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Did Moscow Order the Death of the Romanovs or the local Soviet? (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Local soviet ultimately. Soviet government wanted to bring tsar to Moscow to trial, directed that multiple times, ultimately they send Trotsky to bring tsar to Moscov, and if impossible to conduct trial on place as the representative. But Trotsky didn't managed to get there before white army surrounded Yekaterinburg (which later fell so they would certainly take the Romanovs with them).

The only source about Lenin ordering shooting of Romanovs is of course Trotsky who said that Lenin and Sverdlov talked to him and ordered him to do so. But of course, typical for Trotsky, he only pulled out that revelation after becoming renegade when Lenin and Sverdlov were both long dead, so we could safely assume that did not happen in reality.

I greatly recommend book about that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The narrator of the podcast said there was plenty of contemporary evidence that Lenin and Sverdlov ordered the execution and lied about approving it ex post facto, but the only evidence he directly referenced in the podcast itself was the fact that they had a history of lying because the lie that only the tsar died (that they only kept up for just a little while), and that quote from Trotsky.

Then the fact that he said it was years later when Trotsky said this and he had his own motivations at the time, and then ignored this contradiction, made me wonder if there's other evidence out there that made him so sure about this version of events. There's also the vague idea that the Ural Soviet wouldn't dare execute them without Moscow permission, but I'm not sure why he's so sure of that. It seems to me things weren't nearly so centralized at that time, especially with a civil war going on and all.

I appreciate the additional detail that not only was the quote from when the people who could counter are long dead, but it was after he was going rogue. It makes me more and more sure that the narrator was a lot more positive of one version of events for some random personal reason, like anti-Soviet bias, and not for any solid historical reason. And thanks the book recommendation! I'll be sure to check that out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I'm likely not as knowledgeable as some comrades about the Civil War period, but I will say that the amount of discretion given to local soviets even during the Stalinist era, which was considered by many to be the most harsh, was and is inconceivable to most contemporary Americans, even modern liberalism has harsher incentive structures due to contract law than the soviets did.

Hell, part of the problem of the Soviet Union was a distinct lack of extreme federal centralization, which allowed regions to vary greatly in how they governed themselves and enforced or didn't enforce production quotas created by the politburo. Like if you didn't meet your quotas it was difficult to advance your career, unless you were well connected or bribing people, but if you didn't care, it was only really during the Stalinist era that you had to justify why you didn't meet quota (like, if an essential machine broke down you had to have eyewitness verification from other plant workers this actually happened, so if you weren't liked people could 100% screw you over) or be detained, which is what led to alot of blackmarket graft during and prior to Peristrioka.

I would imagine during the Civil War even more political latitude was given to the soviets, but ultimately I am not very familiar with that period of history.