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« on: September 18, 2006, 05:31:22 PM »
i agree with AGRBear and griffh on several points. in my opinion, the tsar mentally abdicated long before he officially did it on paper. he had long been exhausted by a job which he never sought nor wanted and every decision that he did dare make on his own seemed to backfire.
one of the daughters was near death with the measles......i believe it was tatiana, who went temporarily deaf from the disease. it would have been risky to move any of them.
however, all that having been said, i believe the operative word for the whole situation can be found in the citation from anne morrow's work wherein she uses the word "childlike" to describe the tsar's initial attitude and behavior. but i think he had always had a childlike quality to him. his own father described him as a mere "child" when someone in the russian court of alexander III suggested that nicky be given more responsibility in order to prepare him to be tsar some day. to sum it all up, nicholas was weak from day one of his life. never assertive or aggressive, he always just seemed to roll with the tide with little foresight into any outcome. another case in point of his childlike attitude can be found in the correspondence between him and alexandra in the final days of their reign. he is at the front with the troops and she is at home in tsarskoe selo. she has been writing to him for weeks about the riots in the streets of st. petersburg and in his letter to her he talks about spending the day going to mass and playing dominoes! nothing wrong with either activity, but when one is the autocrat of his country and has been getting numerous correspondence about revolution and riots in the streets during a world war, no less,.....i think we are looking at someone who is in a "childlike" fog of denial.
but, getting back to the subject of the family's opportunities for escape, i have said all this merely to drive home the fact that the tsar never was capable of orchestrating anything throughout his reign and i think expecting him to realistically take care of his family by having the foresight to plan their escape somewhere is going far beyond his capabilities.
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