Thursday, July 17, 2014

Death of a Family

July 17 is a sad anniversary. To quote author and historian Gareth Russell:
It had been a horrible, violent, lawless death - carried out in secret, without a trial or without justice. It was a fate that was to befall millions of ordinary Russians in the years under Communist rule - a system of government which has still, inexplicably, managed to escape the historical condemnation it so richly deserves. The Soviet Union was a depraved and genocidal regime, which even on its best days bore all the qualities of a sociopath. It was devoid of morality or respect for human life. It was infinitely worse than any regime in Russian history. And although it had technically come to power in October 1917, it was the events in Yekaterinburg on 17th July 1918 that should arguably be seen as the Soviet Union's true birth-date. Everything that defined it and everything that it was prepared to resort to was contained in how it executed the Romanovs. As Trotsky so rightly pointed out, with his chilling disinterest in human suffering - it proved that there was no going back. It defined what was to come. (Read entire post.)
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7 comments:

May said...

What a beautiful family!

lara77 said...

That description of the murder of the Romanovs is so upsetting; I found myself reading over the last few sentences too quickly because they were so horrible. The sheer inhumanity and cold hearted barbarism of Lenin and the other goons reminds me of the leaders of the French Revolution. THIS Lenin is the man the Communists revere and encase in a glass tomb? That would be like putting Danton or Robespierre on display for veneration! God bless the souls of Tsar Nicholas, the Tsarina and all the Russian Royal Family.

julygirl said...

...and as history has shown, they even slaughered their own so called comrades in order to achieve...what? The country is littered with mass graves, some of which have turned up 50 to 70 years later.

Anonymous said...

What happened to the actual murderers -did they suffer in the Stalinist Purges?

elena maria vidal said...

Some did, some didn't. King and Wilson's book The Fate of the Romanovs tells what happened to them, as does Edvard Radzinsky's excellent book, The Life and Death of the Last Tsar.

Kaitlyn said...

Undoubtedly, one of the most gratuitous and horrifying examples of violence against innocent people. RIP in the Arms of The Lord.

Kaitlyn said...

I wholeheartedly agree! And nothing was achieved by the revolutionaries in either case. Even if life had improved for people, it still doesn't justify the slaughtering of innocents but it's even worse when it was all for naught.