I think the full time score was Peasants 6 Romanovs 60 million, a big "win" to the Romanovs. The match report said the Romanovs were rather thick throughout the contest, and the Peasants had been on a Spartan diet for 300 years to work em' up to match fitness. That dem de breaks fellas!

The Romanovs probably wouldn't have been overthrown and executed if the Bolsheviks had no popular and widespread support.

The reason they had that support is, like all political revolutions, because of the severe oppression and hopelessness of the population and rampant government corruption.
It's happened in many countries and for almost the same reason every time.

This was the result of the second Bolshevik revolution - the first failed but the second was assisted by Wall Street financiers.

That's a couple of other things conveniently "sent down the memory hole".

Wrong is wrong. Regardless of what was done under the Romanov government the murder of the Romanovs was a crime. Presumably, the murder of their servants were to eliminate witnesses to the crime. How come we know about it? Some of the criminals must have told of the crime. Perhaps they were revolted by what they had done.

The myth has been created by supporters of Lenin and Trotsky that Lenin was a good person, and Stalin betrayed the revolution. This is nonsense. Lenin ordered the crime. The censorship and gulags started with Lenin, and Stalin ws his follower.

I had a faint hope that this topic might turn into a discussion of the brutality of the Soviet system and authoritarian systems in general.

In these days when an apparently large number of younger folk are warming to these socialist ideals while remaining utterly ignorant of what actual happens after the revolution, it is important that the dark history of the 20th century communist/fascist regimes not be lost.

But alas, these days it seems that the mere mention of Russia is enough to cause those who suffer Trump Derangement Syndrome to descend into outraged ranting.

Foxy thinks Trump is being "manipulated" by Putin through blackmail. That there's no evidence of it and that Trump's presidency has been much tougher on Putin than any since Reagan, seems to not matter. "is it grounds for impeachment?" NO.

"I wonder if Trump brought this up in his in-depth discussion with Putin". I'd doubt it since its utterly irrelevant to the current relations between the two countries. I wonder if Trump mentioned the betrayal of Varus when he met Merkel?

"This was the result of the second Bolshevik revolution - the first failed but the second was assisted by Wall Street financiers."

The second? When was the first? Perhaps assisted by one or two wealthy Americans. But those who like to fall for the usual conspiracy theories will fall for the usual conspiracy theories.

"the infamous massacre in the forest of Rainiai in Lithuania."

Yes there were many such massacres, the biggest being that of 10-15000 Poles in the Katyn forest by the Soviets. In the main the people so massacred were the leaders of the occupied nations, the aim being to make the rest of the population compliant.

The Soviets treated these subject and subjugated nations so badly that, when the Nazis first arrived, they were welcomed and treated as liberators. That changed under the equally brutal rule of the Gestapo.

Over the past half-century there's been quite a lot of work done trying to understand how these totalitarian regimes were able to recruit so many people to do their evil work. The guards in the gulags who participated in the slow deaths of the inmates, the young revolutionaries who forcibly stole food from already starving 'kulaks', NKVD officials who raped kids to force false confessions. I think of a scene cover by Shirer of a German soldier shooting naked Jewish children row after row. Where do these people come from?

In the Banality of Evil' we see people who are able to do the most vile of things during the day and then go home to the wife and kids in the evening, or write the most loving letters home.

In the end it requires that these people be indoctrinated into no longer seeing the victims as human or as being so evil that they have to be eradicated. The Nazis did it by race. The Jew was no longer human.

Lenin did it by class. All classes other than the workers were so evil that all members had to be destroyed. A baby born into the aristocracy was just as evil as the father. The kulaks were demonised so that they could be destroyed.

Which brings us to the charming Paul1405 who thinks the murder of the Romanov kids was just to be expected because of the actions of their ancestors.

Its from the Pauls of this world that these murderous regimes draw their foot-soldiers. There's nothing particularly evil about the Russians or Germans. We saw it in China and Kampuchea and Vietnam and Korea and almost everywhere authoritarianism laid its hands. It was said of the Australian communists in the late 1940's that if they gained power (and they thought they would) that they'd have been signing death warrants with both hands.

The flippant dismisal of the 'other' as less than deserving of compassion is at the root of these evil regimes. Western liberal democracy has suppressed these urges but they remain under the surface among too many.

rache,
It goes deeper than that. The reason for the severe oppression was the reformist Tsar Alexander the Second had been assassinated. His successors concluded that entrenching their own power was a safer course of action.