Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of Trotsky's "History Of The Russian Revolution". Anyone who wants to rehabilitate old Czar Nicolas read Chapter Four, The Tzar and Tzarina" first.
Commentary
On October 2, 2008 the Russian Supreme Court did a legal "rehab" job on the last Czar of all the Russias, Nicolas II, absolving him and the "little family" of any crimes during his reign. Hears me out on this though-, one can do all the "rehab" jobs in the world concerning the crimes of the last Czar but we remember events a little differently including the events of Bloody Sunday massacre of peacefully protesting workers and their families in January 1905 that started the 1905 revolution, the massacre of the Lena Gold Mine workers in 1912 for demanding better working conditions and the destruction of Russia's youth in the massacre of World War I. Leon Trotsky mentioned in his monumental three volume History Of The Russian Revolution, in another context (the struggle against the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the Soviets), that some forces have to face the dustbin of history. That is the Czar's fate as it was for Charles I in the English Revolution and Louis XVI in the French Revolution. No court can change that fate. Below, for a different point of view but one that reflects the position of our class opponents and their continuing fear of the events of 1917 is a Boston Globe editorial.
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The Czar of All The Dissidents? The Boston Globe, October 6, 2008
ANYONE who rejects linear theories of history in favor of cycles had to feel vindicated last week after Russia's Supreme Court rehabilitated Czar Nicholas II and his family, declaring that they were victims of "groundless" political repression when they were murdered, at Lenin's behest, in 1918.
During the Soviet interregnum, schoolchildren were taught that the last czar of all the Russias was a criminal culpable for all of Russia's ills and injustices. The notion that he and the other Romanovs executed along with him could one day be officially deemed victims of the Bolshevik terror - well, for 90 years the kindest thing to be said about such a notion was that it was delusional.
At present, however, all the old villains and bugaboos of the Bolsheviks' political mythology are being celebrated as eternal verities of Mother Russia. Pure, undiluted patriotism is back. The Russian Orthodox Church is respected once again; political leaders pay tribute to the institution and its clerics. And czarist imperial history is held up not as a folly of the past, but as an inspiration for the future. Witness Russia's recent military excursion into Georgia and the Kremlin's warnings about Ukraine.
The most astonishing aspect of the Romanovs' rehabilitation is the implicit logic of the court's ruling. If the last czar was an innocent victim of an act of political repression, then Lenin - that ultimate hero of the Soviet Union - was nothing but a murderous thug. Yet Lenin still reposes in his mausoleum in Red Square.
The day he is banished from that sainted spot will be the day that history has come full circle.
Commentary
On October 2, 2008 the Russian Supreme Court did a legal "rehab" job on the last Czar of all the Russias, Nicolas II, absolving him and the "little family" of any crimes during his reign. Hears me out on this though-, one can do all the "rehab" jobs in the world concerning the crimes of the last Czar but we remember events a little differently including the events of Bloody Sunday massacre of peacefully protesting workers and their families in January 1905 that started the 1905 revolution, the massacre of the Lena Gold Mine workers in 1912 for demanding better working conditions and the destruction of Russia's youth in the massacre of World War I. Leon Trotsky mentioned in his monumental three volume History Of The Russian Revolution, in another context (the struggle against the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the Soviets), that some forces have to face the dustbin of history. That is the Czar's fate as it was for Charles I in the English Revolution and Louis XVI in the French Revolution. No court can change that fate. Below, for a different point of view but one that reflects the position of our class opponents and their continuing fear of the events of 1917 is a Boston Globe editorial.
**********
The Czar of All The Dissidents? The Boston Globe, October 6, 2008
ANYONE who rejects linear theories of history in favor of cycles had to feel vindicated last week after Russia's Supreme Court rehabilitated Czar Nicholas II and his family, declaring that they were victims of "groundless" political repression when they were murdered, at Lenin's behest, in 1918.
During the Soviet interregnum, schoolchildren were taught that the last czar of all the Russias was a criminal culpable for all of Russia's ills and injustices. The notion that he and the other Romanovs executed along with him could one day be officially deemed victims of the Bolshevik terror - well, for 90 years the kindest thing to be said about such a notion was that it was delusional.
At present, however, all the old villains and bugaboos of the Bolsheviks' political mythology are being celebrated as eternal verities of Mother Russia. Pure, undiluted patriotism is back. The Russian Orthodox Church is respected once again; political leaders pay tribute to the institution and its clerics. And czarist imperial history is held up not as a folly of the past, but as an inspiration for the future. Witness Russia's recent military excursion into Georgia and the Kremlin's warnings about Ukraine.
The most astonishing aspect of the Romanovs' rehabilitation is the implicit logic of the court's ruling. If the last czar was an innocent victim of an act of political repression, then Lenin - that ultimate hero of the Soviet Union - was nothing but a murderous thug. Yet Lenin still reposes in his mausoleum in Red Square.
The day he is banished from that sainted spot will be the day that history has come full circle.
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