From 1963 onward, the re-educated former of China Emperor Puyi regularly gave press conferences praising life in the People’s Republic of China, and foreign diplomats often sought him out, curious to meet the famous “Last Emperor” of China. In an interview with Behr, Li Wenda told him that Puyi was a very clumsy man who “invariably forgot to close doors behind him, forgot to flush the toilet, forgot to turn the tap off after washing his hands, had a genius for creating an instant, disorderly mess around him”.[280] Puyi had been so used to having his needs catered to that he never entirely learned how to function on his own.

He tried very hard to be modest and humble, always being the last person to board a bus, which meant that on one occasion he missed the ride, mistaking the bus conductor for a passenger. In restaurants he would tell waitresses, "You should not be serving me. I should be serving you."During this period, Puyi was known for his kindness, and once after he accidentally knocked down an elderly lady with his bicycle, he visited her every day in the hospital to bring her flowers to make amends until she was released.

I don’t really feel bad for the tsar or tsarina, and I definitely internalize that Mark Twain quote people (including myself) like to post about revolutionary terror, but I think a case can be made that the tsar’s kids were young enough to be re-educated and proletarianized. Also it was just ruthless witness-silencing to kill their servants. Anyway, it’s all speculative anyway. The whole reason the family was killed was because a white army legion was closing in on Yekaterinburg and Lenin didn’t want the royal family falling into their hands.

I’ve heard it argued that it might have actually sowed chaos in the white army if the tsar fell into their hands, since the white army was already split between Absolute Monarchists, Constitutional Monarchists, Liberal/Conservative Republicans, and even some Right-SRs (agrarian socialists) that were purged later. The question of what to do with the tsar would have possibly caused a lot of white army infighting. But we can never know because it didn’t happen.

Trotsky, with his penchant for showmanship, wanted to be the prosecutor in a trial against Nicholas, similar to what happened with the French revolution, but he never got to have that dream fulfilled. Doing it in public that way certainly would have legitimized it more than what actually happened, which is that they did it quietly, tried and failed to destroy the bodies, and then wouldn’t admit it for a long time. I don’t understand the “kids had it coming because they had jewels sown into their clothes” argument. Yeah. Their parents were using them as human shields like all reactionary parents do. And? If our society is wrongly structured to treat children like the property of their parents, then shouldn’t children be liberated from their reactionary parents, rather than killed alongside them? I think a lot of people just say “fuck them kids” for shock value to trigger the porkies.

Tsar Nicholisn’t

rest in piss monarchs lmao

Death to America

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov#Contemporary_Romanovs

Didn’t do a good enough job tbh.

We need a struggle session emote

Although the massacre of the Romanovs was a moral failing, it does not delegitimize the right for the workers, peasants, and soldiers who suffered under the feudal class dictatorship that saw them as expendable, to rise up for their freedom from such a system and towards their own self-government. Denying this is like condemning the end of slavery in North America because of slave revolts.

1. lol
2. oh boy, here we go

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

We are taught that the deaths of one royal family was a terrible tragedy, and never asked to think about the uncountable people that family had slaughtered at their behest. In other words, something something trolley problem something something pull the lever and kill the royals

Kind of funny but feel a little iffy about seeing children facing their demise being depicted like this.