Hey /r/askhistorians I'm a Russian born in Kyrgyzstan currently living on a US Air Force base in Japan. My family lineage has always fascinated me and I'd recently started digging into it. My mother and grandmother can trace back my family lineage for at least 8 generations. I have recently been talking to them and they told me that our family (Moiseyev) originally came from noble birth, however after the Soviet Union came into power they were stripped of their wealth and forced to move to Kyrgyzstan. As far as I'm aware a fairly large percentage of Russians living in Kyrgyzstan originally came from a similar situation. I do not have a large amount of knowledge on this subject, because it was dangerous to talk about your old family during this time. I was wondering if any of you could provide information to me on this topic? I have numerous medals and several documents that I could provide if they could help at all.
Not enough people are aware. At least in the United States, I know I was taught that the Romanov family was executed, and Russia magically became communist afterwards. In any case, I pursued a history degree in college and did some more work on that particular era.
Really the hallmark of any socialist revolution in the past century is after a succesful coup, implementing a centralized economic plan as a means to that end. After the Bolsheviks took control of power in 1917, they publicly executed the Romanov family and began the process of centralizing most everything in accordance with their communist economic plan; think: banks, land (private and church), manufacture of goods. After the passing of the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land, the Bolsheviks began rounding up opposition leaders (read: tsarist nobles). Those who had land were stripped of it by peasants and the working class, who then redistributed among themselves with impunity, as the Decree on Land forbade owning a private estate. Those who fought were arrested. Those who fought hard enough were arrested, and then executed. Many families who formerly owned a bit of wealth were deported to locations where they could not weild any political influence, or chose to move of their own volition so as to avoid being rounded up by the government.