Word: romanovs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Historical Studies A-42, "Nation, State, and Empire in West Eurasian Space: Where Romanov Writ Has Run," in the spring...
...night of July 17, 1918, the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for more than three centuries ended in a barrage of gunfire that filled the small basement of a villa in the foothills of the Urals. The truth of what happened there was meant to remain forever hidden. For more than 70 years the Soviet Big Lie never wavered: overzealous provincials had slaughtered Nicholas II and six members of his family without orders from Lenin and the Bolshevik high command...
From 1613 to 1917, the Russian empire was ruled, sometimes disastrously, sometimes rather well, by the Romanov family. From 1917 until 1991 it was ruled, always disastrously, by the Communist Party. Bringing back the Romanovs now would certainly be poetic justice. As the historian Richard Pipes wrote, the 1918 massacre by communists of the last Czar, Nicholas II, and his family * was "uniquely odious . . . a prelude to 20th century mass murder." Now that communism has been outlawed, who better to help replace it than the relatives of its first victims...
...next Romanov, should he get the job, must understand that he has been commissioned to reign, not rule. His usefulness to his country, and to the future of his family, depends on his being above politics -- a symbol, not an autocrat. The first post-Soviet parliament could audition all living Romanovs (of whom Grand Duke Vladimir, now living in France, is the most prominent) and pick the one who seems most amenable to these goals -- just as the English Parliament, in 1688, replaced a king it didn't trust (James II) with his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William...
...Somehow one could not forget, when viewing the eclectic arrays he promoted as "treasures of the Soviet Union," how in the '30s he and his brother Victor had astutely brought a freighter load of furniture and bibelots from Russian flea markets and hotel lobbies and sold it as "the Romanov treasure...