From 1963 onward, the re-educated former of China Emperor Puyi regularly gave press conferences praising life in the People’s Republic of China, and foreign diplomats often sought him out, curious to meet the famous “Last Emperor” of China. In an interview with Behr, Li Wenda told him that Puyi was a very clumsy man who “invariably forgot to close doors behind him, forgot to flush the toilet, forgot to turn the tap off after washing his hands, had a genius for creating an instant, disorderly mess around him”.[280] Puyi had been so used to having his needs catered to that he never entirely learned how to function on his own.

He tried very hard to be modest and humble, always being the last person to board a bus, which meant that on one occasion he missed the ride, mistaking the bus conductor for a passenger. In restaurants he would tell waitresses, "You should not be serving me. I should be serving you."During this period, Puyi was known for his kindness, and once after he accidentally knocked down an elderly lady with his bicycle, he visited her every day in the hospital to bring her flowers to make amends until she was released.

I don’t really feel bad for the tsar or tsarina, and I definitely internalize that Mark Twain quote people (including myself) like to post about revolutionary terror, but I think a case can be made that the tsar’s kids were young enough to be re-educated and proletarianized. Also it was just ruthless witness-silencing to kill their servants. Anyway, it’s all speculative anyway. The whole reason the family was killed was because a white army legion was closing in on Yekaterinburg and Lenin didn’t want the royal family falling into their hands.

I’ve heard it argued that it might have actually sowed chaos in the white army if the tsar fell into their hands, since the white army was already split between Absolute Monarchists, Constitutional Monarchists, Liberal/Conservative Republicans, and even some Right-SRs (agrarian socialists) that were purged later. The question of what to do with the tsar would have possibly caused a lot of white army infighting. But we can never know because it didn’t happen.

Trotsky, with his penchant for showmanship, wanted to be the prosecutor in a trial against Nicholas, similar to what happened with the French revolution, but he never got to have that dream fulfilled. Doing it in public that way certainly would have legitimized it more than what actually happened, which is that they did it quietly, tried and failed to destroy the bodies, and then wouldn’t admit it for a long time. I don’t understand the “kids had it coming because they had jewels sown into their clothes” argument. Yeah. Their parents were using them as human shields like all reactionary parents do. And? If our society is wrongly structured to treat children like the property of their parents, then shouldn’t children be liberated from their reactionary parents, rather than killed alongside them? I think a lot of people just say “fuck them kids” for shock value to trigger the porkies.