At 2:30 in the morning on July 17, 1918, the last czar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, his children and several of his servants were taken down to the cellar of the house where they had been confined for months. Told that they were being photographed, the family arranged themselves into two lines. Suddenly, 11 men armed with revolvers burst into the room, executing the entire family, thereby ending the Romanoff Dynasty and ushering in a Communist regime in Russia.
Opening with this grisly scene, Robert K. Massie, author of "Nicholas and Alexandra," explored whether the Russian Revolution could have been avoided in his lecture in Filene Auditorium on Friday evening. The audience of approximately 90 people consisted mostly of members from the Upper Valley community.
Massie's speech described the dynamics of the Romanoff family, specifically focusing on the hemophilia of the Czar's son, Alexis. Hemophilia is a disease which prevents a person's blood from clotting properly and often leads to internal bleeding. The internal build-up of blood then exerts pressure on a person's joints and muscles, causing excruciating and debilitating pain.
According to Massie, it was this disease that allowed Rasputin to gain influence over the Czar's wife, Alexandra, and the family as a whole.
"The so-called mad monk scandalized Russia with his sexual antics, but his ability to slow Alexei's bleeding [was] incontrovertible," Massie said.
After Czar Nicholas II left the capital to fight in World War II, Alexandra remained behind to manage the day-to-day governing of Russia, but, according to Massie, Rasputin was really the person governing the country. Massie emphasized the ensuing anarchy as one of the most immediate factors that contributed to the Russian Revolution.
"After a year and a half of this administrative chaos, along with the crises created by military defeat, [the] whole edifice collapsed," Massie said. "Rasputin's murder came first, then Nicholas's abdication, then the overthrow of the provisional government made up of members of the Duma and then the Bolshevik coup d'tat."
Massie also discussed several other factors as causing the revolution: Russia's relative economic backwardness in comparison to the West, Czar Nicholas II's unwillingness to relinquish his absolute power and the plight of Russia's urban poor.
Massie said that he first became interested in the Romanoff's history not because of political reasons but because he felt a personal connection with his subject matter.
"How did I come to this story?" Massie asked. "My eldest son was born with hemophilia, [so] I decided to learn whatever I could about the tragedy of Nicholas and Alexandra and their only son."
A graduate of Yale University, Massie was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a journalist on the staff of several magazines including Newsweek and the New York Times magazine Life. Massie's book about the Romanoff family was on the New York Times best-seller list for 46 weeks and was made into a movie that was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.
His lecture was co-sponsored by the Dickey Center and Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth.
