'The Seminal Crime of the 20th Century'

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 20^th century, which given the various regimes to come in Russia, carried over with its second- and third-order effects into the 21^st century, was the murder of Nicholas 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.]