Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 17 – One hundred
years ago today, the Bolsheviks slaughtered Nicholas II, his wife and children
and some of his servants in the basement of the Ipatyev House in Yekaterinburg.
In the years since, the reactions of Russians have significantly evolved to the
point where that murder is viewed as a symbol of all Russians have lost, Andrey
Teslya says.
The instructor at the Baltic Federal
University in Kaliningrad says that at first the killing was viewed only as
“one of the bestial actions of the Bolsheviks” among many. But “gradually,” he
says, the views of most Russians evolved; and today, Nicholas II and especially
his martyrdom have become symbols of “a lost and genuine world” (republic.ru/posts/91505).
Because the tsar had been deeply unpopular,
even Russians who opposed the revolutions were not in his corner and viewed his
murder as ugly but only one of many in the summer of 1918. Opponents of the Bolsheviks were not his
supporters and adopted the view that the future of the Russian state should be
determined by a Constituent Assembly.
That should not surprise anyone,
Teslya says, because “by the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, there were
few in educated society who remained sympathetic to the emperor and the
empress.” Many of them wanted him out of office and had taken part in
conspiracies of various kinds against him. Even the upper reaches of the aristocracy
were opposed to Nicholas.
Consequently, he continues, “the
idea of monarchy by 1917 was dead.”
Indeed, by the time of the February revolution, there were no monarchists
left in Russia. There is nothing strange in that, Teslya observes. The same was
true in France in 1792 and 1848 and in Germany in 1918.
“The rightist monarchist
organizations which arose in the course of the revolution of 1905 beginning
with the Union of the Russian People and the Union of the Archangel Mikhail
turned out by 1914 to be practically inactive,” a reflection both of the
government’s stabilization efforts and the patriotism that arose in the first
months of World War I.
Thus, “the specter of restoration in
1917 and the beginning of 1918 was influential not in and of itself but only as
an accusation, a source of suspicion and fear,” the Kaliningrad scholar says.
And that was generally true among the anti-Bolshevik White movements which had
few monarchists as well as universally so among the Bolsheviks themselves.
“Monarchist attitudes arose in
emigration” and then only after many of those who had most directly experienced
the reign of Nicholas had ceased to be the most influential spokesman for its
ideas. As years passed, “the empire
became ever more beautiful in the eyes of emigres,” and with the empire so too
the emperor.
The brutality of the murder of the
Imperial Family “became a factor in the strengthening of monarchist feelings
and illusions,” with the real Nicholas II disappearing in favor of the sainted
image of “the tsar martyr.” And that
happened as the arguments about restoration in the 1920s gave way to the unrealizable
dreams of the 1930s and the post-World War II world.
“The further from the real Russia”
the emigres were, the more inclined they became to deify the tsar and his
family, and as that happened, something else happened as well. People divided
themselves and others on the basis of attitudes not about reality but about an
image that they had invented.
Today, that same process has occurred
in Russia itself, “and the figure of Nicholas II symbolizes all ‘the old past’
and imperial greatness,” without much or in some cases any concern about the
real history of that ruler and his reign and their links with or lack of links
with Russian greatness.
No comments:
Post a Comment