Posted on 07/18/2008 6:29:16 PM PDT by PotatoHeadMick
Bayonetted and shot by drunken assassins, the slaughter of the Russian royal family shook the world. Now a new book reveals in compelling detail the horrifying final days of the Romanovs.
As the light faded, a train halted in the siding near the remote railway station of Lyubinskaya on the Trans-Siberian railway line.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
would you recommend it for someone wanting to learn more about the subject (the truth of it)?
The children were innocents.
Mom and Pop were not.
Many millions of people died from 1914 to 1918. Decisions made by the Tsar, heavily influenced by his wife, were a major contributor to those deaths.
He was not an evil man, but he was an utter disaster for Russia and the world. You can make an excellent case that had Nick been a better politician Communism and Nazism would never have arisen, which between them killed well over 100M people.
Mom and Pop deserved their fate far more than most of the people who died as a result of their decisions. It’s just too bad his first cousin and close friend Willy didn’t suffer the same fate.
They make the current crop of royal females look pretty sleazy....... (excepting the Queen).
Spot on.
I would agree with that statement somewhat, and it's a shame that the Kerensky government couldn't have held up against the Bolsheviks. As one of Polish heritage, I shed no tears for the Tsar, but still, the children didn't deserve that fate.
Did you pause to take a breath when you wrote that? 'Cause I had to when I read it. I started wondering how deep you were going to drill down into Mr. and Mrs. Average's lives.
...though I do think that Pop was well meaning. He did try to act in Russia’s best interests, via the abdication he regretted when he saw that it did more damage than good to Russia.
A guy could do worse.
I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. ("An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934," University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP's Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.
In his masterwork about Stalin's imposed famine on Ukraine, "Harvest of Sorrow," Robert Conquest has written:
As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.
What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. In her exposé "Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's man in Moscow," S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty's Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, "the recommendation fell by the wayside."
It was Duranty who made the remark about the necessity of breaking eggs to make an omelet. Now the media has eggs on its face from the Obamlet. Bring on the youth guard and the new cultural revolution. After the sloppy execution of the ancien régime à la Raila Odinga and the Christian-burners.
By the time he abdicated, it was irrelevant. Nobody paid him any attention anymore, so it didn’t matter whether he clung to the throne or not.
People forget that “leaders” have only the power they get from people who follow them. That’s why those who obsess over a presidential coup are being silly.
For an American president, right or left, to “take over” and dump the Constitution would require at minimum hundreds of thousands and more likely tens of millions of willing followers, appropriately placed in the power structure, especially the military. I don’t see these people out there.
FYI
Thanks for the post; pics. Educational.
I hope our leaders in Washington today meet the same fate.
I never recommend a book unless I’ve read it cover to cover and I haven’t read this one yet. Right now I’m plowing through a history of Scotland and need to keep the Jacobites, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the fallen at Culloden straight, before I tackle yet another branch of the British royal family!
Is that really called for?
Me too. I look at those girls’ faces and I see my own children.
Come November, you may be proven wrong!
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