Vladimir Lenin: A Life From Beginning to End (Revolutionaries Book 4) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2017-05-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Dealing with Monarchist Filth

“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”

—Vladimir Lenin

With the threat of being dragged into external war behind them, Lenin and his Bolshevik Soviets now had to contend with any threats that they might face internally. It was this introspection that would usher in what would become known as the “Red Terror.” The instrument of this terror would be the secret police, personally instituted by Lenin, known as the “Cheka,” an acronym which roughly translated from Russian stood for, “Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.”

The primary antagonists that the Cheka sought to eliminate were members of the rich “bourgeoisie” class who were trying to reinstate their rule. Known as the “White” Russians, this core of previously wealthy land owners would eventually form massive anti-Bolshevik armies whose soldiers wore the distinctive white uniforms of the Imperial Russian soldier.

These White armies were led by former military officers of the Tsar, with the main leadership coming from General Anton Deniken, who led a volunteer army he had cobbled together in the south, and Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who drew up a fighting force from the Siberian north. The White armies were backed by the western governments of Europe and North America, and in some cases, even Japan.

In 1918 some 10,000 Allied troops landed in Murmansk in the northwest corner of Russia, followed by a joint British, American and Japanese force arriving in Vladivostok in South Eastern Russia. These foreign powers were intent upon meddling in Russian affairs. Meanwhile, the “Red” army of Soviet Russia massed in Moscow and St. Petersburg, attempting to solidify their control of the interior.

As the Red army grew in strength, it would slowly push the White army further and further to the fringes, mostly inhabiting former Russian states on the borders. As the civil war between the Red and White armies heated up, Lenin turned his attention to the ousted Tsar and his family, who had been under house arrest since March 22nd, 1917.

Holed up in the industrial city of Yekaterinburg in western Russia, by July of 1918, with the White army threatening to overtake them, the Soviet Red army holding the Tsar’s family panicked and decided it would be better to kill their prisoners than to allow them to be freed by the White army. Lenin especially feared the prospect of the Tsar being used by the White army and its western supporters as a propaganda tool against the Bolsheviks.

This fear led him to fully endorse his most notorious decree: the entire liquidation of the Tsar and his family. Not wanting any other member of the Romanov family to survive and later claim to be an heir of the Tsarist regime, it was determined that they all must die, dismissing the entire Romanov royal family as “monarchist filth, a 300-year disgrace” according to Lenin, they needed to be eliminated.

It was a horrible scene, with the whole family herded into a room with little explanation, only to have guards open fire on them.

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