Another solid assessment there Tsarfan minus one very important factor that you've chosen to admit.
Marie and Louie were sparred, as would have Louis-Joseph and Sophie been if they'd lived long enough. Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia were NOT. But, moving on...
Hard to offer a rebuttal since I more or less agree with you on all of your points below, but just for the sake of discussion...
- incarcerated in prisons rather than in luxurious houses with a cadre of servants
Very true, although the Ipatiev House wasn't exactly "luxurious". And those servants, by then, weren't forced to continue on with the family.- family separated from each other
Key difference indeed. Interesting how for the IF it was the period of separation, perhaps more so than the thought of death itself, that depressed them.- their associates murdered in particularly cruel ways with efforts made to make sure the royal couple knew of it
Yes. At least for the IF they were unaware of the atrocities being suffered by their family and "associates".- the son enticed to accuse the mother publicly of incest
Well the Romanovs son had a debilitating disease to fight through while living in captivity, so that was no picnic...- family members deliberately taunted with threats of death
Nicholas received his fair share of taunts, but not death threats, and certainly the rest of the family didn't have to endure that...agreed.- husband and wife humiliated at public trialIf only Trotsky had his way this would have been a wash. Nicholas however was in fact humiliated to a lesser degree upon heading back home to Tsarkoe Selo. "Citizen Romanov", etc.
- husband and wife going to their deaths aware that death was comingInterestingly I might have to disagree with you on this. More below...
- facing their deaths before crowds that viewed them as entertainmentPretty rough. But is it worse than suffering repeated blows by bayonet, bullets penetrating your body and then severe beat downs with riffle buts? Nicholas & Alexandra got off WAY easy compared to most of the others in the room that night.
The Romanovs spent the evening before their deaths reading and playing cards. They went down into the cellar certainly worried, but apparently thinking they were to be evacuated to another place...The Commune was calculatingly sadistic in their handling of the Bourbons. The Bolsheviks were coldly cynical in their handling of the Romanovs.
This one is tricky for me. The dilemma between whether it's better to know or not to know. The French royal family had to suffer through incredible nervous exhaustion, knowing their time was coming sooner or later, but this also could have afforded them some type of spiritual peace. If you know you are going to die, and know for a while that it's coming (like someone suffering a prolonged and lethal illness) there are ways to make peace with death, almost to the point, for some, where you embrace it just before it arrives.
The Romanovs by contrast had to be stunned at the quick turn of events regarding their fate. Nicholas perhaps had some sort of premonition about what his fate, and maybe even that of his wife, would be. But probably not his retainers and CERTAINLY not his children.
We were simply being moved that night as we had been before...we are slowly working their way towards exile. Not the Crimea, that much is out of the question by this point, but England? Perhaps Denmark or France even? Hell maybe the United States for all we know. We understand that ever since they entered the war the tide has turned for the allies. 16% of Romanov rulers were killed with the complicity of their own family. 16%. It's an extraordinary number. I think it would be very hard to find any Bolshevik with such a history of familicide in his lineage.
Well Stalin did hunt down a few of his former comrades. He went all the way to Mexico to whack Trotsky. Anyway to calculate the total number of Bolsheviks in "power" as opposed to Romanovs in power? Then you must divide that number but 304 for the Romanovs (1613-1917), and - assuming you lump the Soviets and Bolsheviks together - 73 for the Bolsheviks (1918-91).
And you are entirely correct about Ivan VI. Incontestably the legitimate tsar, he was imprisoned as a toddler at the age of one by Elizabeth, he was kept in isolation as a common prisoner, deprived of education and identity, reported to have become insane in the process, and then killed at 24 (barely older than Olga Nicholaevna) on Catherine II's orders.
This was awful indeed. To some extent you'd think that imprisonment, bad as it was, would became his new normal. Certainly not the "fall's gonna kill ya" argument I've made before where having something and then losing it is often worse than never having it at all. I also don't think Ivan would be considered insane. Possibility demented in much the same way Peter III, minus the luxuries of course. But ultimately the thought of his imprisonment and then death, just when it seemed like the tide was turning in his favor, is sad beyond words.
One final thought...Clearly many of us express significant bias with regards to the deaths of last of the Romanovs. Much of it is psychological. We were all alive in the 20th century, we weren't in the 18th. We have actual modern mediums such as photograph and (occasional) video footage to see our subjects of interest, unlike the portraits of the 18th century.
But its deeper than that. 1918 wasn't even a century ago. The world was supposed to be less violent and brutal by then, right? Systems of justice more fully developed and more universally understood. Fewer "savage" peoples in existence as the world was shrinking and continued to move towards globalization. Lessons learned from a brutal human history. A new regime that was to be a peaceful utopian political ideal...And then the horrors of WWI, and then WW2, and then the purges and the holocaust, Mao, Amin, Milosevic, Al-Qaeda and Rwanda. Killing OTMAA is symbolic in many ways...worst of all it shows that human beings, even in the supposedly more socially/intellectually/politically/economically developed 20th century that continued (and continues still nearly a century later) to be capable of ANYTHING!
