Remains of Czar Nicholas II's Son May Have Been Found

FOXNews.com ^ | August 24, 2007 | Associated Press

[wildbill]

Ivan the Terrible reigned in the 1500s and most of his ‘terrible’ acts were committed AGAINST the aristocracy to bring them under his control. The peasants simply weren’t considered worth bothering with, so the magnitude of the crimes was rather small.

While acknowleging the authoritarian regimes of the Tsars several hundred years ago, the systematic brutalization of the entire populace of the Euro-Asian land mass, including gulags, planned starvation of masses of people (ethnic genocide) and killing off of small landowners is an invention of the 20th century.

While claiming Communism was the modern-day enlightened and compassionate political system for the benefit of the masses, Lenin, Stalin and their cronies killed, abused, tortured, and psychically crushed more people than all the ancient Tsars put together.

Wasn’t it one of the Bosheviks who said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is just a statistic?

[TexasRepublic]

Understand this and understand it well...

Let's add to that. No system of absolute power ever turns out well. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The end result is destructiveness and mass murder. Man is fundamentally flawed and incapable of constructively wielding absolute power like some kind of god.

[Centurion2000]

While it is awful what the Communists did to these people and millions like them, it is important to remember that the Romanov Dynasty was a dictatorship vested with absolute power just like the Bolsheviks. The Revolution of 1917 simply replaced one regime with another

Not entirely true. The Russian Orthodox Church was a stabilizing institution during the Tsars' reigns.

[bobjam]

The Russian Church spent most of the Czarist era behaving as the Czars saw fit. Czar Peter the Great forced reforms in the Russian Church prompting the schismatic Old Believers church. A later Czar even forced the clergy to wear Lutheran style vestments. Like the Catholic bishops in 18th Century France or the Episcopal bishops in 19th Century America, the Russian bishops did little in the face of aristocratic abuse of the people.

Patriarch Alexi II probably exercises more power and influence that any of his predecessors over the last several centuries.