In view of the tens of thousands of lives which the Cheka would claim in the years that followed the Ekaterinburg tragedy, and the millions killed by its successors, the death at its hands of eleven prisoners hardly qualifies as an event of extraordinary magnitude. And yet, there is a deep symbolic meaning to the massacre of the ex-Tsar, his family, and staff. Just as liberty has its great historic days – the battles of Lexington and Concord, the storming of the Bastille – so does totalitarianism. The manner in which the massacre was prepared and carried out, at first denied and then justified, has something uniquely odious about it, something that radically distinguishes it from previous acts of regicide and brands it as a prelude to twentieth-century mass murder.
To begin with, it was unnecessary. The Romanovs had willingly, indeed happily, withdrawn from active politics and submitted to every demand of their Bolshevik captors. True, they were not averse to being abducted and brought to freedom, but hope of escape from imprisonment, especially imprisonment imposed without charges or trial, hardly qualifies as the “criminal design” that it was designated by the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks to justify the execution.
[…]
If this was not done [moving the prisoners to Moscow], the reason must be sought not in such spurious excuses as lack of time, the danger of flight, or of capture by the Czechs, but in the political needs of the Bolshevik Government. In July 1918 it was sinking to the nadir of its fortunes, under attack from all sides and abandoned by many of its supporters. To cement its deserting following it needed blood.
[…]
Had the Bolsheviks indeed killed the ex-Tsar’s wife and children in order to instill terror in their enemies and loyalty in their followers, they would have proclaimed the deed loud and clear, whereas in fact they denied it then and for years to come. But Trotsky’s terrible confession is correct in a deeper moral and psychological sense. Like the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill blood to bind their wavering adherents with a bond of collective guilt. The more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience, the more the Bolshevik rank and file had to realize that there was no retreating, no faltering, no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their leaders, and could only either march with them to “total victory,” regardless of the cost, or go down with them in “total doom.” The Ekaterinburg massacre marked the beginning of the “Red Terror,” formally inaugurated six weeks later, many of whose victims would consist of hostages executed, not because they had committed crimes, but because, in Trotsky’s words, their death “was needed.”
When a government arrogates to itself the power to kill people, not because of what they had done or even might do, but because their death is “needed,” we are entering an entirely new moral realm. Here lies the symbolic significance of the events that occurred in Ekaterinburg in the night of July 16-17. The massacre, by secret order of the government, of a family that for all its Imperial background was remarkably commonplace, guilty of nothing, desiring only to be allowed to live in peace, carried mankind for the first time across the threshold of deliberate genocide. The same reasoning that had led the Bolsheviks to condemn them to death would later be applied in Russia and elsewhere to millions of nameless beings who happened to stand in the way of one or another design for a new world order.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Murder of the Imperial Family." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 787-89. Print.
Further Reading:
чрезвыча́йная коми́ссия (Emergency Committee) / ЧК (Cheka)
Execution of the Romanov Family
Battles of Lexington and Concord
Prise de la Bastille (Storming of the Bastille)
Lev Davidovich Bronstein / Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий (Leon Trotsky)
Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский (Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky)
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