Therefore in my opinion there was realistically virtually nothing he as an individual could have done to preserve the throne.
This is to me one of the great conundrums of Russian history.
On the one hand, there were certainly huge stresses building in Russia in the last half of the 19th century as Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs without effective land reform and the acceleration of industrialization produced huge economic and social dislocations. And autocracy, especially in the hands of his successors, was proving too brittle to deal with the conditions, especially beginning with the famine of the early 1890's.
On the other hand, the long-standing desire of the peasants for land redistribution (manifested, for example, in the wave of peasant uprisings of the 18th century) and the fanning of that desire with emancipation -- coupled with the disruption of the commune-oriented culture in the villages as a few enterprising peasants tried to break free from the traditions of the
mir to seize what opportunities half-hearted land reforms did offer them --
still did not produce a revolution in the countryside until 1905, which the government quelled until well into 1917, despite the huge stresses WWI introduced.
Few people know that, even after the February revolution of 1917, the workers in most factories, despite occasional strikes and demonstrations, formed committees to keep their factories running (and their paychecks coming) to produce armaments for the armies and supplies for the cities. Lenin had spent 17 years in exile prior to April 1917, despairing that revolution would come to Russia during his lifetime. The liberal and centrist parties, and even the socialist leaders by and large, wanted to participate in monarchical government, not to supplant it. (One of the most bizarre aspects of the first months following the February revolution was the scramble of the various parties
not to be held accountable for running things.)
This suggests to me that Russian society, as most societies, had huge entropy in its body politic which would require enormous forces to turn into the overthrow of the government and its entire social order. People did not look to the government to give them hope. They just wanted the government not to deprive them of hope.
One of the points historians have made is that where Russia differed most fundamentally from western Europe was in its attitude toward its people and their rights. In western Europe, the assumption was that individuals had the right to do what they wanted unless the activity was proscribed by government. In Russia, the assumption was that individuals had no right to act unless the government authorized their actions. (This has been amply demonstrated by study of the kinds of applications that flowed through Russian bureaucracy year in and year out.) Ironically, much of the reason autocracy survived as long as it did was that the reach of government, due largely to lack of its presence in the countryside, was so shallow. So, whereas western Europeans were left alone by their governments as a matter of ciivil rights, in Russia people were left alone -- and therefore found the central government tolerable -- largely by being ignored. (Oddly enough, up until Nicholas gave the game away with Bloody Sunday in 1905, this was the reason that peasant myth held the tsar as their protector from the predations of the gentry if only he could be made aware of their issues. In real, practical terms most peasants in Russia viewed their landlord as the only government that touched them, and therefore the only government that mattered to them . . . not the semi-mystical tsar in the Oz they knew only by the name of St. Petersburg.)
And it suggests further that Nicholas and his regime could have survived without having to
solve all the problems confronting Russia as it adjusted to emancipation and industrialization. All he really had to do was
avoid making colossal blunders that deprived people of hope of any coming improvement of opportunity.
To me, Nicholas' reign was made catastrophic not by what he failed to do but by the building crescendo of blunders he committed as his reign progressed: the "senseless dreams" speech; the reversal of his father's workers welfare legislation; the mishandling of the St. Petersburg demonstrations in January 1905; the gross insensitivity to the situation at the opening of the Duma and his systematic attempts to undo the embryonic constitutionalism forced on him in 1906; the use of the land captains and the notorious Black Hand to end-run his own bureaucracy in the countryside to supplant regularized government with arbitrary and often sadistically brutal government; his ignoring his ministers' advice not to assume supreme military command in 1915; his putting his ministers in the untenable position of having their reports and advice to him filtered through Alexandra (and thereby somewhat through Rasputin); the series of bizarre ministerial appointments in 1915-16; and, finally, his ill-informed and ill-advised order to reprise the infamous Bloody Sunday blunder of using state violence against peaceful demonstrations in St. Petersburg on February 26, 1917.
