ABSTRACT
Before leaving for Tsaritsyn on 3 June 1918, Stalin had expressed to Lenin and Sverdlov his strong opinion that the Tsar should under no circumstances be surrendered to the White Guards.1 Stalin was preaching to the converted: Lenin had made up his mind long before the Revolution to destroy the Tsar and his entire family. He often quoted his idol Sergey Nechaev, who in one of his revolutionary appeals posed the question of who in the House of Romanov should be killed and answered it with the words: ‘The full ektenia’ (a prayer asking God to bless those mentioned in it, usually the entire royal family). ‘“Who of them, after all, should be killed?” a simple-minded reader would ask himself. “The entire House of Romanov!” was the answer he should have given himself. Look, this is so simple that it has the touch of genius.’2 Lenin declared that it was ‘necessary to cut off the heads of at least a hundred Romanovs’.3 He considered Nechaev a ‘titan of the revolution’ and blamed Dostoyevsky for discrediting him in the eyes of Russian intelligentsia by depicting Nechaev as the provocateur Peter Verkhovensky in The Possessed. Nechaev in his Revolutionary Catechism had sermonized: ‘A revolutionary knows only one science-the science of destruction and extermination. He lives in the world with this sole aim: to leave not one stone unturned; as many ruins as possible, the extinction of most of the revolutionaries-that is the perspective. Poison, the knife, the noose-the revolution consecrates everything.’4 Lenin shared Nechaev’s belief that the Revolution consecrated every crime-provided that it was Bolshevik driven.
