars up against the contemporary standards of their day, when their peers were places like the Ottoman Empire and Qing Dynasty China, I have a hard time arguing that Czarist Russia was an exceptional byword for tyranny and repression.
As far as their rehabilitation, the truth is that they were victims of the Communist regime. Note that they weren’t being rehabilitated over their imprisonment by the pre-Communist provisional government. They’re being rehabilitated for their unjustified summary execution by the Communists, so it’s hard for me to argue with the Russian Supreme Court’s decision there.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Tsarist Russia was a repressive and anti-Semitic place. But it was a liberal utopia compared with what the Bolsheviks instituted.
The apologists for murdering kids should be aware that plenty of monarchies have been overthrown without executing all the members of the royal house. Ask Otto von Hapsburg or one of the Bourbons. When the Tsar and his family were murdered, he had already been overthrown and prospects for restoration were low (it wasn’t even something the White Armies advocated).
This thread just shows once again how the love affair of American progressives with communism never dies.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:29 pm
RKU,
Economic growth rates say very little about distribution of wealth. Russia did begin to undergo rapid large-scale industrialization, but it was very unequal (both in terms of class and regions). The ending of serfdom in 1861 did very little to relieve the dramatic poverty suffered by the majority of rural laborers. After the 1860s, the Romanov dynasty engaged in a number of practices and policies that routinely stripped even the meager landholdings of the majority of peasants, forcing them into new forms of forced, supposedly wage types of labor. After the end of serfdom, poverty changed little, but what changed a lot was the sense of security, in that many peasants were LESS secure in earning their meager subsistence with the way that landholding patterns changed.
Throw in 2 million soldiers killed in WWI, a few random massacres, labor unrest and widespread starvation, and you’ve got some pissed off masses ready to follow the Bolshevik intellectuals.
That doesn’t mean I agree with murdered kids, but to defend the Romanov dynasty simply by comparing it to the Bolsheviks and using deceptive statistics doesn’t really work.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Anyone wondering about the repressiveness of Russia under the Tsars should go to St. Petersburg and hurtle (no loitering permitted) through the dozen or so monumental buildings owned by the ruling class of the time. Russian rulers were horrifying. (Apparently, it’s their one unbreakable tradition.)
October 1st, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I’m not sure how the fact that there was broad-based support for overthrowing the Tsar means that murdering him (and that’s what was done – there was no trial of any kind, as there was for Charles I and Louis XVI) was not a specifically Bolshevik crime.
Beyond that, the Tsarist regime was repressive, and Nicholas II was criminally incompetent. But he was almost completely harmless by the time he was murdered. As Pithlord notes, even the Whites did not really support restoration.
Also worth noting – if you’re only concerned with restoration, there would have been no need to murder anybody but the Tsar and his son (and his brother, who was murdered around the same time). There was Salic law in Russia, and Nicholas’s wife (obviously) and daughters were not in line for the throne.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Now obviously I can’t see any justification whatsoever for killing the Czar’s children.
Everyone arguing for the political logic of murdering heirs is correct, but missing Matt’s point. All he’s saying is that it’s entirely uncontroversial that Russia should rehabilitate the children as innocent of any crimes, whereas Nicholas could very well have been deserving of the death penalty for actual crimes committed by his regime.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
This thread just shows once again how the love affair of American progressives with communism never dies.
Don’t say such abjectly stupid things. It is a hallmark of liberalism to condemn that which is condemnable without having the engage in the mealy-mouthed weasely excuses of right-wingers of “well what came afterwards was worse, so we shouldn’t talk about how bad the other regime was.” It seems to be only liberals who recognize that the repressive behavior of regimes and the public destitution is what makes such violent revolution possible in the first place.
I still think that MattY’s point about the Czar not deserving rehabilitation is ridiculous. Czar Nicholas II was not executed for any crimes. He was executed because the Communists didn’t want him to fall into the hands of the White Russians during the civil war who might have decided to use him as a symbol in their fight against the Communists.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:08 pm
“Well, I’d again emphasize I’m no expert on pre-Revolutionary Russia…but even I know that the Russian serfs were freed over FIFTY YEARS before the Revolution.”
Which is why my blood boils when ignant liberals denigrate sharecropping.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:09 pm
RKU:
Tsarist Russia invented the pogrom. The Tsarist Secret Police wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Tsarist Russia created the system of Siberian labor camps for political criminals. Tsarist Russia created the residential permit system to control where the people it ruled were allowed to live.
The large numbers of people cited as “killed by the Bolsheviks” by genocide-porn authors like Robert Conquest generally draw their biggest numbers from famines such as that in Ukraine in the ’30s, which are termed “deliberate”, and from deaths in labor camps, which usually were due to disease, cold and malnourishment. I’ve always found the “deliberate famine” claim very dicey — there are a lot of famines in Western colonial history that could as easily be termed “deliberate”. But in any case, I don’t think anyone has ever done comparable estimates for famine or labor-camp deaths under the Russian Empire. There were plenty of famines under the Tsarist regime. I’ve also never seen stats on how many people (soldier and civilian) the Tsars killed in their wars of subjugation against Central Asian, Caucasian, Eastern and Southern European nations (the Baltics, Poland); how many Don Cossacks were slaughtered during and after the Pugachev revolt; and I’ve only seen occasional guesses at how many Jews were killed in pogroms carried out by the Tsarist-nationalist “Black Hundreds” gangs. Those guesses are in the tens of thousands for some individual pogroms, and they were certainly enough to send millions of Jews fleeing to America, including my great-grandparents.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Nicholas appears to have been a decent family man but someone wholly inadequate as either a traditional czar or the reformer Russia needed at that moment. He was largely indifferent to news of his fleet being destroyed during the Russo-Japanese War; he allowed the Duma to form only to undermine it whenever he could and his attitude toward the murder of civilians in the 1905 Revolution was appalling.
And Pithlord — Stalin’s murderous tyranny doesn’t mean murderous tyranny is confined to Communism. There were pogroms and supression of basic rights in czarist Russia. Had a more humane and competent ruler been in charge of Russia in 1905, the regime we all despise might never have risen. Nicholas’ incompetence didn’t create the Revolution, but it sure created a climate that nurtured it.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I’d like to see some evidence on Susan’s assertion that the abolition of serfdom and industrialization did little for the rural poor. In general, giving people an exit option makes them better off. Ex-serfs aren’t idiots: if they went to St. Petersburg to get industrial jobs, it is probably because those jobs were better than being a rural labourer. And even those who remained rural labourers had better bargaining power against the landed aristocracy once they could legally leave.
I suspect it was like the current Third World, where pre-existing poverty became far more visible once people were free to leave the farm. Similar assertions used to be made about black Americans becoming materially worse off in the post-Civil War era, but they turned out to be false.
Nicholas was not a great ruler, but I wonder what the crimes were. Whereas it is easy to say what the crimes of Lenin, Trostky, Stalin or Beria consisted in.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:17 pm
That said, I don’t think criminal convictions against Nicholas II make a tremendous amount of sense. It was a perversion of the law for political purposes. But the campaign now to annul the convictions is equally political, and mostly sinister. What Yglesias doesn’t mention, though I’m sure he realizes this, is that the same people who want to annul the conviction of Nicholas II are generally fans of Stalin, and are bad and wrong for both reasons. Unfortunately Russians seem not to have been able to animate a new sense of nationalism grounded in the democratic Kerensky regime, Prime Minister Stolypin, Tsar Alexander II, and other broadly sympathetic figures.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Tyro,
There is undoubtedly an anti-communist left-liberal tradition. But there was also a strong pro-communist left-liberal tradition, and you see it still lives whenever Castro or Chavez is mentioned on the Internet.
It just isn’t true that repressive regimes are particularly likely to be subject to revolution. Revolution usually happens to relatively liberal regimes. The Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky. Even Nicholas’s regime was relatively liberal by Russian standards, despite deeply bizarre stuff like the Rasputin episode.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I’d like to see some evidence on Susan’s assertion that the abolition of serfdom and industrialization did little for the rural poor. In general, giving people an exit option makes them better off. – Pithlord
The problem with the abolition of serfdom was that it saddled the ex-serfs with reparations payments for their own freedom which turned out to be so high that 40 years later most were still hopelessly trying to pay them off. The initial logic was to generate money to compensate landed nobles who had lost tremendous investments when their serfs were “freed”, but the effect was to create a new effective serfdom much as sharecropping in the American South effectively re-enserfed freed American slaves. The problem was exacerbated because serfs didn’t get residential permits to move to St. Petersburg, so many who fled there for factory jobs were illegal migrants with all the legal jeopardy and inability to build up capital that entails. And the freedom tax system wound up perpetuating the absentee-landlord, wastrel lifestyle among the nobility which the abolition of serfdom ought to have wiped out.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
The Tsar was a precursor to the Shah. Everyone wanted him out. He had to go.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Pithlord, it is out of bounds, and even dishonest for you to associate Yglesias’s criticism of the Czarist regime with a progressive “love affair” with Communism. But that’s the thing– the red-baiting of liberals by right-wingers never dies. We’ll catch you screaming about how we’re setting ourselves up for socialism when the next administration starts submitting proposals for health care reform. See you there!
October 1st, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Because my day isn’t complete without implicitly endorsing the murder of innocents, and because I actually think there is something to it, permit me to add my voice to those comments (2, 4, et al) defending the logic–if not the morality–of killing the Czar’s family. Alas, that’s the only way to pre-empt royalist revanchism.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
The love affair of reactionaries with royalty, no matter how manifestly diseased, corrupt, and moronic, never dies.
Wasn’t Lenin’s trip to Russia financed by the Kaiser as a way of destabilizing that country?
October 1st, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Alas, that’s the only way to pre-empt royalist revanchism.
Except, as we see, it didn’t work. 90 years later, they’re baaaaaaack. Maybe they built the Moscow White House on a Tsarist graveyard.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Don’t people like Robert Conquest include the dead of WW2 in their computations of those “killed by Stalin”? Wasn’t Stalin thoroughly bad enough without having to fudge the numbers?
The whole thing is fishy. I suspect that bad conscience is at work here on behalf of former supporters of Hitler’s Germany, who included at the time a lot of respectable, and some quite religious, people.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Pithlord,
Er, it’s rather ridiculous of you to talk about Castro, or Chavez, in the same breath as Stalin and Beria. Not to mention that I don’t think it is necessarily true that STalin was an inevitable outgrowth of the revolution.
I think that a certain degree of repression and authoritarianism is legitimate for the sake of building a just and good society, and I also think that the Bolcheviks exceeded the bounds of any legitimate or justified authoritarianism by quite a large margin. I don’t think those are contradictory positions.
I’m a qualified supporter of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions, the latter with much less qualification than the former. But had I been around in 1917 I would probably have been a partisan of the Left SR’s, the agrarian socialist radicals, who rose in revolt against the Bolsheviks a couple years later.
Somoene brought up Stalin’s tenure in the Okhrana….it’s a dicey historical question, and my impression is there is no conclusive evidence either way. I believe it, personally, but I suppose we may never know the truth.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
In fairness, much of the Bolshevik terrorism started after Lenin was shot in the neck by a socialist.
Didn’t kill him because of poor cartridge selection but the embedded bullet made him kinda testy in the remaining years.
So many problems could be prevented if liberals would just learn how to select and use firearms properly.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Tyro,
I have never said that Yglesias is an example of the progressive pro-communist tradition. I know he isn’t.
Hector, on the other hand, is not alone. And there are a number of people on this thread who even defend murdering (sorry, liquidating) kids. Alex Cockburn said Afghanistan was a country deserving to be raped by the USSR. Half of Berkeley wore FSLN t-shirts in the 80s. And somebody is buying what Naomi Klein is selling.
I wish I was making it up, but I’m not.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I personally consider the czar’s children (and the poor aides in the room with them) to be the victims of cold blooded murder.
I consider the czar & czarina to have been executed for their crimes against the Russsian people.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
The family that Nicholas II came from made a specialty out of strangling its various members – which is, after all, how Catherine II ascended the throne. Wonder if they are going to hang a murder wrap on her? Or condemn Peter the Great for torturing to death one of his sons?
As for anti-semitic Nicholas and his Black One Hundreds, he was, of course, responsible for pograms that killed thousands of Jews and then responsible for getting into WWI, in which millions of Russian soldiers perished due to systematic criminal neglect on the part of the court. Nicholas deserved to die much more than Charles I or Louis XVI. But in the end, if it hadn’t been for the Western powers needless provocation in supporting the White Army, he could well have been exiled.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Matt, do you think every absolute monarch deserved the death penalty?
October 1st, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Don Williams,
Yup, Lenin was shot by one of the Socialist-Revolutionaries I was talking about. Pity she didn’t have better aim. Russia could have been transformed into an utopia of peasant communes instead of what actually happened.
Pithlord, why would any decent person not be wearing a FSLN shirt? Do you actually know anything about the record of the FSLN, or are you parroting some Republican talking points? I’m sorry if the truth that your party was responsible for gross evil all over Latin America makes you feel guilty, but there it is.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:28 pm
You have to compare the Czarist government to the other governments of the same period. Czarist Russia, by a fairly clear margin, was the most repressive country in Europe. (Yes, if you want to compare the Romanov Empire to the Ottomans, you might have a case).
1. Almost all European countries, even the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had moved much further down the road to constitutional monarchies than Czarist Russia had. Even in the more monarchic European countries, there were still non-monarchic cities that had semi-republican city governments or regional Parliaments. Many of these had non-monarchic political histories stretching back hundreds of years. Russia had had such city-states in it’s very distant past, but the Romanovs defeated and completely slaughtered those city-states hundreds of years before.
2. Very few European countries even had any immigration policies whatsoever. Czarist Russia had an extensive internal passport system (which denied most people any power to determine where they would live).
3. Most European countries didn’t have formal internal political police forces (or counterespionage agencies)of any kind. Czarist Russia had a gigantic internal political police force, many times larger than any other in Europe. In fact, it was probably many times larger than the rest of the world’s put together. (The US, for example, didn’t have such a thing at all except during the Civil War.)
4. No European country operated anything even remotely like the Czarist Siberia for punishing political activity. Many European countries of the time did not even formally have anything like crimes for undesired political activity (informally, yes, many European states would find ways to use the normal criminal laws to punish political dissidents if the state desired to do so. But’s that’s different). Usually, there was no specific political criminal justice system in Europe (i.e., a really violent political dissident in France would be processed haphazardly through France’s criminal justice system and placed in a jail along with normal violent criminals). Czarist Russia had a gigantic and formal system specifically against political dissidents. Except during major wars, some European countries NEVER have had such a system in many centuries. No European country until 1917 except Czarist Russia had had even a shadow of a system’s like Russia’s.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I’m tired of sneering reverse-snobbery; no wonder our country is failing when excellence in _anything_ potentially useful* is denigrated. GWB’s administration bothers me less than the thought that we might, in a purely causal way, deserve the Sage of Crawford (who in turn seems to possess an engaged intellect when compared to the Wasillian Sibyl, who apparently inhales petroleum vapours and prophecies in policy-point glossolalia).
The new Merkin motto appears to be, ‘Don’t you get smart with me!’
*That class of things definitely includes philosophy, from which we got science, and which for millenia was the thinking man’s best alternative to religion.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
burritoboy- but none of that’s Nick’s fault. That’s the fault of every tsar before him. He obviously didn’t handle it well, but he wasn’t dealt to being with.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:19 pm
The Austro-Hungarian Empire did have a secret police, extensive censorship of any and all publications and even people’s private correspondence — Even if nowhere near as bad as the Russian Empire, It was very repressive was duly hated, if you remember The Good Soldier Sveik and Colonel Redl — not to mention the Horseman on the Roof. Don’t forget that anti-Semitism flourished and Hitler was born there.
On the other hand they did have an (albeit feeble) tradition of liberal Catholic reform. The great Penal Reformer Cesare Beccaria was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Milan). He was admired by our founding fathers. Some enlightenment reforms were implemented by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
On the whole, however, repression, and the conscious and deliberate denial on the part of the elites of education to the populace, tended to polarize people and breed violent rebellions.
Baudelaire famously said that Belgium, another extremely retrograde right-wing state, was what France would have looked like had the revolution not occurred there.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Some comments to all this:
Russia did not have Salic Law (that was a Germannic thing dating back to the Franks) and it had had, I think, three ruling tsarinas, including Catherine the Great, who wasn’t even a Romanov by blood, or Russian, but was the wife of the ruling tsar who she put out of the way. The succession in Russia was a bit indeterminate and not based on strict inheritance– in principle Alexandra could have succeeded Nicholas, and Nicholas had considered setting aside his sickly son in favor of one of his daughters.
Not all the Romanovs perished in the Revolution. Cousins survived by fleeing abroad and their descendants returned to the country in 1992 where they made a brief political splash– until everyone realized that, like the Restoration Bourbons, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Speaking of the Bourbons, the Jacobins did not kill Louis XVI’s son and heir directly but did imprison the boy and so thoroughly neglected and abused him that he was not long in expiring.
Nicholas himself was a fairly gentle and pleasant man– devoted to his family and his faith, and in no way tyrannical or brutal. His sin was not sadism but incompetence (again, like Louis XVI). He was keenly aware of his shortcomings and so relied on his neurotic wife and a pack of reactionary ministers. The bizarre Rasputin by the way was actually a good influence to the extent he meddled in Russian politics: he was anti WWI and he was murdered by the most reactionary elements of the nobility when he persuaded Nicholas to abolish discriminatory laws against the Jews.
Nicholas and his family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church after the fall of Communism, but as “passion-bearers”, not martyrs, meaning they endured their captivity and death with Christian forebearance and non-violence. Some of the hyper-conservative Russian churches in the diaspora do actively venerate them, but I doubt you will find many churches that do so.
The tsarist Siberian prisons were in no wise unique. France had a notorious hellhole called Devil’s Island, and the American POW camps in the Civil War (above all Andersonville) were far worse than anything Siberia had to offer pre-Stalin.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Interesting the assumption that I am a Republican. I’m actually a Canadian social democrat. The existence of a tradition of sympathy for communism among American progressives is a fact (Henry Wallace, the Nation magazine, SDS, etc.), although pro-communism was always a bigger deal in the rest of the Western world.
No one is defending Tsarist Russia as a society. The question is whether Nicholas (let alone his children!) deserved to be murdered. I wish that wasn’t in dispute either, but it appears to be…
October 1st, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Hector,
The FSLN forcibly dispossessed and relocated the Miskito people, wrecked Nicaragua’s economy and set up a system of neighbourhood informers and spies. It was (and really remains) dominated by communist intellectuals, who unnecessarily sparked a civil war. Today, it is part of the populist economically-illiterate Latin American left that you approve of, but which has helped keep Latin America poor. Berkeley students were lucky not to have to live under such a regime.
I do not approve of American support for the contras, and never have, but enthusiasts like you bug me.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Um, RKU, you’re “no expert” all right.
Russia won World War 1, or would have, had she stayed in it. She was allied with the victors of that conflict: Britain and France.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:07 pm
“The tsarist Siberian prisons were in no wise unique. France had a notorious hellhole called Devil’s Island, and the American POW camps in the Civil War (above all Andersonville) were far worse than anything Siberia had to offer pre-Stalin.”
The American POW camps were to (primarily) house soldiers who had taken up arms against the Confederacy – not political prisoners. Of course, the Confederacy was a horrible regime, so it’s hardly like being better than the Confederacy was a major mark of distinction for the Czarist government. Many nations of the time had horrible prisons – the point is rather, that these prisons were primarily for punishing criminals, not punishing political dissidents solely.
“The Austro-Hungarian Empire did have a secret police, extensive censorship of any and all publications and even people’s private correspondence — Even if nowhere near as bad as the Russian Empire,”
But that’s the point: Russia’s secret police and censorship was far worse and far more repressive than even the nearest European contemporaries (and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was rightly in that era thought to be the next most repressive state in Europe – the most repressive being Czarist Russia). And many nations of the time had minimal or even non-existant secret police and infinitely lighter censorship.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Russia won World War 1, or would have, had she stayed in it.
No. Russia lost WWI to Germany the same way Germany lost to the Allies: it was pummeled until its economy, society, and government collapsed, and a revolution was staged by progressive elites.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Those are some loooong memories passed down Matt’s ancestors!
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:42 am
Re: The American POW camps were to (primarily) house soldiers who had taken up arms against the Confederacy – not political prisoners.
Soldiers fighting in a civil war are not involved in a political exercize, a rather forceful one in fact? And yes, the USA and CSA did toss political dissenters in jail during the conflict. Lincoln jailed half the Maryland state legislature to prevent that state’s secession. Once upon a time it was pretty much standard to lock up people who criticized the Powers That Be in especially obnoxious ways.
On a related topic, one also cannot claim there was anything unique about Russian pogroms. We Americans have a number of similar examples, allowing for the different ethnicity of the victims, (google “Rosewood Florida”), and even meek and mild Britain turned loose the Black-and-Tans on Ireland.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:24 am
Sorry to skip the comments, but this is why they killed the kids:
1. French Revolution of 1793: Louis XVI is killed. His son is allowed into exile. In 1815, Napoleon is exiled permanently. The son comes back, becomes Louis XVIII, the monarchy is restored for 33 years of constant revolt and terrible policy.
2. Russian Revolution of 1917: they kill the kids. No restoration. USSR falls in 1991, nobody talks about restoration of monarchy–because there’s no monarchy to restore.
Monarchy is like a horror movie. If you don’t make sure the monster is totally dead, there WILL be a sequel.
You kill the kids. You GOTTA kill the kids.
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:52 am
It is absurd to say that Russia “lost” WW1. Lenin withdrew from the war against the Germans and Austrians, and the Germans and Austrians then lost to France, Great Britain, and the US. The Russian people did not want to fight in WW1 — the Czar and his army were not loved. Kerensky did want to fight but he unable to get people to get behind his position and was deposed. Many people now think Kerensky was right to wish to save the civilizations of England and France and prevent German militarism from taking over the world, but at the time the more leftist position was against the war.
Massacring people and their families, whether they are the Czar or not, of course is deplorable and wrong.
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Pithlord,
You can call yourself a “Canadian social democrat” all you like, but ultimately you’re morally not that much different than the Contra thugs who blew up hospitals. You support the restoration of capitalism in Nicaragua, and so did they. That is exactly why Nicaragua needed its spies and informers, to protect themselves against people like you. Social democracy is, after all, just another form of the same exploitative system that Nicaragua was fighting against.
So what if the revolution was ‘dominated by communist intellectuals’ (it wasn’t, but leave that aside.) The Sandinistas, ‘communist’ or not, shared none of the bad aspects of Soviet or Chinese communism (the massacres, the slave labor camps, the atheism, the elimination of peasant proprietorship). If you mean that they supported (somewhat) authoritarian government and the elimination of capitalist ownership, so what? So do I, which is just another reason I support them.
You’re no different than the Cuban exiles, the Contras, or the Bolivian and Venezuelan opposition today, all out to further your own greed and self-interest and block needed reforms. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
I think I’m a bit less of a knee-jerk defender of my political “side” than you, given that the only things I said about the Bolcheviks in this thread were critical.
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Luke,
Don’t be silly. It was far from a sure thing in 1793 that France would be returned to monarchy because they let the king go. The reason France returned to monarchy was because the defeat of Napoleon left France at the mercy of the monarchist powers of the Sixth Alliance. If the French had killed their entire royal family then I’m sure the English and Russians would have created a new monarchy from scratch.
France would never have returned to Bourbon monarchy, whether or not they killed the king and his children, if Napoleon had not overplayed his hand (which was a great hand) and brought the whole edifice crashing down around him. Killing the royal family had nothing to do with it.
The Italians didn’t execute their king or his families, nor did the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, or the Egyptians; I haven’t noticed a movement to restore monarchy in any of those countries.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:24 pm
After the defeat of 1870 the French people did try to return the Bourbon king to the throne, but negotiations broke down when the Bourbon heir, the Comte de Chambord refused to accept the tricolor flag, which by then the people had become accustomed to. The Bourbons defeated themselves by their recalcitrance and addiction to protocol.
It is true. Had the entire Bourbon (or any other) royal clan been stamped out, the European powers would have still managed to find some distant relative to put in their place — as they did in creating King Leopold of Belgium (a small-time noble from Germany), after they threw Napoleon out.
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:03 pm
“Soldiers fighting in a civil war are not involved in a political exercize, a rather forceful one in fact? And yes, the USA and CSA did toss political dissenters in jail during the conflict. Lincoln jailed half the Maryland state legislature to prevent that state’s secession.”
Sure, during a gigantic war. Russia was regularly exiling large numbers of people to Siberia for their politics whether there was a war on or not. The USA didn’t even have a formal counter-intelligence agency for another 60 years after the end of the Civil War.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Matt,
It would be interesting for you to explain the evolution of your views on the death penalty. This seems like a pretty big shift.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Re: Had the entire Bourbon (or any other) royal clan been stamped out, the European powers would have still managed to find some distant relative to put in their place
Spain was ruled by a branch of the Bourbons, in fact today’s Juan Carlos, who seems to have learned much and forgotten everything he should have forgotten, is one of them.
Luke is wrong about the Jacobins and Louis XVI’s immediate family: his young son was imprisoned (as I mentioned above), and badly treated so he soon perished. I am not sure what became of Louis’ daughter, who was barred from the succession by her sex. It was Louis XVI’s brother who came back to the throen in 1815 as Louis XVIII (what happened to Louis No 17? He was the unhappy son, whom French royalists and all the powers of Europe recognized as king despite his cicumstances).
Re: The USA didn’t even have a formal counter-intelligence agency for another 60 years after the end of the Civil War.
Being a good capitalist power the US outsourced the functionality of putting down dissent. The Pinkertons handled it at need for both the government and for corporate poobahs. And in the South of course the KKK was pretty good at keeping the lower orders in line.
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Even now they are handing it to the culture war “freikorps” of Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Krautheimer, Hannity, etc.
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