On the night of 16–17 July all members of the Romanov imperial family were murdered: Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters and son. By early August, Lenin was calling for ‘merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests and White guards’ and the establishment of a more permanent apparatus of ‘concentration camps’ to deal with ‘unreliable elements’. In the ‘life and death struggle’ for the survival of the revolution, Izvestia declaimed, there were ‘no courts of law’ to appeal to, merely the injunction to kill or be killed.29 With British forces in the north and Japanese and
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