ON THIS DAY ·
Murder of the Romanov family
17 Jul 1918 — As anti-Bolshevik forces close in, the Tsar, his wife, their five children and four servants are shot in a cellar and their bodies hidden. A memorial to eleven murdered people, remembered here soberly.
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The moment in context
The event that turned a set of scattered risings into a continental civil war was not planned by anyone. The Czechoslovak Legion consisted of former prisoners traveling east to keep fighting for the Allies, and a chance clash together with a Bolshevik disarmament order turned their movement into revolt. Because the Trans-Siberian was Siberia’s single main artery, seizing its stations gave the Legion control of enormous stretches of the country, and the Socialist-Revolutionaries who had been thrown out of the Constituent Assembly used that opening to form Komuch at Samara and raise a People’s Army. Suppressing the democrats had not made them vanish; it had turned them into belligerents with an army behind them.
From Outbreak of the Russian Civil War, chapter 8 of The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924 (JUL 1918).
The place: Murder of the Romanov family — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — The accident of the Legion. Nobody planned the event that started full-scale civil war. A stranded foreign army, a botched disarmament order, a railway that was the only thing…
- The turn — Trotsky’s train at Sviyazhsk, August 1918. The moment the Reds stopped running. With Kazan lost and the road up the Volga to Moscow open, Trotsky arrived at the front in the armoured train…
- What it changed — Full civil war, on every front. By late 1918 the fronts the map will show for two years are set: the Whites in Siberia (soon under Kolchak), in the south (Denikin), in the…
Then ask the room: How did a stranded foreign legion turn a simmering conflict into a full civil war — and what does that say about contingency in history? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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