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

[TimM]

I see this thread has roared back to life...

In many ways, the Russian Revolution still haunts the world.  It led to Lenin and Co., taking over, which led to Stalin, which led to Stalin spreading Communism to other parts of the world after World War II.  This led to the Korean War and later, the Vietnam War.  Finally, it led to the Soviets invading Afghanistan in 1979, which led the U.S. to back resistence fighters there.  From these resistence movements, Al Quaida and the Taliban arose (bet the U.S. never dreamed they would turn on them, like the Frankenstein monster turned on his creator).

If Nicholas II had kept his throne, perhaps the 20th Century would have been a lot less bloody.  Nearly a century later, as I have said, we're still reaping a bitter harvest from the events of 1917-18.

[Alixz]

Did Nicholas II do in Russia what President Buchanan did in the US?  That was to make a decision to "drift".

I have been reading a set of books - one called Profiles in Folly and the other called Profiles in Audacity. They are written by Alan Axelrod (I don't know if there is any connection to David Axelrod the present head of Obama's re-election campaign).

In Profiles in Folly one of the sections is called "The Decision to Destroy" and in that section is the history of Buchanan's road to the presidency and what he did or didn't do about the Kansas-Nebraska problem in 1855.

What Axelrod makes clear is that both Buchanan and Lincoln were more intent on saving the union and obeying the Constitution (which at that time allowed slavery) than eliminating the evil of a slave holding section of the country.

Perhaps (without conscientiously doing so) Nicholas II - in order to preserve the autocracy he knew against the constitutional monarchy that he didn't know - simply made the same kind of decision Buchanan made (and Lincoln made in the first part of the war) to drift with the current and allow the laws that stood to be the arbiter of what kind of action could be taken.

In both countries, this resulted in a Civil War. In America, North against South, and in Russia, the now more educated and now freer bottom rung of society against the top rung.

The point has been made that Nicholas's education was all wrong for the times he lived in and had nothing at all to do with the "restless giant now waking outside the palace walls".

I have read that even the decision to do nothing is still a decision. I think that Nicholas II believed that the autocracy he was used to and the country he believed to be actually around him would continue to hold its own if he just let the laws that stood take their course.

I know that Buchanan felt that way about slavery. After the Dred Scott decision, Buchanan believed that the Supreme Court had put the problem to rest and that the Constitution would take care of the problem in the future as it was the ultimate law of the land and it allowed slavery.

Nicholas, on the other hand, had no constitution, but he had 300 years of Romanov rule to support his decisions.

Neither Buchanan nor Nicholas II understood that people in bondage - slaves or serfs - want nothing more than what everyone else has. Basic human rights.

Unfortunately in both the US and in Russia the elimination of bondage was not accompanied by any kind of life training or education that would have helped those who had been freed to start a new and different kind of life.

In Russia this meant that a few individuals with the power of persuasion and the charisma that made people want to follow them took over. Could Nicholas have changed any of this?  Perhaps, but he would have had to begin on day one of his reign and I don't believe that he understood that, even then, Russia was changing and he didn't know that he needed to change as well.

[Tsarfan]

. . . Nicholas II - in order to preserve the autocracy he knew against the constitutional monarchy that he didn't know - simply made the same kind of decision Buchanan made . . . .

Figes makes a related point in A People's Tragedy in explaining Nicholas' abdication and the almost eerie calmness and sense of relief he demonstrated afterward.  Autocracy was something Nicholas knew and understood.  Constitutional monarchy was something in which he felt adrift, and Nicholas preferred to give up the fight to hang on to the monarchy altogether rather than to take on the burden of learning how to be a constitutional monarch.

However, I think that point applies applies more to Nicholas' state of mind after several exhausting years of declining war fortunes than to earlier in his reign.

If Nicholas was inclined to drift (and I do think that was a large component of his personality all his life) regarding his role as tsar, I think he would have let the imperial bureaucracy continue to evolve to deal with changing conditions in Russia and to accept with more enthusiasm the advice of first Witte and later Stolypin -- both staunch monarchists -- about how to adapt to changing times.  The imperial bureaucracy was, in fact, doing a credible job at levels of government that did not draw the attention (and consequently the interference) of those around the throne and was adjusting along the way to the changing situation.

But Nicholas, who confused staying busy at inconsequential paperwork with effective government, showed a rather surprising degree of energy and application around one signally important issue:  the definition of autocracy.  Up until Alexander III's time, Russian rulers had generally stayed on the course charted by Peter the Great for administration of royal government along western lines.  But Nicholas made it a personal mission to return Russia to what he perceived to be Russia's true form of autocratic government -- that of a personal rule based on a direct communion with the people.

This showed up symbolically in his honoring of Tsar Alexis as the greatest of his forebears, although Nicholas seemed not to understand that Alexis -- another passive tsar with a bent for mysticism -- had almost ceded royal authority to the Church under Nikhon . . . and that it was only Peter the Great's handling of the church between 1700 and 1721 that ensured the permanent dominion of the monarchy over the Church.  And Nicholas' drive to impose an archaic version of autocracy on a modernizing Russia showed up in very real ways in the unrelenting campaign Nicholas undertook after 1906 first to marginalize the Duma (and the ministers, especially Witte, who were willing to work with it) and then to ignore it altogether.  Had Nicholas been willing to appoint a government responsible to the Duma instead of to his wife and Rasputin in the final two years of his reign, he -- and Russia -- might have had a chance.

But you are right.  Ultimately, he preferred no throne to a constitutional throne.

[TimM]

Imagine this, the Provisional Government comes to Nicholas and says the following:

"Tell you what, if you agree to give up the autocracy and become a Constitutional Monarch, we'll let you have your throne back.  If you don't agree, the monarchy is gone for good.  What do you say?"

I wonder what Nicholas's response would have been.

[Vanya Ivanova]

Its a good point Tim, was he really ever offered this?, my understanding is that it wasn't an option put forward, once GD Michael turned the throne down that was it but as others have said I suspect it would have gone against everthing he believed.

I have to say Tsarfan, as much as I concur with all the excellent details of your analysis, I struggle with the emphasis on the mistakes made in the last few years of Nicholas II's reign and the involvement of his wife/ Rasputin etc. Of course it didn't help, but the regime was irreparably damaged before that point in my opinion and by much larger forces than an emotionally distraught mother and an opportunist mystic.

Can one really effectively argue that had Alexander III lived and been on the throne in 1914 that there would still have been no revolution? It was only 56 years, (one generation) from the Emancipation act to the Revolution of 1917.

The tidal wave of change unleashed by the Emancipation of the serfs had really started to gather an alarming momentum by the time Nicholas II became Tsar. I think the 'Senseless Dreams' speech perfectly illustrates that he believed himself to be a 'shepherd to his flock' a 'father to his children' and that the status quo was ordained by God, and that his  duty to his people was to protect them from themselves. That their desire for change was against 'God's law'. Of course to us now this is akin to madness, but my whole point is realistically Nicholas II given his background and education and the times he lived in could not really be expected to have thought otherwise. The pace of change forced on him was also immense and few leaders in history have been able to effectively overhaul/suppress their entire belief system in order to maintain control and then also in a very short space of time.

I fail to see any evidence that Alexander II and Alexander III would have believed anything fundamentally different. The only difference being that Nicholas II was perhaps in some ways as Tsarfan pointed out actively more resistant to social change than his predessors. He genuinely believed it was his duty to prevent it from happening, to 'protect' his people from these changes. Nicholas II saw it as a dereliction of duty not to oppose the social reforms. This was out of a sense of duty not a desire for personal power. In that sense I would say I disagree with the view that he 'drifted'. He made a conscious effort to oppose social reform and promote industrial growth, in my opinion, which is obviously a recipe for disaster.

His father and grandfather were simply not faced with the same level of demands. The analogy made by Alixz between ideological incentives/viewpoints involved with American Civil War leaders and Nicholas II is very pertinent. Lincoln is only now being reassessed as not being entirely the humanitarian hero he has previously been seen to be. It was only in the very late stages of that war that he even really considered the enslaved African's 'human rights'. The war was started fundamentally over an issue of commerce and those rights were not honoured afterwards.

So if a self made man of the world like Lincoln had no real issue with enslaved people ( my understanding of that war being it was started to protect northern industry and wages from the unfair competition of the south's fiscal advantage of a 'free' labour force) then how can we expect the unwordly, sheltered and retiring Tsar Nicholas II to have been enlightened enough to hand his people entitlements and powers that were completely alien to him.

If the serfs had been emancipated in the reigns of either Paul or Nicholas I then perhaps Nicholas II might have had a chance of preserving the throne. I agree that Nicholas II was not very good at the job of being Tsar but had he lived in earlier times these mistakes would not have resulted in the loss of the throne. Russia had remained a medieval, fuedal society far too long and change came too fast and too late and Nicholas II and his much maligned wife simply cannot in my opinion take all the blame for that.

[Tsarfan]

I don't know, TimM.  But I tend to agree with Figes that Nicholas preferred no throne to a constitutional throne.

Although there is a view growing among some historians that Alexandra's influence over Nicholas has been overstated, I do not believe that to be the case.  Once Nicholas and Alexandra became separated for long periods when Nicholas took over supreme military command, many of the conversations they would have had in person became memorialized in written correspondence, and it paints a compelling picture of a very hen-pecked husband and of a wife who was determined that Nicholas not yield an inch of his authority to demands for a government responsible to the Duma.

The same view that Alexandra really exercised little influence over Nicholas' political decisions also holds that Rasputin's influence on government affairs has been overstated.  I do not believe that to be the case, either.  There is just too much anecdotal evidence of both their involvements.  For instance, after the abdication Anna Vyrubova recounted a heated conversation she overheard between Nicholas and Alexandra late one evening in his New Study at the Alexander Palace in late July 1914 when Nicholas was deciding to mobilize.  During that argument, Alexandra pressed the point that Rasputin was against the war as he felt it would bring disaster to Russia.  That indicates not only that Alexandra clearly involved herself in her husband's political decisions, but that Rasputin was discussing far more than family health and spiritual matters with Alexandra well before Nicholas departed for Stavka in 1915 and left Alexandra behind as ostensible caretaker in St. Petersburg.  Alexandra was also known to sit behind the column screen on the loge of Nicholas' New Study so that she could eavesdrop on his audiences with government officials.

Then in 1916 Alexandra in a letter urged Nicholas to make use of the comb she sent him that had been blessed by Rasputin.  Nicholas wrote back that he made sure to use the comb before meeting with his advisors -- a phase of the reign I like to call "Government by Magic Comb".  This kind of anecdotal evidence of Alexandra's and Rasputin's bizarre involvement in running things is backed up by much more empirical evidence.  Alexandra's letters to Nicholas contain advice she is passing along from Rasputin on finance, land reform, food supplies, transport.  And their influence shows up in what became derisively known as the "ministerial leapfrog" whereby between September 1915 and February 1971 Nicholas had five  Ministers of the Interior, four each  of Prime Ministers and Ministers of Agriculture, and three each  of Foreign Ministers, War Ministers, and Ministers of Transport.  It is hardly a wonder that the entire bureaucratic apparatus was overcome by confusion and finally paralysis as the revolution approached.  The longest-lasting of the ever-rotating Prime Ministers during this period was the obsequious Boris Stürmer, an almost laughably incompetent rube who turned to Alexandra and Rasputin so often for direction on what to do next that he was parodied even by the extreme right wing with comparisons to Chichikov in Gogol's Dead Souls.

Olga Alexandrovna reported that during the family's time at Ai Todor, to where the remaining imperial fled for safety after the abdication, her mother the Dowager Empress vehemently blamed Alexandra for the whole mess.  Certainly there was no love lost between those two, and Marie would have been inclined to grasp at any interpretation of events that moved blame from her son to Alexandra.  However, Marie was perhaps the most politically savvy of the senior Romanovs -- having been a firm supporter of Stolypin and others of Nicholas' best ministers -- and she was in a position to know much more about what passed between Nicholas and Alexandra than many other commentators over the years.  Personally, I think her assessment carries some weight, at least insofar as it indicates that Alexandra exercised heavy influence over her husband's political decisions.

I go on at length to make the case of Alexandra's influence over Nicholas, because I believe her views on constitutional monarchy as an answer for Russia would have been relevant -- perhaps even dispositive -- to Nicholas' decision whether to accept such a role had it been offered.  And I believe she would have remained implacably hostile to it.

One could argue that, given the alternative of complete abdication, Alexandra would have yielded to necessity.  But I do not believe Alexandra would have acknowledged that necessity, even in March 1917.  When the family was in captivity at Tobolsk, Alexandra attempted to block a meeting between Nicholas and a delegation from the Provisional Government without her being present, complaining that the last time she had let him meet alone with such representatives he had lost his throne.  It appears that, even sitting under house arrest after a full-blown revolution, Alexandra nursed some strange fantasy that Nicholas had control of events in March 1917 . . . had he only  decided to assert it.

(Sorry, Vanya.  I only saw your post after this one went up.  You raise some points to which I'd like to respond a bit later once I get a couple of chores behind me.)

[Alixz]

The similarity of the freeing of the serfs and the freeing of the American slaves without a program to induct them into a productive place in society is very interesting as it happened in two countries so far apart in both distance and ideology.

Of course, no one knows exactly what Alexander II had planned for the introduction of the freed serfs into Russian society (with a small s) and Russian commerce. However the strip farming and collectives that grew out his actions didn't help the serfs and only set the future rebellion into motion.

However, we do know that Lincoln had many reasons for freeing the salves when he did. He wanted to destroy the South's economy and prevent it from continuing to grow and prosper and so win battles. He freed only those slaves that were held in the States currently in rebellion and not in the country as a whole and this caused an economic collapse and created a group of untrained and uneducated people who could not take care of themselves and so destroyed the South's ability to fight (and also placed a greater burden on the food supplies and the supplies of other non- durable goods). This did not place a greater burden on the North as Lincoln was not freeing every slave, only those in the Confederacy (and it is doubtful that he had the authority to pass any law that applied to the states that were no longer part of the Union and so not exactly under his dominion.)

Both Nicholas II and Lincoln had one thought in mind and that was to preserve the status quo in their respective countries. Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union against all invasion or secession. Nicholas II wanted to preserve the autocracy as the only means of government. In both countries the slaves and serfs were incidental - almost collateral damage.

I agree with Tsarfan. Alexandra was a looming factor in the decisions that Nicholas II made.  Rasputin was a looming factor in the decisions that Alexandra made and then passed on to Nicholas. It has become popular to discount Alexandra's contributions and Rasputin's contributions to the overthrow of the monarchy. Nicholas should not have left his wife in charge and run off to Stavka to "play" with the army. He was no career soldier and had no proper training in running the army of a country as large as Russia.

I also agree that the turn over of prime ministers and other officials at such an alarming rate must have left the government without a firm basis from which to make a stand. Nicholas and by extension Alexandra and Rasputin were responsible for the high turnover and confusing styles of governing. It make sense that there was never a time when the representatives of that government offered Nicholas a place as a Constitutional Monarch or even a "figure head".

[Tsarfan]

did. He wanted to destroy the South's economy and prevent it from continuing to grow and prosper and so win battles. He freed only those slaves that were held in the States currently in rebellion and not in the country as a whole and this caused an economic collapse and created a group of untrained and uneducated people who could not take care of themselves and so destroyed the South's ability to fight (and also placed a greater burden on the food supplies and the supplies of other non- durable goods). This did not place a greater burden on the North as Lincoln was not freeing every slave, only those in the Confederacy (and it is doubtful that he had the authority to pass any law that applied to the states that were no longer part of the Union and so not exactly under his dominion.)

Agreed.  I would add only one point, and it is the one that I think was critical to the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Lincoln concluded that England was on the verge of granting recognition to the Confederacy as a sovereign nation in order to free England's hand in more openly supporting the South and thus the flow of raw cotton to English textile mills.  Lincoln knew that by declaring emancipation of the South's slaves, it would put England in the unpalatable position of defending a nation who was at war for at least one stated purpose, not only of preserving slavery, but of spreading it.  (It was this issue of propagating slavery in the new territories as the U.S. expanded westward that had scuttled the Missouri Compromise and that had drawn Lincoln back into national politics in the mid 1850's.)

[edubs31]

Wow, this discussion is moving along at breakneck speed and I can barely keep up. Fascinating though. Some more thoughts. I'll start by addressing the second to the last post from Alixz.

What Axelrod makes clear is that both Buchanan and Lincoln were more intent on saving the union and obeying the Constitution (which at that time allowed slavery) than eliminating the evil of a slave holding section of the country.

Certainly. Lincoln's famous quote about being willing to free all, some, or no slaves in order to preserve the union is testament to that.

Perhaps (without conscientiously doing so) Nicholas II - in order to preserve the autocracy he knew against the constitutional monarchy that he didn't know - simply made the same kind of decision Buchanan made (and Lincoln made in the first part of the war) to drift with the current and allow the laws that stood to be the arbiter of what kind of action could be taken.

The "drift" concept seems to make sense. But I think it's worth noting that, right or wrong, Nicholas's thoughts regarding the preservation of his autocracy differ a bit than the logic behind Buchanan's. Nicholas was trying to preserve all aspects of a system already in place (at least prior to the Manifesto) whereas Buchanan was attempting to compromise and thread the needle between two ideologically opposed view points. He was a "Dough Face" that lacked conviction which is why in my mind, and in the opinion of many, he ranks at or near the bottom in virtually all rankings of US Presidents. More on that in a moment...

You do point out some interesting similarities between the two men however that help reveal the complexities of their situation. Buchanan was viewed with contempt and his actions considered treasonous in the north. The south meanwhile looked upon him as an ally, someone who was loyal to the constitution and the will of the Founding Fathers by preserving a system already in place. We could argue the same situation applies to Nicholas II.

The problem, or perhaps the paradox, with Buchanan is that while he didn't support the south's right to secede he did very little to stop it from happening. What could he have done by 1860/61 some would ask. He had already destroyed his legitimacy with at least half of the country and was clearly a weak leader (not unlike someone else we know, perhaps?). Still I think it was a direct violation of his oath to protect, preserve and defend the union (and the rights of its citizens) to step aside and do nothing. He was an outgoing President who needed to worry little about losing political capital unlike a Tsar upholding a "semi-autocratic" system and eventually passing it along to his son/family member. Buchanan showed neither courage nor conviction.

I have read that even the decision to do nothing is still a decision. I think that Nicholas II believed that the autocracy he was used to and the country he believed to be actually around him would continue to hold its own if he just let the laws that stood take their course. I know that Buchanan felt that way about slavery. After the Dred Scott decision, Buchanan believed that the Supreme Court had put the problem to rest and that the Constitution would take care of the problem in the future as it was the ultimate law of the land and it allowed slavery.

Certainly both men can be criticized for their naivety. Buchanan at the very least saw the issue of slavery building up when he decided to run for President in 1856 and attempted to redeem his Democratic Party after the lost Presidency of Franklin Pierce. Nicholas didn't view the radical and revolutionary elements in his society the same way, nor were they as obvious as the slavery issue was to the United States in the first part of his reign. Willfully ignorant perhaps, but I don't see this as being as contemptible as Buchanan's blantant pro-southern sympathies (especially as a Northerner).

It's also worth noting that Nicholas, as the heir to throne in an autocracy, had his role of Tsar thrust upon him in an untimely manner and without proper experience. Buchanan on the other hand was a career politician who CHOSE to run for President in 1856 knowing full well what he was getting himself into.

Neither Buchanan nor Nicholas II understood that people in bondage - slaves or serfs - want nothing more than what everyone else has. Basic human rights.

I agree but the elements involved in their respective civil wars differ. The slaves themselves, by and large, were not taking up arms against Buchanan and the eventual Confederate States. The revolutionaries however were the one's who ultimately battled against their government in Russia. In America it was the sympathies of the abolitionists that sparked war against those looking to preserve their cultural and economic system. Furthermore had the South won the war they simply would have been granted the right to secede from the union. In Russia however the victory of Red Army was as a conquering force set on creating a new political system...not simply the right for Moscow and Siberia to break off into its own country. Yes? Bottom line is that I feel like Nicholas II had issues to deal with that a James Buchanan could scarcely imagine.

Unfortunately in both the US and in Russia the elimination of bondage was not accompanied by any kind of life training or education that would have helped those who had been freed to start a new and different kind of life.

We certainly both agree on that. Interesting how the virtual enslaving of American workers in the industrial system largely took place after the Civil War, whereas in Russia it ran concurrently with the revolution.

In Russia this meant that a few individuals with the power of persuasion and the charisma that made people want to follow them took over. Could Nicholas have changed any of this?  Perhaps, but he would have had to begin on day one of his reign and I don't believe that he understood that, even then, Russia was changing and he didn't know that he needed to change as well.

Surely. I'll bring this to a close by mentioning how I find it interesting that the northern viewpoint of the south and slavery in the 1850s was not unlike the American viewpoint of Communism and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They had no desire to start a war. Rather to contain and allow the systems of slavery/communism to smother itself from within. If the US Civil War had been avoided would the system of slavery have carried on for several more decades before eventually collapsing? Would a bloody war, most logically right after WW2, have destroyed communism and shattered Soviet domination of Eastern Europe? Fascinating questions indeed!

[Vanya Ivanova]

I'm sorry I just don't see how you can concentrate on the events of the last few years of Nicholas II's reign as being the deciding factor in why the Revolution of 1917 came about. The Empress and via her Rasputin undoubtedly had a very negative impact on events at this time. However my point is their 'medling' in these few years could not have caused a Revolution.

The causes of the 1917 Revolution in my opinion ran much deeper and had started much earlier. By stating that I'm not defending Nicholas and Alexandra, their regressive almost obsessive belief in the divinity of the autocracy meant that they were in complete opposition to what was happening in Russia, they wanted the country to progress economically but at the same time regress socially. Nicholas II was very active in trying to 'turn back the clock' or put 'the genie back in the bottle as it were', because he and his wife truly believed that was God's design.

However my point is that the speed of change unleashed by the emancipation of the serfs did not give Russia's social structures and institutions time to adjust, the autocratic monarchy most of all.

On a slightly different vein in response to a point made by Tsarfan, if Alexandra is culpable for the Revolution by her failure as an Empress then Maria Feodorovna is too as she played a large part in bringing that failure about. She did absolutely nothing to help her young inexperienced daughter-in-law in her role as Empress. In fact she became the centre of all antagonism and resentment towards Alexandra that culminated in Felix Yussopov murdering Rasputin.  

Alexandra was unpopular with the court and the wider Romanov family to a large extent because of Maria Feodorovna. Tsarfan you make the point that the Dowager Empress was the most savvy of the senior Romanovs but I would counter that by stating that her actions to undermine her daughter in law actually also fundamentally undermined her son and made him more isolated. I fail to see what is savvy about that. I can only assume that as she loved the attention and status of being 'The Empress' so much she resented having to step out of the limelight for her daughter in law.

I apologise for any offence this statement may cause, but in my opinion Maria Feodorovna, was a vain, selfish and unkind woman.

[edubs31]

I see this thread has roared back to life...

In many ways, the Russian Revolution still haunts the world.  It led to Lenin and Co., taking over, which led to Stalin, which led to Stalin spreading Communism to other parts of the world after World War II.  This led to the Korean War and later, the Vietnam War.  Finally, it led to the Soviets invading Afghanistan in 1979, which led the U.S. to back resistence fighters there.  From these resistence movements, Al Quaida and the Taliban arose (bet the U.S. never dreamed they would turn on them, like the Frankenstein monster turned on his creator).

If Nicholas II had kept his throne, perhaps the 20th Century would have been a lot less bloody.  Nearly a century later, as I have said, we're still reaping a bitter harvest from the events of 1917-18.

Well said Tim!

Figes makes a related point in A People's Tragedy in explaining Nicholas' abdication and the almost eerie calmness and sense of relief he demonstrated afterward.  Autocracy was something Nicholas knew and understood.  Constitutional monarchy was something in which he felt adrift, and Nicholas preferred to give up the fight to hang on to the monarchy altogether rather than to take on the burden of learning how to be a constitutional monarch.

Nicholas also regretted his decision to abdicate once he learned of the separate peace his new government made with the Germans. I'm not sure what level of confidence he had that Russia would continue to fight and eventually win the war...but is it reasonable to believe that Nicholas would have fought harder to keep his throne, even as reduced constitutional monarch, had he believed that his country would sign the Brest-Litovsk treaty?

However, I think that point applies applies more to Nicholas' state of mind after several exhausting years of declining war fortunes than to earlier in his reign.

I'm glad you mentioned you this. Sometimes people make mistakes and lose perspective simply because they're worn out! There isn't always a predictable confluence of events that explains everything.

But Nicholas, who confused staying busy at inconsequential paperwork with effective government

lol, busy work that his Grand Duke relatives and ministers rather intentionally burdened him with.

[Tsarfan]

Can one really effectively argue that had Alexander III lived and been on the throne in 1914 that there would still have been no revolution?

Maybe.

Alexander was certainly interested in bottling back up the alarming liberal tendencies of which he felt his father was too tolerant.  And it was Alexander III's view of autocracy which set the stage for his son's more open rejection of the Petrine concept of "autocracy by process" in favor of the Muscovite concept of arbitrary personal rule based on the tsar's personal fiefdom of the Russian soil.

But Alexander III had a common sense of which his son was devoid.  I have mentioned earlier that Alexander was astute enough to follow Bismarck's lead in instituting worker welfare laws in Russia so that the worst abuses of the factory owners were held in check.  His son, succumbing to pressure to attract foreign capital with cheap labor, relaxed these regulations, both by revoking some laws outright and by reducing the number of government inspectors in the factories.  The result was that factories became powder kegs they might not have become had Russian government policy continued to seek ways to absorb the shock of rapid industrialization along the lines with which Germany, England, and the U.S. were experimenting.

On the cultural front, liberals first thought that Alexander's Russification policies would speed the demise of autocracy across the multi-ethnic empire.  Somewhat unexpectedly, the opposite turned out to be the case, at least in the short term.  Some of the intelligentsia actually welcomed Russification and began to celebrate it in literature, music, fine art, and architecture.  And the rancor it stirred up among the nationalities actually nudged some liberals into the growing ranks of Russian nationalists.  If Alexander III had lived long enough for Russification to snap back on him, it would have been more likely to have been in nationalistic break-away movements on the periphery of the empire rather than an assault on the autocracy of core Russia.

Nor do I think that Alexander III would have been drawn into war with Austria and Germany so easily.  While Alexander was no fan of Bismarck's foreign policy, he was careful to avoid an open breach with his fellow monarchs and even went so far as to float the idea of renewing the Three Emperor's Alliance.  And while he maintained friendly relations with France, he would have been more circumspect than his son in getting drawn into a formal Russo-French alliance.  By the same token, although Alexander was an adherent of pan-slavism as a cultural and political force, he actually stopped short of military engagements in support of central-European Slavs even when the opportunities presented themselves.  In other words, Alexander -- or at least the ministers he chose -- had a finesse and an ability to thread the needle that was lost in his son's reign.

Alexander, for all his bulk and personal bumptiousness, actually had some subtlety to his make-up.  Nicholas, for all his personal elegance and demure politeness, was devoid of subtlety in anything that mattered.

(This is going to be a long post, so I'll continue in the next one.)

[TimM]

Just to clear things up, my little scenario above was a "What If?" question.  I've always wondered, had Nicholas been offered the choice of being a Constitutional Monarch, or none at all, which way he would go.  The Romanovs might still be on the throne of Russia today had they adopted a British-style Monarchy.

Alexandra should have looked to her grandmother (Queen Victoria) for guidence on how a succesful Monarchy works.

[Tsarfan]

If the serfs had been emancipated in the reigns of either Paul or Nicholas I then perhaps Nicholas II might have had a chance of preserving the throne. I agree that Nicholas II was not very good at the job of being Tsar but had he lived in earlier times these mistakes would not have resulted in the loss of the throne. Russia had remained a medieval, fuedal society far too long and change came too fast and too late and Nicholas II and his much maligned wife simply cannot in my opinion take all the blame for that.

I think you are perhaps discounting too much the tremendous entropy a governmental system as old and relatively stable as Russia's could still command.  Despite an almost full-blown revolution in 1905, Nicholas had succeeded in putting the genie back in the bottle and within a few years even of negating the Duma as a significant curb on his power.  All the main political parties in Russia were seeking to work inside the government, not to overthrow it.  By 1917 Lenin had given up on seeing revolution in his lifetime and, except for a few months in 1905-06, had spent the past 17 years in exile.  The Social Revolutionaries had moved toward the center.  The Kadets were in the ascendant.  Trotsky was biting his nails in frustration at the ebbing away of revolutionary energy among the urban populations.  The Mensheviks had given up on rousing the peasants and ended their summer romances with the grossly-misunderstood politics of the countryside.

In my view, and especially with the outpouring of pro-government sentiment at the outset of WWI, it took an extraordinary series of missteps to bring the whole system crashing down inside of 30 months.

Nicholas II was not the first tsar who could have lost his throne had he not acted adroitly in the crunch.

His idol, Tsar Alexis, almost allowed the Church to acquire political power equal to the monarchy, which Nikon might have succeeded in doing had Nikon's personality been less prickly and had Alexis not been fortunate in the choice of talented advisors who lured him back from the brink.

Alexis' son, Peter the Great, flush from his success in the Great Northern War, overextended himself too early afterward against the Ottoman empire and very nearly lost his empire and his personal freedom to military defeat.  It was only the quick thinking of his wife Catherine who, knowing of the seedy character of the Ottoman Bey, collected all the jewels on hand from among the traveling court to bribe the Bey (who was a somewhat indifferent ally of Charles of Sweden) to release the military grip he had on Peter.

(Speaking of Peter the Great, I would argue that Peter actually put Russia under more stress than industrialization did two centuries later.  Peter uprooted his nobility, both physically and culturally; he imposed with brutal force an unpopular westernization campaign; he taxed the peasantry to the breaking point and imposed state monopolies on almost all the stuff of their daily lives to the point that the Russian population basically had to shop at a vast state-run company store; he conscripted vast armies of men to staff his shipyards, to man his armies, and to build his new cities on the Sea of Azov, the Neva, and elsewhere.  The burdens Peter placed on his people reached wider and deeper than anything that happened in the last three reigns of the Romanovs.)

Catherine the Great's reign was beset by prolonged waves of peasant uprisings that have largely been forgotten by modern historians but were, in part, the blow back from the huge depredations Peter's policies had imposed on Russia two generations earlier.  In one of those uprisings, the Pugachev Rebellion, Catherine, distracted by military matters to the west, delayed too long in recognizing the threat.  By the time Catherine turned in a near-panic to confront Pugachev, he had actually been declared tsar in vast stretches of the Russian hinterland.  It was this experience, more than the French Revolution, that triggered her hard turn right from liberalism to reactionism in her later reign.

Nicholas I came perilously close to being unseated by a coup aiming to establish a constitutional monarchy in 1825.  Although the coup had only 3,000 armed participants (many from the nobility), they had the Winter Palace and the emperor and his family in their sights as well as enjoyed some apparent support in the population of St. Petersburg.  Had Nicholas I not shown resolute calm and known how to balance daring with circumspection, the scales could have easily tipped to his overthrow.

And Nicholas II himself had a very close scrape with being overthrown in 1905-06, when all the forces unleashed by industrialization were already in full train.

However, there was one critical factor in every one of these above salvaged situations:  there were at least some important constituencies who wanted that particular ruler to remain at the helm and to whom the ruler could appeal, either tacitly or openly, for support.

By March 1917, NO constituency wanted the government in the hands of Nicholas and Alexandra.

Not the imperial ministers.  Not the military commanders.  Not the centrist or rightist Duma parties.  Not the workers.  Not the peasants.  Not the Church hierarchy (which, though it is seldom mentioned, had quietly abandoned its loyalty to Nicholas over Rasputin).  Not even the Romanov family.

And this difference was not the result of emancipation, industrialization, or war.  It was the result of an incredible series of bone-headed moves beginning in 1915 and building to a crescendo of near delusional madness by February 1917.

(By the way, Vanya, don't worry about offending me.  I agree with the points you made about Marie Feodorovna.  And don't worry about offending me in any case.  If my posting continues, you'll soon find that I can get pretty energized around a point myself, and I have to be willing to get as good as I give.)

[Alixz]

And as for Alexandra looking to Queen Victoria for an example. QV was a very bad example for almost 20 years after the death of Albert and if Britain hadn't been a Constitutional Monarchy, she would have lost her throne.

She was losing support because of her apparent inability to get over Albert's death and her loss of the one person she had leaned on for so long.

There is a new view that Albert actually changed Victoria's view of herself from monarch to "little wife" and that her sex made her unable to handle the role she had been born into and that she had, until her marriage to Albert, handled very well.

Victoria began to lean on and depend on Albert for many things. Their relationship changed from his role of blotting her signature, to her role becoming subservient to his.  I am not sure that Alexandra saw her grandmother in the same light that we now understand her in. Albert was beginning to whittle away at Victoria's self image and Victoria had to relearn to be a monarch. It took her a long time.

By the time that Alix was old enough and aware enough to understand the British system, Victoria had rebounded but she was always scrapping with her Prime Ministers. Threatening not to receive them if she didn't like them or issuing ultimatums that somehow were always fulfilled. This is the Victoria that Alexandra grew up with.

I am not sure that Alexandra could have become the domineering consort she was if she truly understood her grandmother's role in a Constitutional Monarchy.