Was it justified for the Bolsheviks to kill the children of Emperor Nicholas II?

From a moral standpoint, there was no reason at all. The Bolsheviks could, perhaps, try to justify killing the Tsar, charging him of crimes against the Russian people, or anything like that, but his children couldn’t possibly be blamed of anything. Alexei, for instance, was a sick boy who was not even 14 years old yet.

It is so difficult to justify those killings that the Soviets announced the Tsar’s death but tried to hide the information about the children for years.

However, if by “justified” you mean from a practical, not a moral standpoint, than it is probably correct to say they had to kill the children. Machiavelli explains this in his book The Prince.

Machiavelli says that, if you take a country ruled by an absolute monarch, one step to keep this conquest is to extinguish all the bloodline of the king. If you don’t, than whoever wants to rise against you may take the surviving prince as a unified banner to call others to attack. Even if the prince is just a child and even if he is your prisoner. It doesn’t matter, an attack is made in name of that prince with the ostensive objective to install him in power, even if the real objective is to use him as a puppet. If such princes don’t exist, it is much more difficult to form a cohesive attack against the new rulers, as the attackers would need a different motive and may struggle among themselves instead of uniting against you, due to divergences about who should rule in your place.

This concept was applied to several different instances in History when a monarch was displaced. It is a brutal concept, so there were many ways the new rulers had tried to make sure the bloodline was extinguished without having the blame on them.

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Notes of Nagesh

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