Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/18/new-dna-tests-show-remains-are.html
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I misread the headline and thought the DNA tests showed the remains were The Ramones.
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…they were shot, knifed and clubbed to death…
Well Lenin was nothing if not thorough.
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Martyrs
More like Tryants. The way they were killed was rather barbaric, but like the ancien régime in the french revolution, they had it coming.
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The adults, you mean? No-one would care if they’d just executed the Tsar and his cronies.
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Ah, the Russian Orthodox Church, always preferring mysticism to science even when the science could benefit it. But then this is an organisation that makes Nicky, the hapless figurehead of a brutal regime, a martyred saint.
Perhaps the Bolshevik troops thought that Rasputin had cast his own personal invulnerability spell on the Romanovs.
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The children were of course victims of history. Though I can understand the sentiment of a people as oppressed as the russians to not want to leave any contenders for the throne remaining. At the time of the russian revolution the Russian empire was still a medieval style feudal state, where the common people were rightless serfs. The way the Romanovs were removed was equally medieval. What they got instead was not better in any way, though. It seems like the imperial power structure was embedded so deeply into the russian society they couldn’t (and still can’t) really turn into a true democracy.
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That’s not correct. The serfs were officially freed in 1861 (it’s Russia’s version of the roughly contemporaneous Emancipation Proclamation). That’s not to say that life was great for the common people in 1917, but they did have more rights and greater mobility than actual serfs.
It would be more accurate to say that vestiges of the strongman-worshipping and superstitious peasant mentality remained in place among the bulk of the Russian populace long after 1861*, accounting for the barbaric and medieval nature of the execution of the Tsar’s entire family.
[* I’d argue long after 1917 but that’s another discussion]
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“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” —Calvin Coolidge
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Ah, thanks for the info. You learn something new every day 
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In practice, the 1917 (and indeed I suspect even later) Russian Society was pretty feudal. On paper the people were maybe not serfs, but the regime was autocratic and brutal with secret police everywhere. At least that’s what I gathered from reading up on russian society through the years,.
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Indeed, they simply traded one set of brutal gangsters and secret police for another. A cautionary tale for any who want a revolution, even when it’s rightfully needed.
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“Nits make lice” is the traditional justification…
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Don’t forget that the October revolution was the second Russian revolution in 1917. Alexander Kerensky was not perfect, but he definitely wasn’t a bolshevik or tsarist
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LOL. On the sad side, the Ramones had their own family scourge, cancer. I think they all died of one form or another.
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“Kerensky will return!”
Hmm, maybe I’m thinking of another Kerensky…
to the best of my recollection of the histories i’ve read about the revolution and the civil war, the decision to take out the romanovs was made as much by the local soviet as it was by the central committee and in any case happened sooner than it might otherwise have done because of a local rebellion to overthrow the soviet. certainly lenin endorsed the executions after the fact but the only thing on record tying lenin to the executions was a vote by the central committee to give the local soviet authorization to plan and carry out the executions if they became necessary.
not really trying to defend lenin who was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths but the romanov executions weren’t purely his work.
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IIRC, one reason for this persistence was that the women had jewels sewn into their clothes, so some of the bullets bounced off. If this is true, that sounds like an awfully lingering way to go, rather than the rapid executions planned.
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When dealing with royalty you usually have to get all the heirs as well to remove any remaining claimants who have enough legitimacy to be recognized by foreign powers. The Bolsheviks were so thorough in liquidating the Russian nobility it’s currently unclear who has the proper claim to the Russian throne under old imperial law.
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Romanov DNA, all of them? Was that through inbreeding or in-law gene-splicing?
