What Could Nicholas II Have Done to Preserve the Imperial Throne?

TIMM,  you are mistaken about the murderers.  They were not  "rewarded". Actually, several were shot later because they were talking about what happened,. often  trying to make excuses for themselves.
 And,  I do not have any sympathy for  "poor Nicky". He and Alexandra died because of their actions, or lack thereof.  It is a real crime that the children  were caught in the crossfire. IMO  they should have been away before Tobolsk, when there was a chance to save them.  I do not know  if Alexei  could have gone, but the Grand Duchesses certainly
 In any case, we have strayed a long way off the topic here.

Wasn't Figes recently discredited ?
 Anyway, I agrre Elisabeth. The country was simply not ready for stability,even after the Civil War,it took some time to get the new system operating properly. For better or worse.

Robert, his works are certainly not discredited. Maybe his actions are, but not his works.

Furthermore, I am a little amazed at how members of this board are so self assured in making conclusions which to me are far from evident.
Why was the country not ready for stability? With a Tsar who would make a serious effort to make an appeasing politic statement and stick to this politic statement, no matter what difficulties he would encounter, who knows how history would have turned out?

It is just that Nicholas wasn't that kind of man.

Look, I'm very sorry if I gave the impression that I was disagreeing with Orlando Figes because of his recent, much-publicized problems with his colleagues. Excuse me, I own all of Figes's works and I am a great admirer of his. I was indeed upset about the scandal swirling around him last spring and, it's true, somewhat disillusioned by his initial response to accusations of professional wrongdoing. On the other hand, as I stated in the thread I started to discuss this issue, Figes is not an axe murderer. It's not as if he'd actually killed somebody or done anything else equally unforgivable. As far as I'm concerned, if he's been suffering from personal problems and that led him to indulge in some unprofessional behavior he was later ashamed of, well, that only means that he's like 90 percent of the rest of us. (I would say 99 percent but I realize there is a moral minority out there.)

No, I disagree with Figes's assessment that Russia could have survived as a constitutional monarchy through and after World War I, based on Figes's own conclusions about the overall failure of Stolypin's land reforms. Dear Sergei, read A People's Tragedy again. Figes says, repeatedly, that the majority of Russian peasants, particularly the village elders, who carried the most local clout, remained resistant to the new land reforms and actually hindered their implementation wherever they could.

As long as the peasants were unsatisfied and unsocialized there was very little chance that Russia could emerge as a democracy in the early twentieth century. That's just the way I see it. The peasantry made up some 80 percent or more of the total population. How can you build a responsible citizenry or a viable civil society on a population that is, for the most part, functionally illiterate and hostile to all authority outside of the narrow confines of the village? It's impossible. It was impossible. It didn't work. What the provisional government found in the spring and summer of 1917 was that the peasantry was taking matters into their own hands, without asking for any permission, and seizing the land from the nobility and gentry and other property holders. In other words, the peasantry did not give a damn if the provisional government had decided that it would only legislate land reform and partition when the Constitutional Assembly met in January 1918. Long before this date, the peasantry had actually presented the provisional government with a done deal. The land question had been settled -- period. And if the provisional government had been even remotely sensible they would have taken a page from Napoleon and realized they had to have the peasantry on their side to make their revolution succeed.

Instead they were basically fools and allowed Russia to descend into an abyss of utter chaos and violence. There wasn't a single Napoleon among them. There were plenty of would-be Napoleons on the Bolshevik side, however. Which was Russia's bad luck, as usual.

Well Bear, people were doing that in the US in the 1950s under McCarthy ism too.

While Bear does tend to exaggerate, I have to say that I don't agree with you here, Constantinople. As awful as McCarthyism was, it nevertheless was not even remotely comparable to the witch hunts that went on in the Soviet Union during the Lenin and Stalin eras and even as late as the Brezhnev period. Even under Brezhnev, a great poet, a future Nobel Prize winner like Joseph Brodsky was arrested, put on trial, and actually found guilty of anti-Soviet activity -- for writing poems! And his sentence: exile to Siberia! Hard to believe that this could have happened in Russia in the last decades of the twentieth century, when supposedly Stalinism was but a mere relic of an ignoble past! And yet there were other Soviet poets sentenced to prison and exile during this same time frame, Irina Ratushinskaia, for example.

For that matter, what was I thinking? I forgot to mention the most notorious example of all - the KGB's attempt to assassinate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the early 1970s, when the great writer was putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus (his finest work, too, IMHO) The Gulag Archipelago, and arranging for it to be published in the west. This assassination attempt - via an injection of poison, administered surreptitiously, much like that which claimed the life of a Bulgarian dissident living in England around the same time - is well documented by numerous sources, it is an actual historical fact. That Solzhenitsyn survived was, I suspect, a testimony both to his physical strength and to his will to live after his bout with cancer more than a decade before. But the KGB (and by extension, their employers, the Soviet state) fully intended to kill him, of that there can be no question.

As horrible a person as McCarthy was, I don't think he was quite capable of resorting to such measures, given American institutional restraints and our legal system (although, no doubt, transposed to the Soviet state, as a Soviet official, McCarthy would have found it all too easy to adapt to this new environment of rampant lawlessness and political violence and would have become every bit as vicious as Ezhov or Yagoda).
 

I agree accept for this part:

"...Bear does tend to exaggerate...."  

Since you believe I have,  what true story would you like me to post first?  Maybe, the story about my great uncle who was arrested in the middle of the night by  Bolsheviks who tossed him into a cattle car where there were so many people they couldn't even sit down, but,  as the people died, because there was no water and no food,  more room was available after  the bodies were tossed  along the rail side by the guards where the animals, birds and insects soon left bare white bones of  infants, small children, old women and men, and then the young and middle aged...  After weeks of travel there was enough room for everyone to lie down.... He spent from 1918 to 1956 in a Siberian mine.   Meanwhile,  his lovely wife and six children were labeled "enemy of the people" and no one was allowed to feed them, so,  guess what happen.    The littlest ones ate the tips of their fingers off as they slowly starved.... All of his family died of starvation.

Bear doesn't need to exaggerate.  This true story can be followed 20 million times over as people died in similar ways due to Lenin and Stalin's direct actions.

I do realize that there are horror stories which can be told by those living under the Romanovs, but, we were not talking about the Romanovs at this point in time,  even though I've tried to pull us back to Nicholas II a couple of times.


AGRBear

TIMM,  you are mistaken about the murderers.  They were not  "rewarded". Actually, several were shot later because they were talking about what happened,. often  trying to make excuses for themselves.

First of all, it's just Tim.  Second of all , maybe some of those thugs got shot, but most got away scot free.  Peter Ermakov, one of the worst of the lot, spent the rest of his life proudly boasting about his role in the murders (often grossly overplaying his own role).  The man was a murderer, a thug, and a drunk, and he ended up being a "hero".  Blecchhhh!!

And,  I do not have any sympathy for  "poor Nicky". He and Alexandra died because of their actions, or lack thereof

 

Well, I see we disagree here.   As I said, if Nicky was a bad leader, put him on trial, give him a chance to speak in his own defense.  You do NOT just murder him and his family cold bloodedly.  However, as I said, Communists were cold blooded killers, and that is what they did best.  Bear's most recent post only reinforces that.   

You know, Bear, please forgive me if I hurt your feelings, but it was unintentional, because I wasn't referring to the sufferings of your German ancestors in the Soviet Union. I know very well those sufferings were real enough, only too real. I just sometimes get a little exasperated with your seeming inability to have any truck with communists whatsoever, even Western communists.

There are some communists I like, and I think most reasonable people would like if they had a heart in them... Even Soviet communists. For example, I adore the poet who almost despite himself became the poet of the newly established Soviet state, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Who cannot but love these lines he wrote just before he killed himself in 1930?

"Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in a tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation."

OK Tim, I was just responding to you by the name you have posted.
 And, no, we do  not really disagree, much. I may have no sympathy for N&A,  but  I too deplore the treatment they received at the hands of the Bolsheviks. A trial- yes, legitimate  in ful lworld view. In Moscow. I doubt the outcome would be much different, though. Just more civilised with the veneer of legitimacy. And the children  might have been saved.
Bear, you do not remember the Japanese  confications and internment camps ?
 And, I still remember the lectures in school  about  telling the principal if we saw or heard anything about Communism- even in our own families. What a thing to tell children. I was pretty young butI got the message and I did not like it. Fortunately, my school, at that time, stopped at allowing the John Birch society on  campus to lecture us. This was at the tail end of the "Red Scare"  era, so it did not last all that long for me.

A trial- yes, legitimate  in ful lworld view. In Moscow. I doubt the outcome would be much different, though. Just more civilised with the veneer of legitimacy. And the children  might have been saved.

Exactly, no matter what sentence Nicky may have gotten, the children would have been spared (and maybe Alix too).  They probably would have been sent into exile.

As for what happened with McCarthy and all that in the 50's, that was bad.  Granted no one was killed, but peoples careers were destroyed all the same.  The worst example was what happened in Hollywood at that time, and many an actor found themselves out of work if even a HINT of them having Communist sympathies.  Same with writers, directors, and producers, who found themselves blacklisted.   I remember a movie that came out some years back, The Majestic, starring Jim Carrey, which was set in that time period.  Carrey played a writer who had been blacklisted and had lost him memory.  He found his way to a small town when everyone thought he was a World War II soldier named Luke, who had gone MIA.  Carrey's character greatly resembled Luke.  At the end of the movie, he got his memory back and was shown testifying before Congress.  I remember him saying something like "This is not the country that Luke died to protect".  Thankfully, once McCarthy was gone, the U.S. came to its senses.

A trial- yes, legitimate  in ful lworld view. In Moscow. I doubt the outcome would be much different, though. Just more civilised with the veneer of legitimacy. And the children  might have been saved.

Exactly, no matter what sentence Nicky may have gotten, the children would have been spared (and maybe Alix too).  They probably would have been sent into exile.

Actually, I doubt very much Alix would have been saved, and certainly not the heir Aleksei Nikolaevich. He would have been done away with, one way or another, probably surreptitiously, just as the poor second dauphin Louis Charles was done away with (in secret) during the French Revolution.

Perhaps the daughters would have survived, if they had been part of an official exchange of prisoners, something that would have reflected if not exactly well, then not too badly, on the new Soviet government. But I doubt it.

I think the whole family was for all intents and purposes doomed once Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power. Not because Lenin was himself personally bloodthirsty or desperate for vengeance (I think he was far too cold-blooded for such heated emotions), but because it simply wasn't politically expedient to leave the family alive. And whatever you say about him, Lenin was always the absolute master, indeed dictator, of the politically expedient.

I have been away and have been catching up and must congratulate the participants in this thread. Its a pleasure to read the discourse but being argumentative as well I can't help but make this observation in response to one of the comments from Constantinople I believe: "Actually Tim while I am not a fan of communism, for the 80% of Russians who were illiterate, could not afford education or medical care, life got better under communism. For the 0.002% of Russians who were nobility, life, if they still had it, deteriorated exponentially."

This view always aggravates me for two reasons (and perhaps I'm being unfair in the following inferences but I've heard them so often that I assume that they are now generally being taken for granted):
Firstly, there is the implication that absent communism life for "80% of Russians" would not have gotten better. Secondly, there is an implication that somehow communism was an inevitable development in Russia. There is a hint of this thinking in Elizabeth's remark about the difficulty of creating a democratic state because Russia was an agrarian state composed of "illiterate" peasants (there's that categorization again) with the further implication that nothing short of a revolution would change matters. As I have stated elsewhere absent the Great War it is not clear that Russia would not have developed along more democratic lines and that its citizens would have benefited both politically and materially. WWI was such a cataclysmic disaster that virtually no country escaped unscathed. Even the US which entered the war late and did not suffer anything like the casualties that the European countries was adversely affected (one has only to read Hemingway).  We today really have no frame of reference as to the effect on society that the war had. My Grandmother who was born in the 1880's and died in 1968, having been a lady in waiting to the Dowager Empress, a nurse in the Russo Japanese, the Great and Civil Wars and having lived through exile, WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, when asked always told me that WWI changed everything.

when asked always told me that WWI changed everything.

Well, it did. 

World War I allowed the Communist take over of Russia, which in turn allowed Stalin to spread Communism to other counties after World War II, which led in turn to the Korean and Vietnam Wars.  What Lenin and his thugs started in 1918 steamrolled throughout the 20th Century, leaving death and misery in its wake.

As I indicated elsewhere Russia was in the throes of rapid economic development which was brutally interrupted by the war. Development that could have changed the political landscape and ushered in a constitutional monarchy for example. Furthermore, the war destroyed the Army which I believe would have been the principle source of stability for the state and could have permitted a more evolutionary political development by helping maintain order in the face of the revolutionary onslaught post-1905. All of this flies in the face of the seemingly accepted western view in certain liberal circles that somehow communism was good for Russia and was inevitable.  Perhaps, social upheaval is necessary for progress but I believe with Edmund Burke that evolutionary rather than revolutionary change is more lasting and beneficial to mankind.  One must also ask at what price progress? Was the blood of 20 million innocents necessary? Communism like Nazism is inherently evil because it subjugates individual liberty to the will of the state. If mankind could be assured that the exercise by the state of its power would under all circumstances be benevolent then perhaps (although I doubt it) an argument could be made in its favor. But the fact is that mankind is imperfect and as Lord Acton so aptly put it power corrupts...etc. It is the true genius of the Founding Fathers that they recognized this fact and in crafting our political system created the vaunted systems of checks and balances. I don't doubt that there were and are nice communists as no doubt there may have been some nice Nazis as well but the fact remains that any political ideology that is willing to sacrifice the individual for the "greater good" is, in my view, because of the inherent fallibility of man, easily corrupted and highly suspect.  

Which gets us back to this thread what could Nicholas have done to preserve the throne. I found the discussion of Alexander III interesting in this regard. Again the Western liberal view is that he was reactionary, that he damaged the monarchy and there is surprise that Putin would have his portrait in his office. I should tell you that there is another view. That but for his early death there was a chance that he would have kept Russia out of the WWI.  That while he did hold reactionary views (perhaps understandable given this father's murder, the times he lived in and the threats he faced) he might have been able to maintain stability and order which would have permitted the development I alluded to above.  The contrast between father and son is perhaps instructive and Alexander III is never given credit for not having those attributes of character that Nicholas II is often criticised for having (e.g., his weakness and indecisiveness ).   I believe that one should put his reign in its historical context. For example, one of my  forebears M. N. Katkov (check him out on Wikipedia) as a well known journalist and publisher started out as a major public supporter of Alexander II's reforms (he was a liberal and published Dostoevsky) and yet in the face of the terror of the 1880s became a staunch conservative supporter of Alexander III.  It is perhaps  difficult for us (unless you consider the current public reaction to Al Quaida) to understand the corrosive effect that the Narodnaya Volya and the other anarchists had on Russian Society of the time.    

It was not my intention to defend the excesses of the Soviet Union. Merely to point out that the US was not exempt from people fingering and turning in relatives for Anti US senntiments.  The victims may not have been exiled in a physical sense but they were exiled financially and in terms of having their careers ruined and a few were imprisoned.
         My initial point was we have usually focused on the evil side of the Russian communist system but as bad as that was, the standard of living of the majority of Russians (the illiterate serfs) actually improved materially under communism, as did opportunities for them. This was obviously not the case for the aristocracy or for the middle and upper classes.

For many years, I viewed the fact that the Grand Duchesses did not leave the Alexander Palace or that Alexandra and the girls (I hate to call them children because they were not they were young women) and Alexei did not "escape" before they were formally imprisoned as stupidity on Alexandra's part.

Believe it or not it was after I read Snow Mountain a novel by Catherine Gavin, that I more fully understood the effect that measles had on the family and on the Grand Duchesses.  This was not the "garden variety" sickness that I experienced when I was a child (and which hardly anyone experiences anymore because of mandatory vaccinations) this was a debilitating illness that could, in 1917, kill.

Ms. Gavin, while not writing history books, does draw on historical sources to write the backbone of her stories and then adds the "romantic touch".

Measles at the turn of the century could cause deafness, blindness and, of course, end in death. 

I used to ask, sick or not, why didn't they just pack up and get out of there?  With more research and more study, I can now understand why they didn't. 

So one of the myths about why the young women did not leave their parents for freedom has been debunked.  Not only did they not want to go, and I think part of that was due to the fact that they did lead such a sheltered life and could not imagine leaving, but after they all came down with the measles one after another, they were, in fact, deathly ill and just couldn't leave.

I do remember having the measles when I was 14, just a little younger than Anastasia, and I had them under my eye lids.  I had to have a wet cloth kept over my eyes at all times, so that I would not open them and scratch the cornea.  I could have been left blind by what used to be called a "childhood illness".

So Alexandra, even if she wanted to, could not take her sick family and just leave for freedom.  Not only were the young women at risk, but then Alexei with his clotting disorder also came down with the measles and, at that point in medical history, who knew what it would do to him if he were moved?

By the time everyone was back to more stable health, the family had been arrested and confined to the Alexander Palace and any chance for "getting away" was then gone.

Fate, as seems to be the norm for Nicholas II and his family, played one more cruel trick on the Romanovs.  This then put them in the position that Kerensky tried to mitigate by sending them East instead of West for their safety.

It might have been at that time that the Grand Duchesses could have stayed behind and then been separated from the fate that later took their lives, but if one thinks of what life was like in August of 1917 with the war still raging and the Dowager Empress still in Russia with most of the other relatives, where would they have gone for safety?  I imagine that going East with their parents seemed to be the best solution.  After all they had no idea that in just a few months Lenin would return to Russia or that the October Revolution would unseat Kerensky and send him flying from the country.

Yeah, once again we have the benefit of hindsight.  Once Lenin and his band of murderers and thugs took over, poor Nicky and his family were doomed.  They were the first victims of the horror story called Communism, and they would not be the last.  I wonder if anyone has crunched the numbers to see just how many human being were wiped out by Communism.  I imagine it's in the millions, if not billions.

You know, Bear, please forgive me if I hurt your feelings, but it was unintentional, because I wasn't referring to the sufferings of your German ancestors in the Soviet Union. I know very well those sufferings were real enough, only too real. I just sometimes get a little exasperated with your seeming inability to have any truck with communists whatsoever, even Western communists.

There are some communists I like, and I think most reasonable people would like if they had a heart in them... Even Soviet communists. For example, I adore the poet who almost despite himself became the poet of the newly established Soviet state, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Who cannot but love these lines he wrote just before he killed himself in 1930?

"Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in a tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation."

Beautiful poem.  Thank you.

I assume you've forgotten but from the very start,  I have made it very clear that I judge people individually.  Having been on the campus of UC Berkeley from 1962 to 1968 it would have been impossible for me not to have known communists.  In fact, where we lived,   we had many neighbors  who were communists from all parts of the world, not just Russia. And, I had long long talks with them  [mostly the women as it was usually the husband who was going to school, but, not always].   I learned from them exactly how they felt.  I can recall more than a dozen times the women or men told me that there never could be a question that they would return to their country because they feared for the safety of their families in their country. Some had been told right out front that if they didn't return they and their families would suffer the consequences.  Some of us became very close friends which stopped when they returned home.  Much to my surprise,  they did not forget me.  Years later,  when these people and their families  applied to return to the US they often used me as reference....

Without knowing me personally and without asking me,  you have made an assumption that Bear dislikes an entire group of people, in this case all  the communists.  Perhaps I should have made my position clear more often. I hope I have, now.

We have been discussing the Bolsheviks and communists in general terms.  It was  and is their politics which causes me to break out in a rash.  I  hope no one misunderstand this:  I even understand why at that time in our history that  McCarthy was trying to weed out the communists.  Of course,  I will never agree on his tactics.  And, it is a sad note to our US history that such actions  were ever allowed.   All the "I'm sorry" will never mend the innocent people who were broken.  And, yes,  I recall the history of the Japanese camps during WWII.  Perhaps more so than most.  My childhood best friends were Japanese who lived on the north corner of our block.  My small American town had a large community of Japanese who were prisoners in these WW II camps while their sons and or fathers were fighting in our US forces.  Our town did not condemn our Japanese neighbors and friends. Most of their families had been living in the area longer than most of earlier European settlers because their ancestors migrated to California in the mid 1800s...  As a community, the non-Japanese  took care of empty Japanese homes and businesses,  knowing full well they hadn't been helping the enemy, and,  when they were released,  which the Japanese were and so our neighbors and friends  were able to return to their homes and businesses.  I heard first hand that our govt.  didn't do very well in caring for these Japanese as they should have.  My one friends mother lost a child because there hadn't been a doctor sent to them....  Our govt.  hasn't been nor will it ever be perfect.  I do hope, however,  that we learn through our mistakes.  It was not long ago, and I must say long overdue,  that some of the Japanese who suffered this disgrace have received some compenstations but  all the "I'm sorry" will never mend the people who were broken.

The German-Russians were just a small percent of the 20 million who perished.

The reasons I'm interrupting this conversation which has turned back to Nicholas II is because I want my fellow citizens as well as those outside of the US to know that you cannot believe everything you read in books, newspapers and magazines.   A person should judge individuals for their actions and not condemn anyone because of who their parents are or their color of skin  or where they celebrate their religion, not even if they are from a different political party...

And, yes, the US is having a problem with the terrorists who flew into the buildings in New York and Washington DC  and those who were stopped by a plane full of very brave Americans and others [I assume].  We're at this moment losing young men in a war with these terrorists.

The Romanovs were fighting terrorists and lost.

Nicholas II was constantly afraid of being assassinated.   One of the reasons he left the palace just before Blood Sunday in 1905 was because an attempt had been made on life just shortly before and his advisors nearly pushed him out the door and onto the train.

AGRBear