⚠ This post contains (historic) spoilers ⚠

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Many years ago I read an interview with Cuban activist Carlos Moore* and something he said really stuck with me. He was talking about the difference between Revolution and Regime.

“The Revolution is the collective hope. (…) Was there a Russian Revolution? Yes. Did it die? It did. Was there a Chinese Revolution? Yes. Did it die? It did. Was it murdered? Yes.

The people set the Revolution in motion, and soon those who manipulate the control apparatus assassinate it.”

Carlos Moore

Last week, when I was watching the final episode of the Netflix series The Last Czars it reminded me of those words and how the assassination of the Romanov family (spoiler alert: they all die in the end) was maybe the first of the many stabs that would eventually kill the Russian Revolution.

Some historical context about the series: the Romanovs had been ruling Russia for 300 years. In the wave of democratization that was sweeping Western Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Russia was seen as the last post of a truly centralized autocratic regime. Despite that, there was an intense modernization when it came to factories and technology, which started to create a numerous urban working class.

When you add to that a World War, a growing number of Marxist groups, extreme poverty, an unorthodox charismatic priest, an incurable disease and a monarch with a knack for picking the wrong course of action, you have the powder keg that exploded in the Russian Revolution in 1918.

The phrase “…and then Nicolai II made the worst decision possible” is said so often by the historians in the show that it got predictable in the end. Many in his close circle assumed that the bad decisions we coming from advice given by Rasputin, an intriguing figure (and a pretty well-cast character) who became a sort of spiritual councilor to the Romanovs.

But then when Rasputin is assassinated and the disaster continues, it becomes clear that “It wasn’t Rasputin guiding Nicolai. It had been Nicolai guiding Nicolai all along”.

Nicolai’s bad decisions and the iron hand with which he tried to rule the Russian people led to famine, death and revolt. His answer, as every autocratic leader, was cracking down on the dissidents, which led to more revolt, to the point in which the Russian soldiers were leaving the front in WWI to come back to the city and join the protesters.

Despite the many political groups fighting for control of the power, the revolt that led to the fall of the Romanovs was an almost spontaneous, leaderless popular movement, since many high-profile opponents of the regime were in exile by then. In that sense, that was truly a popular revolution. But soon came the fight for the power.

The abdication of the last czar led to a civil war, with many groups fighting for control of the country. One of the main forces was the Bolsheviks, on one side and the White Movement, on the other. Fearing the the Romanovs could become a flag for their enemies, the Soviets ordered the whole family to be executed, including the Czar, the Czarina and their four daughters and son, ranging from 22 to 13 years old.

The execution was carried on with guns, and when that failed (the younger members of the family were wearing jewels tied to their vests and survived the shots), they had to finish the job with bayonets. The assassination of the family was just one of the first in a long line of executions promoted by the Soviets in the following decades. According to official records, 800,000 people were executed between 1921 and 1953, not to mention the 1,7 million that died in the concentration camps system known as Gulag.

It’s needless to say autocracy and despotism continue to be the norm in modern Russia, considering the war in Ukraine and the death of one of the most vocal opposition leaders, Alexei Navalny, just to stay in recent events.

So when did the Russian Revolution die and become the regime? Was the execution of the Czar a revolutionary act, like the beheading of Louis XVI during the French Revolution? Or were both just acts of tyranny? When did the intellectuals with high ideals of fairness and equality for all become Putin’s close-circle oligarchy?

These are all questions without answers that started to live in my head after this show. Overall is a great and well-produced series. I bet many historians will have their bones to pick, but to me, this was a very interesting new perspective on the Russian Revolution.

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*By the way, Moore is a fascinating character himself. His memoir “Pichon: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba” is definitely on my to-be-read list!