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

The Romanovs were fighting terrorists and lost.

Yeah, and these same terrorists went on to kill countless more people.  As I said, Nicky and his family were just the first victims to Karl Marx's twisted ideals.

Nicholas II and his family were not the first victims  of the terrorists.  There were others before  Lenin took over the leadership.  I won't go into a list of names at this time. I will refer to  the first largest group of victims that probably changed the course of Russia's future  more than anything else in pre-war times.  They were the poor souls   who with only good intentions followed Gapon toward the palace on Bloody Sunday in 1905, and,  ended up running for their lives.  Some were wounded,   maimed, or killed.  Let us not forget  the soldiers,  who were given no choice but to charge with sabers drawn after THE  "mysterious first shot"  was fired, because they were, also, victims, while Gapon and the other terrorists quickly slipped away and went back to their favorite haunts and celebrated their success.

If you haven't read the thread on Bloody Sunday,  please,  when you have time,  learn about that day and it's importance in Russian history.
http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php?topic=1754.0

AGRBear

All I have to say to people who can't accept that communism benefited a large per centage of the population is that they are blinded by their prejudices.  For Russia in the 19th century to have virtually no middle class and the vast majority of its population illiterate meant that it existed in conditions equivalent to the middle ages in Europe. Communism was not inevitable in Russia in 1917 and without Lenin it may not have dominated Russian politics but the ineffectiveness of the Russian ruling classes combined with Lenin and Trotsky/'s organization abilities allowed it to dominant. The ossified aristocracy,which had been more concerned with their own welfare for too long combined with the Imperial Family who were more concerned with maintaining absolute power at the cost of political development left Russia with few people able to organize an alternative political strategy. They had all the cards but they did not know how to play the game.

I beg to disagree. It has always struck me that most western evaluations of communism and its role and effects in Russia starts with certain preconceived notions and prejudices based upon (a) the utopian tenets and, of course, the worthy goals of the communist state ("to each according to his need") and (b) the belief that Russia at the turn of the century was stagnant, "ossified" and not capable of change absent a revolution. As to the former, there is no and has never been any communist or even proto-communist state that is or has not been characterized by gross abuses of human rights (look at Mao's China and Cuba and Venezuela today). To excuse this behavior by saying that the populace has good medical care (cf., Michael Moore) is to exhibit the same prejudice and subjective evaluation which the left accuses critics of communism. As to the second point, recent scholarship points out that prior western views of pre-revolutionary Russia were quite superficial and failed to recognize various currents of reform and change as well as rapid economic development which could have presaged results more "acceptable" to western notions of what constitutes a modern democratic state. Indubitably, Russia's development at the turn of the century was starting from a postion well behind the rest of Europe but the important point was the rapid rate of change, which came to a screeching stop with the advent of WWI. In fact, some sociologists blame the revolution on the fact that peasants were moving from the countryside into 19th century style factories at a rapid clip without the time to acclimate themselves to the change in condition involved unlike the urban working classes of England, Germany, France and the US. By the way, some of the most vocal proponents of change were members of the "ossified aristocracy".  So who exactly is "blinded by their prejudices"?                 

Exactly, despite what Karl Marx might have hoped, there was a class system in Communism, two.  You had the people on top, and the people on the bottom, just no one in between.

The Russian Revultion was greatly summed up in George Orwell's book, Animal Farm.  In the book, the animals rebel against their neglectful farmer, Farmer Jones, and drive him off the farm.  The proclaim their own society and say that all animals are equal, that they will not become like their famer.  However, the pigs, led by one named Napoleon, gradually begin taking over and soon the other animals find themselves in a new dictatorship, led by Napoleon.  The book ends with one of the animals realize that there was no difference between the pigs now and the humans that once ruled them.

A little footnote to this.  An animated version of Animal Farm was made a few decades back.  The producers felt the ending of the book was too downbeat, so they altered it slightly.  In the movie, when the other animals realized that Napoleon was just another Farmer Jones, they march on the farmhouse and overthrow him.  This, decades before the fact, nicely forshadwed the overthrow of Communism in the late 1980's and early 90's.

As I said before, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

obviously you have a romanticised view of Cuba before the revolution.  It was controlled by the mafia and had an illteracy rate of 22% and a semi literacy rate of 60%.  the average person  had a grade 3 education with no prospect of a decent life.  After the revolution, that rate dropped to 1% and the average education increased to 12 years.
    As for China, it was a country that had been strangled by warlords, overrun by the Japanese and then strangled and robbed by the Generalisimo Chiang Kai.  Prior to the war, Chiang was more concerned with finding communists than he was in fighting the Japanese.  Chiang even asked the Japanese in 1945 to delay their surrender so that he could grab control of the KMT (Kuomingtng) and then China.  Chiang even alienated both the Americans and British after both had funded his battles against the communists.  HIs wife, Madame Chiang held a similar reputation to that of Imelda Marcos as a spendthrift who was not afraid to use government money to fund her lifestyle.

As for Chavez, I have nothing good to say about him.  He has taken a prosperous country that had relatively decent income distribution and taken into the relm of a country gripped by a personality cult.

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.

Petr, I'm so glad to see you back here. I think you are correct to make the arguments you do - the only problem is, World War I. It was for all intents and purposes unavoidable, was it not? So even if the economy was growing rapidly and the literacy rate was appreciably growing among the Russian peasantry and proletariat by the early 1910s (as all of the above demonstrably were!) that's still not enough. World War I rent the entire fabric of the body politic from top to bottom. What was retrievable after such major, repeated trauma?

Perhaps to say this is blasphemous, but I do think a lot of history boils down to individual personalities, brains as it were, and I simply don't see anyone in the political elite on the side of monarchy or democracy who quite had the personality or, more importantly, the brains, to prevail over Lenin and his Bolsheviks after the Revolutions of 1917. Which revolutions, as Lenin himself hinted ("If only Nikolasha would give us a war") IMHO only came about when they did because of the first world war.

As for Chavez, I have nothing good to say about him.  He has taken a prosperous country that had relatively decent income distribution and taken into the relm of a country gripped by a personality cult.

And the ironic thing was that the people willingly elected him, like the German people did to Hitler in 1933.

As for Chavez, I have nothing good to say about him.  He has taken a prosperous country that had relatively decent income distribution and taken into the relm of a country gripped by a personality cult.

And the ironic thing was that the people willingly elected him, like the German people did to Hitler in 1933.

Oh, please, don't compare Chavez to Hitler. That's too much. Too much for me at least to stomach... Not only is there the great discrepancy of power (no Latin American country even in the 21st century measures up in political power to the Germany of Central Europe in the early 20th century, Treaty of Versailles or no!). For another thing, Chavez is an idiot and Hitler, pardon me for saying so, was a genius, albeit a completely evil, crazy, and undoubtedly even psychotic genius. There's simply no comparison.

I wasn't comparing so much the men themselves, rather how they came to power.  The fact was that both men achieved office through elections, not a military coup.

Which just goes to show that the masses can be foolish in the extreme, if not outright stupid at times. As Joseph de Maistre put it, "toute nation a le gourvenement qu'elle mérite." Every country has the government it deserves.

Dear Elizabeth I actually agree with you and you are not being blasphemous when you say that the role of Lenin in crafting the revolution (in Churchill's colorful words as only he could express --shipped across Germany in a locked box car "like a caged bacillus") cannot be underestimated. Its almost proof of the Hegelian or was it  Nietzsche's (I can't remember --its been awhile since I've read them -- thankfully) notion of the ability of the single special individual to affect the course of history (can't the same be said of good old Adolf and Mao and all wonderful leaders of their ilk). Russia was the victim of the perfect storm, the War, the presence of Lenin, the early death of Alexander III and the succession of Nicholas. The fact that Alexandra converted to Orthodoxy (but that's the subject of another thread).  Obviously, one can't discount the fact that the condition of Russia in the 19th century presented fertile ground for all this evil to ripen and bear fruit. Let's start with the death of Paul, Alexander I's abdication and the effect that had on Nicholas I whose handling of the Decembrists and subsequent repressive regime fomented Kropotkin, Chernyshevsky and their followers which led to the assassination of Alexander II which led to Alexander III which led to Nicholas. These are all people who like me and you are formed by their experiences and the times in which they lived.  There was a wonderful sympathetic commentary on Nicholas I by Winston Churchill in his book World Crises (it was quoted in a post in this Forum but I've been unable to find it).  As for whether WWI was unavoidable, that is a question for the ages! Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August makes an interesting point about the effect of Austria's General Mobilization Order, kind of an early twentieth century version of the "doomsday machine", once it got started the dominoes fell one by one as each country issued its own mobilization orders.  There is some evidence that the Kaiser was initially resisting mobilizing his troops and cautioning the Austrians which raises the interesting question, again, that were Alexander III still alive could he have restrained Willi (Willi, after all, considered Nicholas II a nice boy but certainly not on par with him which in turn created some resentment). The other possible restraining presence was Edward VII but he died and George V certainly wasn't his equal in foreign affairs. That would have left Alexander as the possible restraining force on the European royal houses. Given his conservative inclinations it certainly was in the realm of possibility. He alone had the force of character to restrain his own General Staff.   If Germany hadn't mobilized then France wouldn't have mobilized and Russia probably wouldn't have either leaving Austria sitting alone and its a possibility that the matter could have been resolved diplomatically (certainly without the conflagration that ensued) .  Who knows? There is also an interesting line of thought that the "Progressive Block" (Miliukov, Rodzianko, etc.) went after Nicholas after the murder of Rasputin did not have the desired political effect and in fact there were indications that Russia was beginning to show signs of impending victories on the Eastern Front particularly as against Austria (cf. the discussion in this Forum regarding Belochka's new book "The Murder of Grigorii Rasputin"). Obviously, any such victories would have strengthened the monarchy immensely.  This is why history is so fascinating and also why Santayana was right "...those that don't know their history are doomed to repeat it".        

Alexander I's abdication

I see you're familiar with the legend of Alexander I faking his death and living as a hermit for decades aftewards.  It really is fascinating and has yet to be debunked.  For all we know, it might have happened.  It was easier to do things like that back then.

Anyway...

Regardless of how good or bad a leader Nicky was, I'm just glad he and his family are rememberd.  Here we all are, nearly a century after they last walked this Earth.  We colour pictures, paint pictures, write fan fictions, honour their birthdays, and have fascinating discussions, like this one.  One of the good legacies of Nicholas II is this great board we're all part of.

Petr, you have a great line there, "Russia was the victim of the perfect storm" -- not only is this a catchy and memorable phrase, it's actually true. You're right that if circumstances had been radically different in 1914, if say, Alexander III, and even or especially Queen Victoria had still been alive (although Victoria would have sided with Germany, not with Russia, doubtless she would have tried to broker an agreement) one or both of them might possibly have prevented the outbreak of World War I, or at least (in my view) delayed it for a decade or so... at which point it would nevertheless have broken out and Russia still would have had a revolution. Perhaps a different sort of revolution, however.

To me, the saddest thing, the most tragic thing about Russian history is how Russia always seems to be running out of time. It's a recurring theme, a leitmotif (even now, with the Putin-Medvedev government). The Russian people can't keep up with the West, they're struggling to the utmost to catch up with the West, and instead the West catches up with them, and deals a veritable death blow to whatever progress they've made. Marx, Kaiser Wilhelm and his generals, Hitler and his generals... the list seems to be endless. And one could extend it backwards, actually, into the Time of Troubles of the early seventeenth century.

And Tim, I have to say this, I don't think it's any great shakes that we spend so much time remembering and commemorating Nicholas II and his family. If only we could spend as much time paying tribute in some way to the millions of individual citizens of the Russian and Soviet empires (and their satellites) who died during the twentieth century as a result of political persecution at the hands of the state. But of course that's impossible. Which is probably why many of us here tend to fixate on individual victims like the imperial family, just as ordinary people who mourn the Holocaust but have no personal connection to it tend to fixate on Anne Frank and her family. This is an all too human and completely understandable impulse of compassion. But it's nothing to celebrate, exactly, when we're discussing historical figures who -- unlike the very ordinary Frank family and their friends -- had an incalculable impact on the course of world history.