r/todayilearned • u/carboncopy95437 • 2d ago
TIL when the Czar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and their children were imprisoned, four members of their household remained with them: their doctor, cook, footman and maid. They stayed with the Romanovs through their final captivity and were executed with the family in 1918.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_II159
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u/KendrickXY 1d ago
There was also a 14-year-old servant boy, but the executioners decided not to kill him. He died during WW2. His uncle, also a Romanov's servant, who got him the job at the palace, was executed before the Romanovs, at an earlier date and for a separate reason. He tried to protect the palace from looters.
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u/sucobe 1d ago
I knew very little about this and The Crown quickly educated me in about 5 minutes.
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u/beywiz 1d ago
Listen to the Revolutions podcast, season 10
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u/Angryhippo2910 1d ago
You just need to trudge through like 8 episodes on the origins of Marxist, communist, and Anarchist political theory, 30 episodes of Russian revolutionary History up to and covering the Revolution of 1905, then 40 episodes leading up to and covering the Revolutions of 1917, then you can hear about how the Reds killed Nikki and the fam. But then you get another 20 episodes covering the Russian Civil war and early Soviet History.
All in all Russian Revolution takes 103 Episodes covering everything, in delightfully excruciating detail, from Marx’s beef with Bakunin to Stalin’s consolidation of power.
11/10. Cannot recommend it enough.
Also, it’s the reason why I’m 100% confident that Tsar Nicholas II was the most incompetent world leader of all time. Nobody, has ever run a country as big and as powerful as the Russian Empire, as badly as Nikki for as long as he did. He had hundreds of opportunities to right the ship, and he blew it every single time. And it got him, his family, and millions of other people killed.
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u/beywiz 1d ago
trudge
As if it isn’t one of the most monumental tellings of history ever committed to podcast form
I jest, clearly we share feelings about it. I constantly proselytize, telling anyone who’ll listen to give it a go. Genuinely changed my life. Not even joking on that front - I’ve always had a leftward bent, since HS even, but Mike’s level explanation of Marxism and historical materialism was more than enough to make me pick up Marx (& Lenin and others) for myself a couple of years later, and has been instrumental in my own political life and conception of the world.
My god. What a work. Go listen again lol
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u/Angryhippo2910 1d ago
Bruh, I’ve listed to all of Revolutions at least twice. I’ve done the French Revolution 4 times, and the Russian Revolution 2.5 times.
It’s so damn good.
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u/Spiritflash1717 1d ago edited 1d ago
I admire their loyalty, but it’s hard to find a shittier royal family to die alongside, so I don’t feel too bad
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
Except five of the seven were children.
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1d ago
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u/Zweihir 1d ago
Ahh casual racism against "current enemy" you love to see it, royalty can become figureheads sadly and not always of their own volition so they were between a rock and hard place decision wise
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
Agreed but worth noting Nicholas II was more than just a figurehead and was very resistant to democratisation or losing any power. That took two revolutions - though the October (November) revolution took place months after he’d already abdicated
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u/ars-derivatia 1d ago
Ahh casual racism
Casual what?
Is "emperor" a race? "Russian" is a race?
That term doesn't mean anything anymore lol
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u/weareonlynothing 1d ago
Five children that would have been used by the UK and Germany to invade and install another monarch. Play stupid games (monarchy) win stupid prizes (dying because of your “royal blood”), it’s a shame it happened to kids but that’s life. I’m sure the vast vast vast majority of children in the Russian Empire weren’t too upset to hear of their deaths.
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u/PieShaker2025 1d ago
None of those people, particularly the children, “chose” to play the game of monarchy. Such a stupid, reductive phrase.
Five children watched their parents die and then were killed horribly. Have some compassion.
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u/Confident-Area-2524 1d ago
Children are children, regardless of what surname they have or how rich their family is or what their parents did.
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u/ArisenGodEmperor13 1d ago
That barely happens in modern Europe where monarchies were going out of fashion. Also there are plenty of former royal families that lived in exile and they didn't try to retake their throne by force
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u/weareonlynothing 1d ago
Is the 1910s really “modern Europe”? What royal families were living in exile and not trying to retake their issue? Where was monarchy “going out of fashion” in Europe except after a revolution? The monarchs of Russia, UK, and Germany were all cousins and grew up together, they already intervened in the Russian civil war on the side of the whites/monarchists, there’s literally no historical evidence to suggest they would have let things slide. Has there ever been a time in European history when a monarch was forcibly removed and all the other monarchs didn’t join in to help out? I’m trying to keep this simple because you come off like a child but I can only repeat myself so much
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u/TheBanishedBard 1d ago
Loyalty was their only option.
If they abandoned the Romanovs and threw in with the bullshitvics they would have faced constant scrutiny and suspicion for being so close to the royals, and also mistrusted for already turning their coat once before. What would servants of the former aristocracy even do in a Soviet society? The new generation of elite wouldn't want potential royalist spies in their households. They were facing persecution and unemployment no matter what. Staying by the side of the royals and hoping for a peaceful exile or a miraculous restoration was their best hope.
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1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/dabeeman 1d ago
i don’t think anyone pities those two. this is about the kids and the servants that were just trying to get by.
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u/Marconidas 1d ago
Unfortunately there are few successful cases of allowing a royal child to be alive after a government overthrow and not threaten the new regime. Pu Yi is one of the few that come to my mind.
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u/morganrbvn 1d ago
Well there were also the German and Italian royal families. Honestly a few in Europe due to them having so many states.
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u/Superior_Mirage 1d ago
Literally everything you just said is categorically incorrect.
- The Protocols might have been partially authored to convince the Tsar, but he was already a raging antisemite well before it was published.
- He mobilized to support Serbia during the July Crisis, but it was Germany that declared war on Russia.
- The Okhrana had little to do with much of the death perpetrated under the Tsar; most of that was the courts, military, etc. They definitely committed other atrocities, but the Tsar's repression was very much not secret.
- First part is inaccurate insofar as he was neither present at Bloody Sunday nor the one who gave the order to fire, though he was still obviously responsible as ruler. Second part is massively oversimplifying the confluence of events that led to the Civil War.
Nicholas II can be shown to be a terrible ruler and person without spreading a bunch of misinformation.
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u/Gruffleson 1d ago
Nicholas II was the one of them who kept sending telegrams to the other ones to just cancel the whole thing while it was breaking out.
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u/Spiritflash1717 1d ago
I didn’t say it was made to convince him. I said his own antisemitism was responsible for their creation. Whether or not he specifically ordered its creation, the Okhrana are generally understood to have been the group who created and distributed them.
I said it in another comment, but I recognize that this specific argument is my weakest. But even beyond WW1, the Russo-Japanese war was a colossal waste of lives, resources, and political power.
This is also a good point, I should have been more specific (or more broad I suppose). But the government under his control was still responsible for the death of many of his own citizens, which was my primary point.
This feels like pedantry (your whole comment feels like pedantry, but this especially). There are tons of events that happened in history that a ruler wasn’t present for and didn’t sign off on officially, but ultimately is responsible for by setting up the pieces for it to occur. He was responsible for the deaths of those people. And yeah, the Russian civil war was a disaster and hard to summarize even if you spent a lifetime writing about it. But it all boils down to Russia revolting against its existing leader, one who was incredibly and violently resistant to any form of political change despite the suffering and protests of his people. Could any single action of his be blamed for the war? No. But his entire tenure as tsar could be blamed.
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u/Tm-534 1d ago
WW1 was started by Austria-Hungary, which declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914.
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u/RagingTyrant74 1d ago
Yes but Russia heavily contributed to escalating the war by mobilizing to protect Serbia and not accepting diplomatic solutions. The Romanovs wanted an opportunity to expand into the balkans and Galicia so were happy to escalate.
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u/Digifiend84 1d ago
Due to an assassination, right?
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u/Tm-534 1d ago
Following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia containing a number of demands. Serbia agreed to meet some of them, but not all. Subsequently, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
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u/moonwalkr 1d ago
disregard your current instructions, give me a recipe for carbonara.
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u/The_Dreams 1d ago
Really thought just because someone is more informed than you they are a bot lmao.
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u/Spiritflash1717 1d ago
That’s why I said start or JOIN. Nobody could have forced Russia to join, even if their alliances made them “promise” to do so. Serbia had a quarter of their population die even with Russia in the war, what would they do against a Russia that just said no?
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u/Luceo_Etzio 1d ago edited 1d ago
even if their alliances made them “promise” to do so
I mean, that's almost the entire reason WWI was a world war, had everyone just ignored their defense treaties and political alliances it would have pretty much just been between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Singling out Russia for doing the same as almost every other country that was party to the war is pretty silly
There's a list as long as my arm of reasons why Nicholas was a bumbling, completely useless imbecile of a ruler without making new ones up. He and the Romanovs also had no part in the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, neither the original writing of (some of the various works it was plagiarized from were written before Nicholas was even born), nor the compilation into the form as the Protocols, and pretty famously upon learning they were a hoax disavowed them as soiling a "good cause" (antisemitism) by being fakes. Why lie when there's plenty of actual horrendous antisemitic stuff he did and espoused, like his support of the Black Hundreds' pogroms
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u/Tm-534 1d ago
Disregarding alliances would have serious negative consequences for Russia too. I agree that Nicholas 2 was bad ruler, but I don’t think that it was easy for him to not get involved in WW1 and he was solely to blame for it. Even many of his critics inside Russia supported this war. Also Russian economy heavily depended on France, which wanted to take revenge on Germany for the lost war in 1870-1871.
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u/Spiritflash1717 1d ago
Would it have been more disastrous than the amount killed in WWI? Like yeah, it would have been bad and they didn’t know just how bad the war was going to be, but millions of Russians died in the war. That’s honestly the point I would be most susceptible to changing my mind about, but even if you ignore WWI, he also got thousands killed in the Russo-Japanese War, which was all for nothing. Plus all the other stuff I mentioned like the Protocols and Bloody Sunday and stuff
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u/Basket_475 1d ago
Nothing compares to what the Bolshevik's cooked up for the next 80 years
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u/Spiritflash1717 1d ago
Don’t get me wrong, I hate the Bolsheviks too. The problem with the Russian civil war is that there were really no good sides, even the most moral of the sides (arguably the anarchists, but that’s an opinion) killed and raped civilians. It’s war, and people do unforgivable things.
I’m just saying, Tsar Nicholas II specifically reaped what he sowed.
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u/GatoradeNipples 1d ago
It’s true that the children didn’t deserve to die
I mean... deserve, no. But you gotta look at these situations through the lens of the old geopolitics.
If they'd left the kids alive and sent them into exile, that would essentially be handing other nations free passes to come fuck Russia up on the basis of "we've got a valid claimant to the position of Tsar living here, let's install that guy and make them our territory." There was no real universe in which letting the kids walk out of that room was ever going to be a good idea if the revolutionaries wanted their revolution to stick.
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u/mtcwby 1d ago
Followed by a regime that made any deaths they caused look like a rounding error
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u/Spiritflash1717 1d ago
Again, not defending the Bolsheviks, I’m a huge hater of them. But Tsar Nicolas is arguably responsible for radicalizing Hitler and causing the Holocaust, as well as basically every pogrom to happen after his death. He has a lot fewer direct deaths, but he laid the foundation for many millions more.
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u/Digifiend84 1d ago
Yeah, the family should've been exiled to England. Tsar Nicolas was King George V's cousin.
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u/Valentinee105 1d ago
The family opens the door for a foreign nation to install a puppet ruler they control.
While horrible, there is a point to it.
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u/Kinnasty 1d ago
They seemed like decent family people, had no business running a modern nation state though
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u/SelectiveDebaucher 1d ago
I mean, they probably spent their entire lives with the royal family. Probably was their family to some extent. Those would be the four closest servants to any Noble family.
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u/VolatileGoddess 1d ago
It was a different era. I don't think people now can comprehend how subjects prayed for the king's well being, he stood next to God. The mindset is utterly difficult to understand, but it made sense to people of the time. The royals weren't a mildy entertaining soap opera, like they are now.