Books Reviewed:
Title: The Last Tsar: The Last 503 Days of Nicholas II
Author: Robert Servis
Translator: Paid full
Publisher: Yilin Publishing House
Publication date: December 2021
On 16 July 1918, Nicholas II, the last Russian Tsar, and his wife, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, and five other children: Crown Prince Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, and four daughters Olga Nikolaievna, Taziana Nikolaievna, Maria Nikolaievna, and Anastasia Nikolaievna, together with their attendants, were brutally executed in Yekaterinburg.
In the book "A Grain of Ashes of the Tsar's Sin Fell on the Heads of Innocent Children and Became a Mountain" (a book review of the Four Romanov Sisters: The Daughters of the Last Tsar), Nicholas II's family was carried out by the local "Cheka" organization, and the Soviet Central Committee only confirmed the implementation of the instructions afterwards.
Because Nicholas II's four daughters had visited many times before the war, became the focus of attention of the European and American media, and were the darlings of public opinion at that time, Nicholas's entire family was killed, and after the execution, the remains were poured with gasoline and sulfuric acid and destroyed, which severely damaged the image of the state and political party in Soviet Russia at that time. Nicholas II was the cousin of King George V of England, and the Russian Queen's maternal grandmother was Queen Victoria, who ruled Britain for most of the 19th century, which made Britain quite hostile to Russia from then on.
After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Russia tried to reintegrate into Europe, and an important step in restoring a respected legal order was to recover the mutilated remains of nikolai's family, solemnly rehabilitate them, and grant Nikolai the title of saint.
The author's article "A grain of ashes of the Tsar's evil, falling on the heads of innocent children and becoming a mountain" also mentions that the Soviet Russia's abuse of Nikolai's family seems too brutal, but It is no problem for Soviet Russia to believe that Nicholas himself is a sinner of the people. If the Soviet Union had released the children of the Nikolai family at that time and executed the Nicholas couple through trial or imprisoned them for life, it is believed that the criticism caused by them would be much less. After Nicholas II succeeded to the throne, he was at odds with the trend of the times, refused to promote democratic constitutionalism, and used complicated court etiquette to separate his family and even the entire Romanov royal family from the people, including the upper middle class. Determined to defend the authority of the Tsar, he repeatedly suppressed the people, causing repeated bloody cases. He accelerated the promotion of Russification in areas annexed by Russia, such as Poland, and intensified the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities in those areas.
As Chinese, we also need to remember that Nicholas II single-handedly promoted diplomatic blackmail against Li Hongzhang, accelerated the annexation of Chinese territory, and stepped up the listing of northeast China as his sphere of influence. In the 1900 Hailanpao Massacre and the Jiangdong Sixty-Four Tun Massacre, the victimization of the Chinese people was no less than the last encounter of the Nikolai family. After the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in China, Tsarist Russia formed an eight-power alliance with many countries, and Russia sent the most troops to Japan, causing the most damage to the Gyeonggi area. After the signing of the "Xinugu Treaty", the Russian army was still reluctant to withdraw its troops.
The last Tsar: The Last 503 Days of Nicholas II is from Robert Service, a well-known British historian who studied Russia and the Soviet Union, a fellow at St. Anthony's College at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Robert Servis had previously published biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky.
The Last Tsar: The Last 503 Days of Nicholas II, in contrast to works that also describe the end of the Nicholas family, such as The Romanov Sisters: The Daughters of the Last Tsar, focuses on how Nicholas himself embraced this drastic change in the individual, the royal family, and the state during the 503 days from his forced abdication to his execution. The Last Tsar: The Last 503 Days of Nicholas II is not a work that "washed the ground" for Nicholas II, and the author has no intention of portraying Nicholas II as a so-called "saint" who does not stick to sin.
As pointed out at the beginning of the book "The Last Tsar: The Last 503 Days of Nicholas II", Nicholas II was actually fully aware of the hostility of Russian politics and the people to him, but had no intention of changing, but always hid in the warm shelter of his family. Nikolai himself was not a power lover, but refused to delegate royal power to the democratic channel, stubbornly adhering to the authoritarian tradition of successive tsars.
By March 1917, the revolutionary situation had allowed the Tsar to continue as the supreme authority of the state. In this case, Nikolai easily wrote the abdication edict and decided to pass the throne to his younger brother Mikhail instead of his own son Alexei, who was suffering from hemophilia. But the revolutionaries were no longer satisfied with Nikolai's abdication, but buryed the tsarist system once and for all.
The Nikolai family was claustrophobic in the Tsarist village of Petrograd. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks used the Provisional Government to treat the deposed emperor as a deposed emperor, and on the other hand, the Bolsheviks frequently attacked public opinion on the pretext that Nikolai should be tried as soon as possible, which made the Provisional Government feel passive; on the other hand, Kerensky himself actually held an anti-monarchy position for many years, but in his dealings with the Nikolai family, he began to sympathize. Nikolai himself, in addition to reading every day, cut wood with axes and saws, which surprised the revolutionary soldiers who were guarding the deposed emperor's family, and the relationship between them eased somewhat. Later, when the "Cheka" executed Nikolai's family, he specially changed the guards several times, in order to avoid the "dangerous sympathy" of the revolutionary soldiers for Nikolai because of daily contact.
The last Tsar: The Last 503 Days of Nicholas II uses historical sources to examine the taciturn Nicholas' thoughts during the last few hundred days of his life, that is, to consider his diary and reading list. The book points out that Nikolai had read Chekhov's short stories and her family's Sherlock Holmes novels, and that the focus was on Russian historical works, including those that incited the overthrow of the Tsarist rule and exposed his dark rule. That is to say, in reading, Nikolai was relatively calm to know the political ideas and theoretical views that he had tried to reject in the past. In a sense, he had already foreseen the end of his family, so he tried to preserve the dignity of himself and the whole family as much as possible.
From Tobolsk in Siberia to Yekaterinburg, Nicholas II's calm won considerable respect from all those with whom he had maintained close contact, including Yakovlev, a commissar from the Bolshevik party. The chaos of the civil war that followed the October Revolution also turned Nikolai and the entire Romanov royal family into a dangerous legacy for revolutionaries – once Nikolai fell into the hands of the White Army, Russia could fall into protracted war, division, and even the defeat of the revolution. In the confusion, the Soviet Cheka executed the conservative, weak, and refusing to change emperor during his tenure, killing his family. A month before that, his brother Mikhail was also killed.