One hundred years ago today, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks took power in Russia, only eight months after Czar Nicholas II had abdicated the throne amid a popular uprising and soldier mutiny. One of the earliest acts of Lenin’s new regime was to murder Nicholas, as well as his wife and children.
The lives of the last imperial family have become an international legend — as the existence of a Disney movie and Broadway musical about Nicholas’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, can attest. But in Russia today the last czar and his fate play a larger and more complicated role in politics and culture. In fact, the most recent rendition of the story, the film Matilda, has led to a wave of lawsuits and arson attacks aimed at the theaters screening the film. The official Russian Orthodox Church — which canonized Nicholas and his family in 2000 — does not criticize the movie, but its conservative fringes claim that the story of a love affair between Nicholas and Polish ballerina Matilda Krzesińska insults his family’s status as holy martyrs, since it (falsely) depicts Nicholas as reluctant to relinquish his mistress upon marriage.
More significantly, the movie has also been criticized for trying to undermine Russia politically. At stake is Russia’s current attempts to reconcile two large and diffuse ideologies that can roughly be described as “red” (or Bolshevik) and “white” (representing pre-Soviet tradition) — a tension still unresolved a century after the Bolsheviks took power and over a quarter-century after they lost it. Nicholas’s surprising prominence today has little to do with the person Nicholas II was and everything to do with his usefulness as a symbol — one that revolutionaries literally and figuratively murdered a century ago and that political leaders have since struggled to assimilate into a new national narrative.
Read the full article at WashingtonPost.com.