The end of the Romanovs

The sense of awe down the generations 
The prestige which is the aristocratic birth right    
Dies slowly at the birth of the intelegensia 
Pageantry is empty when tanks flatten earth and Europe drowns 
In muddy conflict   

Great families fight Againist themselves 
Raising peasant army's
But these peasant tire of industrial slaughter and industrial work which unbinds them from their land 
 

The soil built ties 
For King
For tsar
For Kaiser 
For what ? 
For endless labour and little reward 
For a fiction of heaven 
The peoples opium 

For  the enlightenment holds no divine right of Kings 
If right is not pronounced by God 
Then from where is authority issued  
Fraternity and Liberty abroad 
So why not here the people cry 
The Mad monk has the ear of the queen 
perform a modern miracle 
By whispering to a faulting child 
Heir to a faulting empire 
Things fall apart 
Just as flesh is no match for an ideal 
To face reality all illusions most by fates decree come crashing down  
A new year dawns 
And with it a new era 
February 
International women's day 
In the streets all turns silent 
The machines grid to a halt 
The state  turns white then red 
In the heat which ends oppression 
As the ties to old society are cut 
This is the Soviet 

October
 an empty palace is raided 
Shots ring out in a basement 
Half a world away  imperial Russia 
Ends in the remoteness of wildness 
And enters legend 
What once was yesterday 
Is now an old world never to be revisited 
Lenin  boards a train in Zurich 
Returned from exile   
To start a second revolution 
He know it can only end 
In total revolution or execution for him and his followers 
later illiterate peasants 
Learned of their elevation 
In Murals on the side of trains 
Zig/ zagging mother Russia 

The end of reign of centuries 
Cut down in a hail of bullets 
A bloody slaughter 
No member of the family left  alive
No one to reclaim the old way 
No new dawn at the end of empire 

The rest of the century is a war of systems 
The state 
The wealthy 
The individual 
Each one over turning the other