- After the 1905 revolution, Tsar Nicholas II offered some political concessions to appease the growing revolutionary sentiment, but these were seen as insufficient and reactive rather than voluntary. If further pressure could force more concessions, some concluded that more may bring down the entire government. - In the aftermath, the Soviet had achieved little in terms of results. Lenin and Trotsky went back into exile believing the revolution in Russia would not occur. There was some repression with executions, which increased dramatically in subsequent years.

1. THE REVOLUTION IN DETAIL
Stephen Evans

2. AFTERMATH OF 1905
• Tsar offered concessions in the hope of defusing the building revolutionary
tension.
• No win situation: his concessions were perceived as a grudging response to
irresistible pressure from the people, rather than the voluntary act of a
reforming monarch.
• If the people could force the government to concede this much, many
concluded, another push might bring the whole edifice crashing to the
ground.

3. AFTERMATH OF 1905
In terms of immediate results, the Soviet had achieved little. Lenin and Trotsky
went back into exile. They believed the revolution would not occur in Russia.
There were many arrests: but the number of executions was low –
official figures put it at ten for the whole of 1905,
while even the radicals in the opposition claimed only 26.
Those numbers would rise dramatically to over 200 in 1906,
over 600 in 1907 and over 1,300 in 1908, before declining in
subsequent years.
The figures suggest that the monarchy was willing at first to try conciliation
before eventually resorting to repression.

4. Nicholas and Alexandra donated 50,000 roubles to the families of those who died on
Bloody Sunday.
Three weeks later the tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, the military governor of
Moscow, was blown to pieces as he left his office in the Kremlin.
“The sight of his uncle’s severed head on the cobblestones, the blood and fingers
spattered on the Kremlin walls sent Nicholas into shock. For the next eight years the
tsar failed to appear in public. His hysterical German wife lived in terror.”
Martin Sixsmith
Tsar more wary of reform as it could be seen as a sign of weakness by his opponents.

5. The Tsar’s Chief advisor, Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte tried to
persuade the tsar that only an immediate programme of
reforms – modernisation, constitutional democracy and
respect for civil freedoms – could defuse the pressures
threatening to tear Russia apart.
Witte was the author of the October manifesto of 1905.
In August 1905, he convinced him to accept an
embryonic parliament , known as the Duma, but was appalled when at the last
minute Nicholas insisted on restricting it to an advisory role
“Such a contrivance was typical ! The Duma had all the prerogatives of a parliament
except the chief one. It was a parliament and yet, as a purely consultative institution,
it was not a parliament ! The law of 6 August satisfied no one. Nor did it in the least
stem the tide of the revolution , which continued steadily to rise.” Count Witte

6. 23rd April 1906
Opposition had petered out
Reversed many of his concessions
It gave the tsar a veto over the decisions of the Duma
Freedom of speech was severely regulated
Tsar held the right to appoint ministers and dissolve the Duma
The moderate opposition saw it as a betrayal
When elections in April 1906 produced a left-wing majority
Duma demaded further reforms (including the transfer of all
agricultural land to the peasants)
Nicholas ordered the dissolution of the Duma after just 73 days.

7. He dismissed Witte and appointed a tougher prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin.
Stolypin fixed the election rules to guarantee a right-wing majority, but he
resisted the tsar’s demands to abolish the Duma completely .
Over the next five years, Stolypin would govern Russia with a
combination of ruthless repression and dogged attempts at
reform.
Stepped up the executions of the regime’s opponents; the
hangman’s noose became known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’.

8. The period between 1905 and the First World
War was a brief golden age for Russian
industry, with factory output growing by 5 per
cent per annum. The population of St
Petersburg swelled as it became an important
centre of metalworking, textiles and
shipbuilding. In the south, the iron and steel
industries boomed. Output of coal more than
doubled, and the expansion of oil extraction in
the Caucasus brought prosperity to Baku and
other cities.
Refer to your note from History Today.
But Stolypin’s efforts did not save the
monarchy, or himself.

9. 5 September 1911.
Stolypin assassinated while at
theatre and took 4 days to die.
The tsar visited several times and reportedly begged Stolypin to ‘forgive’ him.
Nicholas ordered the curtailment of the judicial investigation into the shooting
Rumours that the assassination had been ordered not by the revolutionaries but by
conservatives who wanted to put an end to Stolypin’s programme of liberal reforms.
It emerged that the assassin Bogrov had had contacts with senior figures in the tsarist
secret police, but he was executed before he could talk.

10. There was nothing inevitable about the
Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn says – “greater determination
and better leadership could have achieved a
different outcome”
he criticises the fatalism of the Russian
generals
“1914 offered a last opportunity for the tsarist regime to save itself.
The war was popular. For a brief moment, peasant resentment and
workers’ demands took second place to the imperative of defending
the motherland. In the capital, now renamed Petrograd because
Petersburg sounded too German, huge crowds cheered the tsar. Six
million men enlisted in the first four months.” Martin Sixsmith

11. The Battle of Tannenberg and the Battles of the
Mazurian Lakes left 70,000 Russian casualties.
Nearly 100,000 Russians were taken prisoner.
The news had a devastating effect on public
confidence, comparable to the catastrophe of
Tsushima in 1905.
At home, there were food shortages, profiteering and inflation. Discontent
with the government and the tsar bubbled to the surface . In August 1915,
the centrist parties in the Duma demanded the replacement of the tsar’s
cabinet by a government appointed by parliament, a guarantee of
workers’ rights, legal trade unions, full citizenship for the peasants and an
amnesty for political prisoners.

12. The tsar rejected the parliamentarians’ demands, suspended the Duma and
announced that he would personally take command of the army, directing the
war from military headquarters. His decisions showed him to be hopelessly out
of touch.
In a famous speech to the Russian parliament in
November 1916, Pavel Miliukov, the leader of the
Constitutional Democrats, denounced the tsarist
regime, its ministers and the tsarina. The fact that the
denunciation came from the moderate KaDety, who
had previously supported the tsar’s ideas for a
constitutional monarchy, revealed the depth of the
country’s anger and disillusionment.

13. •
Miliukov’s speech attacked on the tsarina Alexandra
• reflected the repugnance she aroused in the Russian people.
• Her German origins, her rumoured desire to capitulate to the kaiser
•
Her closeness to the religious charlatan Rasputin were damaging the monarchy.
• Alexandra had always been the dominant force in the royal marriage and, with
Nicholas frequently absent at army headquarters at the front, she and Rasputin were
widely believed to be running the country.
• For over a year Russia suffered the vagaries of ‘tsarina rule’.
In December 1916, Prince Felix Yusupov and friends murdered Rasputin.

14. 22nd February 1917 Workers at a key
munitions factory , the Lessner plant in
Petrograd, issued a proclamation of
discontent, declaring they would not fight for
Russia until the regime accepted their
demands for civil rights and the redistribution
of land. The talk in the streets was of
impending insurrection.
•
On 23 February 1917 , International Women’s Day,
thousands of women left their places of work in a
spontaneous protest.
•
joined forces with the bread queues and with strikers
from the giant Putilov engineering works.
•
The women organised themselves into groups to go
around factories all over the capital and urge the
workers to down tools.
•
Their demands were not specifically formulated, but
bread, freedom and an end to the war is a fair summary.

15. “…the February Revolution of 1917 was a
spontaneous uprising against a hated regime,
driven by an avalanche of grievances :
peasants demanding the land, workers sick of
exploitation, soldiers disgusted by the war,
ethnic minorities jostling for independence
and almost all enraged by food shortages and
spiralling prices. It was unplanned,
uncoordinated , and it left the professional
revolutionaries trailing in its wake.” Martin
Sixsmith
On Sunday 26 February, a quarter of a million people converged on the centre of
the capital: workers from the big engineering plants chanting ‘Long live the
revolution!’

16. In late afternoon, faced with escalating chaos and an absence of orders from their
political masters, the troops opened fire. The Cossacks , always the most ruthless of
the tsarist forces, sent volleys of rifle shots into the crowd, killing about 200 men,
women and children. Nearly 200,000 would die before the uprising was over.
The massacre disgusted many of the soldiers
who’d been rushed back from front-line
combat to put down the uprising.
By Sunday evening hundreds of troops had
defected to the demonstrators.
Within a couple of days the whole Petrograd
garrison was in open mutiny, murdering those
officers who tried to restrain them.
Tsarist insignia were torn down, prisoners
released and police arsenals looted , with the
guns handed out to the crowds.
Even the Cossacks began to desert to the
revolutionaries.

17. Nicholas seemed strangely detached. His letters to his wife Alexandra
barely mention the revolution.
When the chairman of the Duma, had gone to warn the tsar that revolution
was imminent, Nicholas answered: ‘My information is completely different .”
When he tried to explain that he had the tsar’s interests at heart, Nicholas
waved his hand and said, ‘Hurry up! The grand duke is waiting to have tea with
me.’

18. Nicholas’s response was to order the dissolution of the Duma and a military crackdown. The idiocy
of such a course was so evident that the parliamentarians ignored his command and dispatched a
delegation of deputies, led by the former Duma chairman Alexander Guchkov, to try to reason with
him.
As he listened to their accounts of the bloodshed and chaos, the tsar finally accepted the end:
‘There is no sacrifice I would not bear for the salvation of our Mother Russia,’ he told them. ‘I am
ready to abdicate the throne.’

19. But the last Romanov tsar would never rule. Mikhail didn’t want the throne. A
Duma delegation, led by Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a moderate liberal and a
founder member of the Constitutional Democrats, failed to convince him to do
other than sign a document saying he might accede to the throne when things
calmed down. Nabokov would later lament the lost chance of a constitutional
monarchy.

20. • The Duma deputies announced that a new ‘Provisional Committee’ would
run the country.
• The men who formed the Provisional Government were liberals and
moderate socialists, and Constitutional Democrats and others
• This made them deeply untrustworthy in the eyes of the people.
• The new prime minister was a prince – Georgy Lvov – which didn’t go down
well at workers’ rallies.

21. • At rallies the people proclaimed the Petrograd
Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
• Soviets sprang up across the country - Peasants
across Russia had elected local councils, or soviets,
to seize the land from the landowners and run the
villages themselves
• Workers in factories and workshops had named
their soviets.
• And in most army units soldiers had done the
same: many allowed their officers to take
command in actual combat, but some insisted on
nominating their own officers and, on occasion,
murdering their predecessors.

23. • The revolutionary groups that had refused
to cooperate with the tsar were all
represented here
• They were disorganised, divided and
surprisingly cautious.
• After some debate they decided that for
the moment they would cooperate with the
Provisional Government ‘as long as it didn’t
hinder ”a democratic revolution’.
• The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet had the
might of the people behind them, but
seemed reluctant to use it.

24. This became known as the period of dvoevlastie (dual power), when the
Provisional Government feared the raw strength of the Soviet of Workers’
Deputies , but the Soviet apparently feared the responsibility of governing.
WINTER PALACE (PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT) –V- Tauride Palace (Soviet)
When tsarist power was overthrown by the forces of the February
Revolution in 1917, Lenin and co were desperate to get back to their
homeland. It appeared that the exiles could be of service to the German
cause. If Berlin could help get them back home, they would almost certainly
stir up so much trouble for the Russian government that Russia would be
forced to withdraw

25. According to Winston Churchill, the
Germans aim was to send Lenin into Russia
‘ in the same way that you might send a vial
containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera
into the water supply of a great city. And it
worked with amazing accuracy ...’
The sealed train arrived at the Finland
Station in Petrograd shortly before midnight
on 3 April 1917
“In April 1917, Lenin was half expecting
to be arrested as he stepped out of his
carriage. He had not been in Russia for
12 years and he himself admitted he
knew ‘very little’ about what had been
happening there. But he had the
unshakable confidence of a true
believer, a revolutionary fanaticism.”
Martin Sixsmith

27. • Petrograd Soviet Divided
• Socialist Revolutionaries were quarrelling over land reform
• The Mensheviks were sticking to the Marxian doctrine that society must go
through a phase of capitalist democracy before a true revolution can usher in
socialism.
• So the Soviet took the position that the Provisional Government should be
allowed to get on with it: the revolution would have to wait until this stage of
Marxist theory occurred.
SPLIT BETWEEN REVOLUTIONARIES IN 1903
Bolsheviks – overthrow of capitalism as soon as possible. Lenin was a Bolshevik.
Mensheviks – followed Marxist theory more – revolution through evolution
approach.

28. THE APRIL THESES
• a much more urgent blueprint for
revolution. The soviets, he said, should stop
waiting for history
• stop cooperating with the Provisional
Government
• and step forward at once to install a
dictatorship of the proletariat
• ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ was Lenin’s
dramatic conclusion that day
• the Bolsheviks were no more than a minor
faction in the soviets’ leaderships.
• His April Theses addressed the demands
coming from the different sectors of society
and gave them the answers they wanted to
hear

29. LENIN GAUGES THE PUBLIC’S MOOD EXPERTLY
power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest peasants! …
There must be no support for the bourgeois Provisional Government.
An end to the imperialist war …
abolition of the police, army and bureaucracy …
confiscation of the landowners’ estates,
nationalisation of the land and its redistribution by the soviets …
the salaries of state officials not to exceed those of an average worker
… the banks to be nationalised under the control of the soviets …
the creation of a new revolutionary Internationale!

30. Lenin boldly promised the people what they wanted to hear: Land, Peace, Bread and
Freedom.
“it was a masterstroke of PR: the Bolsheviks became the standard-bearer for the
aspirations of the people, and it would give them the popular support they needed to
have a real chance of taking power.” Martin Sixsmith
By June 1917 Lenin was ready to make his move…

31. Lenin seized the moment. He declared: ‘There is such a party!’ To those who
say there is no political party ready to take full responsibility for power in
Russia, I say ‘Yes, there is! … We Bolsheviks will not shirk the task. We are
ready here and now to assume the fullness of power!’
It was brilliant political theatre.
Those three words – Yest takaya partiya! – became part of Bolshevik legend,
repeated endlessly for the next seven decades.

32. By the summer of 1917, Russia was
falling apart and circumstances were
playing into Lenin’s hands.
Prince Lvov had resigned as prime
minister and the Provisional
Government had a new leader.
The socialist lawyer Alexander
Kerensky was committed to social
justice, democracy and the rule of law.

33. JULY 1917
In early July, angry soldiers and workers took to the streets.
4 July 1917 shows protesting crowds gunned down by government troops in
Petrograd.
Heaps of bodies were left lying in the middle of the road, at a crossroads under a
maze of trolley bus cables
Radical mobs of soldiers and workers were roaming through the capital. Inflamed by
Lenin’s rhetoric , the Petrograd garrison had refused to be sent to the front.
The sailors of the Kronstadt fortress were in open revolt.

34. A quarter of a million people had besieged the
Tauride Palace calling for the soviets to seize power
and end the war.
Terrified and fearing anarchy, the Provisional
Government had ordered those troops who remained
loyal to open fire.
With Russians now gunned down on the streets, the
Bolsheviks could claim that Kerensky and the
‘bourgeois liberal’ government were just as great
enemies of the people as the tsar had been.
It seemed that Lenin’s moment had come: another
revolution was under way. Then, inexplicably, he fled.

35. Following a government raid on Bolshevik headquarters on 5 July, Lenin went
underground.
For the next three months Lenin hid, first in Petrograd, then in a primitive straw hut
on Lake Razliv north of the city.
Then fled abroad to Finland, where he stayed until October.
With Lenin in hiding, the Provisional Government celebrated victory prematurely.
Kerensky told his ministers the Bolsheviks had missed their chance and were now a
spent force. Their party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), was banned and a government
commission announced that Lenin and his comrades were German provocateurs.
Their return to Russia in a German train and their acceptance of funds from Berlin
were splashed on the front page of pro-government newspapers under the headline:
‘Lenin and Co are spies
Bolsheviks who hadn’t gone to ground, including the recently returned Leon Trotsky,
were arrested on suspicion of treason. But the Provisional Government was
committed to the rule of law, and when it turned out there was insufficient evidence
to charge them, it let them go.

36. Vladimir Nabokov offered this despairing
comparison: The Provisional Government
could have used [the July Days] to eliminate
Lenin and co. But it failed to do so. The
government simply made concessions to the
socialists … The Provisional Government had
no sense of real power.
By disbanding the instruments of state power
– the police, the secret police and the death
penalty, even in the armed forces – the
Provisional Government was effectively at the
mercy of the revolutionaries who denounced
bourgeois liberal democracy and demanded
nothing less than a revolutionary dictatorship.

37. OCTOBER 1917
We have inherited widely differing accounts of October 1917
Lenin had been hiding in Finland since July and his influence was confined to vociferous ‘ letters from afar’
urging armed revolt.
Stalin, who’d been in Petrograd the longest, was a junior figure in the Bolshevik leadership: he had shared
prison and exile with Trotsky and Lenin, but was never regarded as anything more than a useful enforcer
and party fundraiser (mainly through bank robberies).
Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, the two other leading Bolsheviks, actively opposed a renewed attempt
to seize power at a meeting on 10 October (voting was ten for and two against, with Lenin smuggled in
incognito to attend).
It was left largely to Trotsky to organise the revolution. He had been arrested in July and switched his
allegiance from the cautious Mensheviks to the more radical Bolsheviks while in jail.
On his release in September he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and took personal charge of
the Military Revolutionary Committees, assembling Red Guard militias of former soldiers and policemen.
Trotsky was the military brains of the revolution and he had a strategy ready when Lenin emerged from
hiding to take charge at the end of October.

38. Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government were nominally in
charge; but the directly elected revolutionary Soviets of Workers
and Soldiers had overwhelming public support.
The Bolsheviks ’ promise to end the war had increased their
support among the public and, with a little manipulation of the
membership regulations, they gained a majority in the Petrograd
Soviet.

39. At the end of August, the army commander General Lavr Kornilov advanced on the
capital with six regiments of troops from the ferocious Caucasian Native Division,
pledging to restore order by crushing the soviets, instituting full military discipline
and hanging Lenin and co from the lampposts.
Kerensky first supporting Kornilov but then panicking when he received reports that
the coup might topple him too.
He offered to do a deal with the Petrograd Soviet. In return for their help in fighting
off the advancing Kornilov
Kerensky agreed to release all remaining Bolsheviks arrested after the July Days and
to arm the Soviet with weapons from the government’s armouries.

40. But when the coup was defeated and its leaders arrested, the Bolsheviks
refused to hand back the guns.
The episode left Lenin’s party armed and increasingly popular with the
masses. By the end of October, they were ready to strike.
On the evening of 25 October, sailors on board the Avrora sent
up a series of blank shots from its 6 -inch cannons. The Baltic
fleet was notorious for its revolutionary fervour, and the sound of
the gunfire from the port area terrified the ministers of the
Provisional Government holed up in the Winter Palace.
But, in reality, it was none of those. The Winter Palace was hardly defended
the troops had all drifted away or defected to the revolutionaries. The people
just wandered in, got lost in the endless abandoned rooms and helped
themselves to the tsar’s wine cellars.

41. Kerensky himself had fled, promising to return with fresh troops to put down
the revolution Instead, he escaped to a lifetime of exile in Paris and New York,
leaving his ministers behind to await arrest in the Winter Palace.
They were rounded up in the imperial breakfast chamber and forced by the
illiterate revolutionaries to write their own arrest warrants, before being
carted off to prison without any serious resistance.
In fact, there wasn’t much heroism or bloodshed anywhere in St Petersburg.
Bolshevik tales of the masses storming the Winter Palace in the face of stiff
resistance were myths
But myths are powerful tools

42. The majority of people in Petrograd, let alone in the rest of Russia, barely knew it had
happened.
The coup was over in 24 hours with only two recorded deaths, far fewer than in the
February Revolution, the July Days or, indeed, in 1905.
The myth replaced the reality of the event and the part Lenin played.

43. But Western eyewitnesses tell a different story – that no one was in charge of the
chaotic October events and Lenin himself was never sure how it would all end.
Morgan Phillips Price, a British journalist reporting for the Manchester Guardian,
recorded his memories of the days after the Bolshevik coup for the BBC: See
transcript supplied.

44. THE MENSHEVIKS PROTEST
When Lenin addressed the Congress of All-Russian Soviets the
following day, he was heckled by the Mensheviks and one faction of
the Socialist Revolutionaries.
They complained that the Bolsheviks had taken control of the
soviets by forcibly barring opposition delegates, especially in
provincial areas outside the big cities.
Lenin had used his party’s new dominance to set up a cabinet of
ministers completely dominated by Bolsheviks, in effect an
unelected government, known as the Sovnarkom (Council of
People’s Commissars).
Accusing the Bolsheviks of illegally seizing power, the Mensheviks
stormed out in protest.
As they left, Trotsky famously snarled , ‘You’re finished , you pitiful
bunch of bankrupts. Get out of here to where you now belong – in
the dustbin of history.’

45. One of the Sovnarkom’s first acts had been to create a new
secret police known as the Cheka.
The secret police were instructed to round up and imprison the
Bolsheviks’ opponents, including their former allies among the
SRs and Mensheviks themselves.
Lenin’s government also passed genuinely popular measures:
the Decree on Peace
the Decree on the Distribution of Land to the Peasants.
It nationalised the banks
seized church property
turned the factories over to the workers.
With a stick and a carrot, the Bolsheviks were consolidating
their monopoly on power, and it would last for over 70 years.

46. To the surprise of opponent and supporters, Lenin stood by the Provisional
Government’s promise of free elections to a national constituent assembly, a body that
was intended to pave the way for a constitution and a parliament based on universal
suffrage . But Vladimir Nabokov Senior sensed this was a cynical ploy: See transcript.

47. The millions who turned out to vote on 25 November 1917 knew nothing of the Bolsheviks’
plans and probably believed that democracy in Russia was finally dawning. After a largely
peaceful election, in which two-thirds of the population voted, 707 men and women from
across Russia were chosen to represent the interests of the people.
The Constituent Assembly convened in the Tauride Palace 5 January 1918. It was the first
freely elected parliament in Russia’s history, an historic moment by any standard.
The Bolsheviks had not done well in the elections, and their rivals , the Socialist
Revolutionaries, had a majority in the assembly. With more than twice as many seats as
the Bolsheviks, the SRs should have been dominant.
But Lenin had already installed a government dominated by his Bolsheviks, and he
wasn’t about to let an election remove them from power.
He said, “We must not be deceived by the election figures. Elections prove nothing. The
Bolsheviks can and must take state power into their own hands …”

48. THE END OF DEMOCRACY… THE BOLSHEVIKS CONSOLIDATE POWER
The Constituent Assembly was allowed to exist for just over 12 hours.
The Bolsheviks walked out after the first votes went against them.
The other parties carried on and were then evicted by pro-Bolshevik guards
fuelled with vodka and brandishing rifles.
When the deputies came back the next day, they found the Tauride Palace
locked and surrounded by soldiers.
See Martin Sixsmith transcript

49. Most damagingly, when demonstrators marched in support of democracy
and the Constituent Assembly they were fired on by Bolshevik Red Guards.
Twelve marchers were killed.

50. THE MURDER OF THE TSAR, THE TSARINA AND THEIR FAMILY

51. Yekaterinburg - 2,220 KM from St. Petersberg
At midnight on 16 July 1918, the royals were woken by loud knocking on their
bedroom doors. Two Yekaterinburg secret policemen told them they were
being taken to the cellar, ‘where they would be safer ’.
The tsar and empress were allowed to wash and dress, eventually emerging
from their rooms at 1 a.m. A local party member, the teenaged Pavel
Medvedev, was among their guards and seems to have established cordial
relations with some of the family. See transcript
Yakov Yurovsky , a Yekaterinburg Bolshevik also gave an account of what
happened next. See transcript
:

52. After the shootings, the corpses were thrown onto the
back of a lorry and dumped in a disused mineshaft
outside the city.
Later the remains retrieved and take them elsewhere
for reburial. On the way to the new site his lorry broke
down, so bodies buried them where they were in the
forest.
As a result, the resting place of the last tsar and his
murdered family remained unknown for over 70
years.
Finally discovered in 1991 by local amateurs, the royal
bodies were identified by DNA from their relatives in
the British royal family, including Prince Michael of
Kent.

53. There has been debate about exactly who ordered the executions, but recent
research suggests the decision was taken personally by Lenin. At first the
Bolsheviks gloried in the murders. The anniversary was declared a public holiday
and Soviet officials came to Yekaterinburg to have their photograph taken in the
blood-stained cellar with its bullet-scarred walls . But in later years the official
version became almost apologetic. Now it was claimed that the murders were the
panicked reaction of low-level functionaries as the escalating civil war closed in on
Yekaterinburg, with the dangerous possibility that the tsar might be rescued by the
monarchist Whites.
DO YOU THINK THE EXECUTION OF THE TSAR AND HIS FAMILY TO BE A NECESSARY
ACTION OR COULD IT HAVE BEEN AVOIDED?
WHAT DID IT ACHIEVE FOR THE BOLSHEVIKS?

54. Vasily Grossman, writing in 1964 shortly after the death of Stalin, identifies Russia’s
two brief chances of freedom – the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and the ‘ bourgeois’
revolution of February 1917 – both of which were tragically spurned. His late novel
Everything Flows (1964), recognises in the October Revolution another instance of
Russia moving backwards and choosing despotism and tyrany.
“Dozens, perhaps hundreds of … teachings, creeds and programmes came
as suitors to the young Russia who had cast off the chains of tsarism. As
they paraded before her, the advocates of progress gazed passionately
and pleadingly into her face … Invisible threads bound these men to the
ideals of Western parliaments and constitutional monarchies … But the
slave girl’s gaze, the great slave girl’s searching, doubting, evaluating gaze
came to rest on Lenin! It was him she chose … In February 1917 the path of
freedom lay open for Russia, but Russia chose Lenin … The debate opened
by the supporters of Russian freedom was ended. Russian slavery had
once more proved invincible …”