Some years ago I happened on an account of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination that read like a coroner’s report. The author described in minute medical detail what happened after John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger – the blood, bone fragments, tissue damage in the president’s brain. I had known since I was a kid the events leading to his death that night in Ford’s Theater, but this second-by-second forensic narrative still shocked me. I felt I was learning of the murder for the first time, as though my earlier knowledge were little more than a sketchy impression, a rumor.
Robert D. Kaplan is a rare
writer who makes international relations and geopolitics interesting. He writes
tight, intelligent prose that is never gassy or dull. His approach to world
affairs is shrewd, unapologetically pessimistic and carefully documented but at
the same time literary. The first chapter of his latest book, Waste Land: A
World in Permanent Crisis (Random House, 2025), is devoted to the doomed
Weimar Republic, and Kaplan begins with a look at two novels – Goodbye to
Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (1939) and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1929). As his thesis develops, he adopts various literary
figures as guides, scaffolding to structure his story, including Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. Much of the material is familiar to me but when he describes, in
a single paragraph, the murder of the czar and his family by the Bolsheviks early
on the morning of July 17, 1918, I felt as though I were encountering those
events for the first time:
“The seminal crime of the
20th century, which given the various regimes to come in Russia,
carried over with its second- and third-order effects into the 21st
century, was the murder of Nocholas II’s family, including all the children, in
July 1918 in Ekaterinburg, probably ordered by Lenin himself. If you could
deliberately kill children at point-blank range with guns and bayonets, well
then, you could kill millions.”
Dead were Czar Nicholas II,
his wife Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children: Olga, 22; Tatiana, 21;
Maria, 19; Anastasia, 17; and Alexei, 13. Murdered with them were court
physician Eugene Botkin, lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova, footman Alexei Trupp
and chief cook Ivan Kharitonov. The bodies were transported to the Koptyaki
forest, stripped of their clothing, mutilated with grenades and acid to prevent
identification, and buried.
Kaplan is no sentimental
defender of the czar and his dynasty. “Czar Nicholas II,” he writes, “was
stupid, indecisive, and self-destructive. He had no judgment. But as much as
Nicholas retreated into a reactionary past—even as Russian society was
experiencing the painful birth pangs of modernization—there could simply be no
Russia without the monarchy. Alas, Nicholas was understandably hated as much as
his family was necessary: this is the signal tragedy that Solzhenitsyn captures
in these novels.”
The slaughter of the Romanovs was “seminal” because as a group and often as individuals, the Bolsheviks were and are serial killers, even of children. The roll call: Holodomor, Great Purge and millions of others dead, most of them anonymous, many of them children, and the killing goes on.
[Watch a video of Anatol Shmelev, the Robert Conquest Curator for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, recounting the murder of the Romanovs.]
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