Alexander Palace Forum
Discussions about the Imperial Family and European Royalty => The Final Chapter => Topic started by: GDSophie on August 25, 2017, 04:10:52 PM
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I was watching 'The Russian Revolution' on Netflix last night and when they reached the part about the massacre Helen Rappaport said that no one expected that the children would be shot and cruelly murdered. I saw it being mentioned on here a lot but no one showed any evidence that the Russians and half of the world back in 1918 were not expecting Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei to be assassinated. I've saw newspaper clippings of when the news was released but it said nothing about anyone's reactions to the children being murdered.
Does anyone have anything-diary entries, articles, anything really-from after the world was informed of their murders that say that people were surprised and, from Helen's own words, horrified?
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Well, the world was not informed. Lenin and Co. didn't exactly step forward and say: "Yeah, we killed them all."
Instead, only rumours trickled out. That is why Anna Anderson and other fakes were able to get away with what they did for so long. There was no direct proof that the I.F. were all dead at that point.
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Lenin and Co. all deliberately kept what happened to the IF murky and unclear. They didn't want the world to know what had happened and in fact encouraged all the claimants. While their immediate family "knew" what had happened, they had no evidence and many, like Marie Feodorovna kept hope that somebody might have survived. There were no "official announcements" of the murders.
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So how do we know that people were 'horrified' at the rumours of them being murdered when they themselves didn't know?
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Because they said so in letters.
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Marie Feodorovna wrote: "You know that my thoughts and prayers never leave you. I think of you day and night and sometimes feel so sick at heart that I believe I cannot bear it any longer. But God is merciful. He will give us strength for this terrible ordeal." Her daughter Olga Alexandrovna commented further on the matter, "Yet I am sure that deep in her heart my mother had steeled herself to accept the truth some years before her death.
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I didn't mean the Romanovs themselves. I meant civilians in Russia and outside the country itself; supposedly they were also horrified that OTMAA had been murdered, even people who wanted the Tsar and his family dead in the first place.
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OTMAA were mysterious , distant figures to most people I guess , even to Russians, especially OTMA . The Tsars death would have been more meaningful to them.
On Rappaport : I have enjoyed her work but she is prone to romanticism and overstatement occasionally , especially on camera . There is a tendency to project our modern revulsion back to those times. After all , OTMAA are better known now, and sympathised with, more than ever before .
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I'm curious if anybody knows the reaction of Woodrow Wilson? He didn't like the Russian Monarchy, but he also didn't like the Bolsheviks. Did he ever release a statement, or tell someone word of mouth what he thought?
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In "Nicholas & Alexandra," Robert Massey writes that one purported reaction among the peasants to news of the Tsar's possible death at Yekaterinburg was, "Merciful Christ, could they have burned the whole family alive?"
Since no formal announcement of the assassination was made, the world had only rumors to go on at first. But even rumors of the assassination of the Tsar and his family would naturally have evoked shock, horror, and revulsion among some, and indifference among others in 1918, just as they would today. However, the Imperial family were so removed from their subjects that little was known about them by anybody outside their immediate circle. Given that, and the turmoil Russia and the world were embroiled in at the time, I suspect that any reaction to rumors of the assassination would have passed quickly as people's thoughts turned back to the matter of daily survival.
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And it was only later on that the true horror sank in.
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I have reproduced clippings from the New York Times from August, 1918 that devotes a large multi-page article w/family photographs to the death of the IF. I believe the front page headline read; “Apparent Death Of Tsar & His Family” or “Apparent Death of the Russian Imperial Family”, or something to that effect. I’ll have to dig it up for another look.
The generally tone of the article was one of restrained shock & outrage. Perhaps because the details were sketchy and because the Tsarist rule in Russia was viewed skeptically by many Americans (especially in New York).
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I remember my British grandmother saying (before 1987) that she had been shocked by the murder of "all those Russian princesses" but I don't recall the context of the conversation or any other details. But her statement does indicate that there was some knowledge of the murders in Britain and that it was taken as fact.
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According to Princess Marie Louise, she was asked by George V some time in August 1918 to visit VMH to inform her of the murders, the newspapers having agreed to hold back the news until the following day. I imagine the major British newspapers would also have treated the matter with restrained shock.
We should bear in mind that the First World War was still raging, and the first instalment of the spanish Flu epidemic reached Britain in July 1917, so susceptibility to shock was probably more blunted than it would be now. To draw a parallel, over the last week or so, the news here has reported a succession of knife attacks on teenagers in North London. My reaction, and I suspect that of many others, is, 'Oh no, not another one,' and wondering what the causes are.
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Both my grandmother and my mother said they thought Russians were savage people because they killed their own royal family. Grandma was born in 1906 and mom in 1936. Horrified didn't begin to describe their emotions about the children being killed.
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In Britain we were losing over 300 people per week. In France it was twice that number.
How much would the death of the Romanov children would affected the population as a whole?
My gradparents went right through the First World War. They never mentioned it to me.
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For 90 percent of the French in 1918 (I am French, so I speak for what I know), Russia spoke very little to people. So the Romanov family ...
Moreover, I believe that the notoriety of the imperial family today comes from its deep humanity. Otherwise, she would have fallen into oblivion. It would be a historical "episode".
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I wonder if this was one of those somewhat rare instances where foreigners were more appalled than Russians - the ones generally sympathetic to the IF & monarchy but perhaps not arch-monarchists - themselves.
In the midst of a Civil War, inflation and food shortages it’s easy to get preoccupied by other things than the fate of a deposed former ruler and his family. For those of us in the West the plight of Russia as a whole was less relevant making this tragedy stand out.
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If individuals in Britain, France and Germany were asked in 1918 something like 'Do you think that the murder of the Romanovs was a terrible crime?', then probably 99 out of 100 would have answered yes.
But how much the murders affected people when they read about them in newspapers at that time is another matter.
Britain with about 18 million households took approaching 2.7 to 3 million casualties during the war.
France with about 16 million households took 6 million casualties during the war.
Given the scale of suffering it hard to think that the murder of the Romanovs had a major effect on people in the major combatant nations.
Perhaps public reaction was different in countries like the USA that were comparatively unaffected by the war.
Who knows?
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If individuals in Britain, France and Germany were asked in 1918 something like 'Do you think that the murder of the Romanovs was a terrible crime?', then probably 99 out of 100 would have answered yes.
But how much the murders affected people when they read about them in newspapers at that time is another matter.
Britain with about 18 million households took approaching 2.7 to 3 million casualties during the war.
France with about 16 million households took 6 million casualties during the war.
Given the scale of suffering it hard to think that the murder of the Romanovs had a major effect on people in the major combatant nations.
Perhaps public reaction was different in countries like the USA that were comparatively unaffected by the war.
Who knows?
Sort of what I was getting at there. The US/Canada would have had the luxury of focusing on a very specific, individual tragedy such as the fate of the Romanovs since, by and large, far fewer families suffered their own loss and since the American economy and system of governing wasn't thrown into turmoil by the effects of the war.
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There is an interesting article about British newspaper reports on the reign of Nicholas II at https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2017/03/14/the-last-of-the-romanovs/ . "It was in Yekaterinburg, in July 1918, that the Romanov family was murdered by the Bolsheviks. The reports afterwards were conflicting and rumours circulated about the tragic fate of the family.
‘Fate of the Romanovs’, Edinburgh Evening News – Saturday 06 July 1918
‘Romanov mystery’, Aberdeen Press and Journal – Tuesday 09 July 1918
‘The last journey of the ex-czar’, Sheffield Evening Telegraph – Monday 05 August 1918
‘Fate of the Romanovs’, The Scotsman – Thursday 05 December 1918"
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If individuals in Britain, France and Germany were asked in 1918 something like 'Do you think that the murder of the Romanovs was a terrible crime?', then probably 99 out of 100 would have answered yes.
You are probably underestimating the number of Communists who believed in (and were hoping for) armed revolution and class war in these countries in 1918. In Germany the left-extreme USPD (which split from the main Social Democratic Party) got 7,6 % of the votes in the 1919 election and the new Communist Party KPD 2,1 % in 1920. Four years later the KPD got 12,5 % of the votes.
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I have no idea of how things stood in France and Germany.
In Britain, the Communist Party of Great Britain did not contest a General Election until 1922 when it gained 30,684 out of 13,748,300 votes cast (about 0.22%). How much the murder of the Romanovs influenced peoples' voting intentions is perhaps anybody's guess. I would doubt if it had any in effect at all but who knows?
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If individuals in Britain, France and Germany were asked in 1918 something like 'Do you think that the murder of the Romanovs was a terrible crime?', then probably 99 out of 100 would have answered yes.
You are forgetting that in 1918 no-one knew anything about the murder of the Romanovs. The death of Nicholas and Alexei had been announced by the Russian Government but at that stage the rest of the family was reported to be in a place of safety.
That question was not relevant until the mid-1920s, at the earliest, and it can only be answered in hindsight.
In 1918 many European royal families had lost their thrones, and there was little public sympathy for their plight. The world was trying to recover from a calamitous World War and most of the royals were seen as having caused that war. Seen in that context, the death of some members of a particular royal family would not have been seen as a terrible crime, but as retribution.
You would probably get a different answer today, as modern readers are suitably horrified by the manner of the Romanov deaths. But in 1918? No.
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Slightly off topic but I always found it interesting and, being a Romanov fan, heartening, to hear that Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, the longest living person ever recorded (1875-1997) considered the execution of the Russian Imperial Family to be the most significant historical event in her lifetime.
This is someone who met Vincent Van Gogh, saw the invention of electricity, the automobile and airplane, lived through two World Wars and was still around when the World-Wide Web was first launched...and yet it was the death of the Romanovs that stood out above all else. Pretty impressive!
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I do not know if I will live 121 years, but the most important thing in my life until today is my meeting with the imperial family of Russia.
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Josef Stalin's mother asked him if he had been involved with the murder of the Imperial Family. He said no. His mother was Georgian, and not well educated but the murders were very important to her. I would imagine for most subjects, the murder of the Emperor was vitally important. Stalin's mother was horrified by the murder of the family, I should add.