PbSO4

I'm going to argue myself and everyone else in the thread to the point of exhaustion as a bit

Has convinced me to disengage. Have a good night.

Historically, indefinitely.

A case remarkable for its singular, improbable nature makes a poor argument for calculated policy.

I don't understand this notion of 'most legitimate heir' that keeps cropping up

Then pick a different name for it, "person whose claim to the throne could mobilize the most rubles, guns, and hands to hold them". Non-legitimate claimants may still gain the throne by force of arms motivated by virtue of their adjacency to the last legitimate holder of power. The law exists, but its ability to influence action and the ways it will be rhetorically implemented are not cut and dry. Legally, Peter I was a non-legitimate Tsar while Ivan V should have ruled alone, but de jure legitimacy and "that quality which will motivate believers in a feudal monarchy to support a candidate materially" are not one and the same. "Being the child of the last guy" is a rhetorically resonant plank for such a believer.

Can you demonstrate that, had their deaths been confirmed, removing the ambiguity, there would not have been competing claims to the throne? It is a sound line of argument that removing the most legitimate heir to the throne would necessitate that monarchists either arrive at an agreement on a suitable substitute or else settle their differences, consuming their time and energy.

You instead seem to be making the case that he could have been kept alive, but with rumors of his death disseminated. How long could such a situation really have persisted? Everything leaks, and faster than expected. If there was a prince locked away, who is providing for their needs of life? What do the locals say about that location? It's difficult to accept the claim that a live prince publicly declared ambiguously living is equivalent in its effects to a dead prince not confirmed dead.

And yet monarchists feuded amongst themselves until 1929 over the rightful heir. I have a low level of confidence that this would be the case with a surviving Alexei.

Any good study should acknowledge its limitations. In this case, applying statistical analysis to historical events faces the issue that statistical analysis is highly dependent on data integrity and on the ability of future events to be predicted by historical data. When we are discussing a proletarian revolution and attempting to predict how the forces of reaction will attempt to combat it, we lack a representative sample in 1918. In this case, we must take the approach of the clinician rather than the pure theorist. Statistical analysis is an invaluable data point, but it is a data point among others. Understanding of the underlying mechanism can and ought to drive decision making in the absence of conclusive data.

Does it matter?

Does it matter that they can't kill Romanovs they don't have in custody? Yeah, I'd argue that that puts a damper on things. "There's Romanovs now" obscures a lot of information about where they are at that time and whether they were even in a position to be executed. Additionally, the entire issue of the dynasty need not be exterminated if the most likely threat is that his direct male-line heir is used as a tool by counter-revolutionary forces. The previous Tsar's child will enjoy broader support than a cousin by virtue of proximity.

Getting back to my core problem with this argument, "why not just kill everyone" is a poor component of an otherwise well documented and well thought-out post. I think you make some thought provoking points and genuinely care about the moral calculus of revolution.

BRCA positivity has a great deal of work behind it specifically quantifying the probabilities in question.

The specific mechanism driving the elevated risk associated with an heir is hereditary monarchy. While I cannot produce a scholarly work examining the lineages, both actual and claimed, of the individuals advanced by rebel factions throughout, say, Eurasia from 1400-1900, I would assert that a cursory study confirms that individuals perceived to be legal heirs under the laws of their given title (and who subsequently are denied that throne) have a significantly higher correlation with driving civil war than those not holding such a position. The child and heir of the latest monarch, while not the only claimant who could be co-opted by a faction, is certainly one which would command the most legitimacy to the nation at that time.

There was an entire extended Romanov tree to contend with, and there still in fact is.

Were there Romanovs in a similarly vulnerable position that were spared intentionally, or were these individuals unreachable by the same forces that determined the risks of leaving the proximal Romanovs posed sufficient threat to be eliminated?

It's doubtful to me that one could ever justify, with formal logic, that the Romanovs' deaths were necessary, but their killing was rooted soundly in an understanding of the propensity for monarchs and all who associate with them to engage in violence to preserve, even if not the rule of specific monarchs, the institution itself.

this is that it is such a liberal standard that it can be applied to nearly everyone. There are scores of documented peasant rebellions throughout history, so by the same standard it is plausible that any given peasant may be at risk for launching a peasant rebellion down the line and thus, by that same standard, we are justified in liquidating them.

This folds under scrutiny. Any given peasant may pose a threat of revolt, but a royal heir poses a specific threat, and of a much greater magnitude in both likelihood and severity that the two cases are not comparable. There existed specific powerful groups who had a vested interest in putting an heir to the throne back onto it, and the means to attempt to do so in bloody fashion.

In this case, the specific qualities of the subject set them apart from the general population. I liken it to BRCA positivity. Yes, any given breast may cause cancer. However, it is not prudent to excuse every breast. It is prudent to excise one's breasts if one is double BRCA positive. One does not have to do this, but it is a reasonable response to a specific threat that can prevent greater harm in the future.

It took me multiple confusing paragraphs to stop thinking "Tangled" where you had clearly written "Taken".