I’m actually definitely not a royalist, but the brutal way the Russian royal family was murdered and the subsequent horror of 70 years of communism was an abomination. I’d like to believe that a gradual progression of Russia from royal autocracy to something more democratic would’ve happened eventually. Instead they got Stalin – who killed more people than Hitler – and even bigger gulags, repression, and starvation under Stalin and his successors than under the royal regime.