You probably should have elaborated a bit more instead of going, "yeah, I wouldve shot you, too"

Well, you did basically tell your friend who just literally pretended to be Tzar Nicholas that you'd be willing to shoot them, right to their face. Haha

I would have just said something like, "I wouldn't be friends with you in the first place if that was the kind of person you were, so the question is irrelevant."

You could've been kinder to your friend, who is now either offended or scared of you (but that's kinda funny, to be honest).

But are you the asshole for insisting to kill the Romanovs? NTA!

"Would you ahve shot the Romanovs, even if it was me?"

"Yes"

There are no stupid questions.

Would you shoot Hitler even if it was me?

There are some stupid questions.

My friend (who played Tzar Nicholas) asked me something like:"Would you shoot the Romanov’s even if it was me?! "

Czarist detected

Would you shoot the Romanov's even if it was me?!

Would you ride a bike even if it was your grandma with wheels for legs?

You had an opportunity to make people reconsider the glorification of monarchs. Instead you allowed the conversation to move from being a hypothetical about historical figures to being a concrete situation about your immediate friends. And then you doubled down on murdering one of those friends, whose connection was that he was playing a character in a play. It’s not your fault that you got such a loaded question, but the only appropriate response was to deconstruct that question. I think you could’ve steered that conversation differently.

If it’s a surprise that your friend is avoiding you, then I think you’ve had a lapse of empathy while gaining precisely zero ground in people understanding your position better. Whether your care about him avoiding you is your prerogative. But it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Hypothetically killing teenagers without remorse may socially ostracize you, yes

You told your friend you would shoot him, lmfao.

I think it's not a good look to say you'll shoot a classmate, even in hypothetical, I think it was better dismissing the hypothetical as nonsense, which it is, answering it with the question, would you condemn your population to violence and hunger? Otherwise yeah it's not wrong to have that stance just think you could go about it a little more gracefully, cause one problem is that when we are THE communist some people know they'll judge communism based on US and the optics of how you went about it might lead them to believe communists are more trigger happy then they are.

NTA, the Romanovs had it coming and so does anyone who still defends them, especially the ones who think they'd leverage a friendship that CERTAINLY WOULD NOT EXIST if the petitioner were a Romanov

You could have been a bit more diplomatic with a friend. Dishonest a bit but it would have been a chance to swerve and say that if you were their friend it wouldn't likely get to that point, that you'd convince them to abdicate or that if you were their friend you'd likely have similar class interests and not want to shoot them so it's a moot point. Pivot then to how much you value them as a friend but they should really read up more on the truth of the matter and that particularly ugly royal family. But it's not always easy to keep one's cool and be collected in the moment with the perfect things to say.

Still you should apologize and try to explain a bit. Reframe it and explain how awful the Romanovs were as people and how you don't see them as being like that at all.

Romanovs did deserve it though and not the asshole for holding that point of view.

I would shoot

You're right, your friend is just a liberal in need of education on what the Romanovs were actually like.

Would you ~~love~~ shoot me even if I was a ~~worm~~ Tsar?

The form of your opinion makes sense, but your delivery was brusque, immature and alienating. Propaganda is a skill, and I hope you can learn some good lessons from here. In general, you are going to seem nuts rigidly and dogmatically relitigating historical events. It's better to deflect around these sort of questions and talk concretely about contextually relevant issues.

If you lead off the bat with the most extreme and least relevant example, you will probably foreclose the opportunity to build the prior beliefs necessary to support this less relevant position.

I was dissapointed that the one communist didn’t brutally blow Anastasia’s brains out, but I definitely think the play ... inspires violence in me.

I don't think this is a good thing. It is true that violence becomes regrettably necessary in resistance and revolution, but it should not be something we take pleasure in, for a myriad of reasons. It leads to adventurism, it hinders our ability to grow our movement, and it puts our culture in a bad spot post-revolution towards successfully building towards communism.

And on a personal level, no, you should never, ever tell your friend that you would kill them under some hypothetical scenario. You should never let the conversation get to the point where that's even a question being asked.

NTA. As others are saying, the Romanovs deserved it- but also- the very system of monarchy as it existed in Europe, meant that the existence of the Romanovs was a constant threat which could result in the loss of lives of millions, and a reversion to the old order (of serfdom and aristocracy). So long as the royal family existed, other European monarchs and domestic monarchists would seek to return them to power.

Libs can cry and whine about the Romanovs or (to a lesser extent) Bourbons all they like- frankly, I wish those people could experience the same things those living under their boots in the "good old days" did. Their executions were absolutely necessary- and it's incredibly interesting that people latch on to them as the ones to cry about, when millions of peasants, over many generations, had suffered their families' rule- and when there is no shortage of royalty and nobility in history, outright exterminating each others' entire family lineages, killing off rival claimants, etc... I'd go so far as to say that regicide and fratricide is a natural part of the system of monarchy throughout history.

Mfers be supporting carpet bombing entire villages but oh no the poor aristocrats lives matter!

Top performace would be to show there dressed as Yakov Yurovsky

It would have been better to point out how stupid your friend's question was. Thars a really weird hypothetical, like if he was a Romanov and your were a revolutionary ar the time you wouldn't know each other personally, so the it's a senseless thought experiment on its own. Like...if my firend became The Romanovs since apparently this guy is hypothesizing himself as an entire family we wouldnt be friends anymore, so.if he's going for modern day it's also weird and stupid.

"If I were a totally different person who did horrible things would you kill me?"

"Yes"

"I can't believe you're willing to kill me"

Insisting that Alexei should be killed is cringe since he was already dying and wouldn't have made it past the harsh Russia winter anyways. And he wasn't so important that his death had to be bumped up several months. The dude would've just died from bumping his head too hard or stubbing his toe.

As for the rest, meh. Most overthrows of a feudal dynasty are violent and even if we pretend the Bolsheviks were just supporters of a new feudal dynasty, they didn't treat the Romanovs any different from how a victorious feudal dynasty treated a defeated feudal dynasty. The Romanovs, as a feudal imperial family, understood this. The founder of the Romanov dynasty basically ordered a three-year old pretender to be hung among other things. And now that the shoe's on the other foot, they want to be treated like citizens of a liberal democracy. Nicholas could've done the actual feudal way of abdicating by gouging his eyes out and joining a monastery where he could spend the rest of his days as a blind monk like so many feudal pretenders to the throne, but he didn't do that, so he simply paid the price of a feudal sovereign who refused to abdicate for real.

"Would you shoot the Romanov’s even if it was me?! " “No sympathy. And yes, I would shoot regardless of personal connections”

What for though? Where is political pragmatism?

The amount of memes on the subject I see from western leftists makes me question if there are very few sources available in English or it's just juvenile cruelty. It was local initiative, strongly influenced by strategic situation during the civil war in the region. Nicolas was "citizen Romanov" by then and the party had a 1001 reason to keep him and his family alive, including plans for a public trial. Lenin was pushing for their evacuation to Moscow. Also...moral implications of killing a couple of teens that were there, anyone? Kill them, because they were born into the wrong family? How very conservative... Not to mention penty of nobles up to and including at least one Major General of the Imperial army I can remember went on to form the core of the Red Army.

Consider the implications for propaganda too. Why create a bunch of martyrs for the Whites? Using exactly this argument, later that same year Maxim Gorky convinced Lenin let Nicolas' sick second cousin go. Lo and behold - no one remembers Gavriil Constantinovich Romanov.

AITA for hating the fact that they were shot instead of getting guillotine in the middle of Red Square?

YTA but you (obviously) had the correct opinion

It's sort of beside the point, I think? Because litigating the morality of an argument over hypotheticals is a red herring to begin with. The real point is about the conditions those people were living under, the power dynamics in play, and the response necessary to secure liberation. What they did is try to put you firmly within a framework of idealism, which is about doing the "right thing" (as abstract moral principle) even if the circumstances surrounding it would tempt you to do otherwise. So in their minds, you affirmed that you are hypothetically morally bankrupt and would not do the abstract moral principle "right thing." Naturally, that's going to make them uncomfortable around you because idealism is all about what people are capable of and whether they are willing to strive to overcome their "base urges."

The question is, do you want to be friends with them? If so, you'll probably need to go out of your way to be more diplomatic about this stuff. If this were a question of organizing, I'd say, don't bother. Friendship and making sure you stay safe, that people aren't viewing you as some kind of loose cannon when you aren't, can be a little different.

We shouldn't have to go above and beyond to deal with people like this, and let's be real: sometimes we're not going to. The idealist position would say we should always strive to, no matter what. Well, sometimes it's just not going to happen. BUT, that doesn't mean you have to leave these situations to impulse either. What you can do is try to learn from it by reflecting on what about it didn't work, how you would like to present yourself and your views going forward, what outcome it is that you're even wanting. For example, are you wanting to vent? to persuade? To be the opposition when everyone is affirming the norm? Keep in mind the last one can be very difficult to do alone and it's easy to slip into defense mechanisms instead of keeping a clear head, especially when people are throwing nonsensical hypothetical gotchas at you or citing some of the same talking points you've heard a thousand times.