(Continued from above.)
The second critical factor Figes tags as a cause of revolution was personal to Nicholas II himself. Figes speaks of two different concepts of autocracy. The first was the Petrine concept, which relied on the tools of bureaucracy to govern. By this model, the tsar was sort of "Bureaucrat-in-Chief". And, indeed, that is the form of government that Peter the Great sought to institutionalize in Russia. His regulations requiring the education of the nobility, his instituting promotion by merit in the military and civilian services, and his (largely failed) attempts to root out corruption were all directed at giving Russia the kind of fair, regularized government according to principles of law, equity, and predictability that he so admired in western Europe.
The countervailing concept of autocracy was the Muscovite concept of personal rule of the tsar as fief holder of the Russian soil. Nicholas II consciously sought to look back beyond Peter the Great and to restore the concept of a personal connection between the ruler and the peasantry (a concept he highly romanticized and grossly misunderstood). This desire was manifested by Nicholas' naming of Tsar Alexis as his most admired predecessor and by both Nicholas' and Alexandra's constant harping to all and sundry about how the peasants loved them and were loyal to them in ways a cynical and too-sophisticated nobility never could be.
The implication of this view was that Nicholas regarded his own bureaucracy as an unnatural impediment to the true lines of autocratic authority between the ruler and the land. And this showed up most disastrously in two ways: in Nicholas' preference for "yes men" in his ministerial appointments (a preference which became completely unshackled by Stolypin's death and in the almost insane turnover of personnel after Alexandra and Rasputin asserted themselves into the void Nicholas left by removing himself to Stavka in 1915); and in Nicholas' preference for asserting his authority in the countryside through the notoriously brutish and corrupt Land Captains rather than through the bureaucratic apparatus. In fact, much of the final stages of paralysis that overwhelmed the government during the war years was brought on by Nicholas' setting loose his dogs on his own bureaucracy.
But why was Nicholas so hostile to his own bureaucracy? The real reason lay in the nature of bureaucracy itself. Bureaucrats like rules. They like certainty about what they are supposed to be doing. They like precedent to which they can turn to broker conflicting demands. And they like some way to detect and measure success. As the people employed by the central government who were on the front lines to get the results the government wanted in industrial production, economic development, land management, military reform they found themselves cheek to jowl with the conflicts between competing interests of employer and worker, landlord and peasant, soldier and commander, student and professor.
As a result, it was the bureaucrats of late imperial Russia who -- far more than the tsars and their land captains -- came to understand the real needs and capacities of the Russian people at all levels of society. Consequently, the bureaucracy found itself inexorably evolving to favor compromises between competing interests and as a result to harken to many of the demands of the populace to which the court circles around the tsars were implacably hostile.
Peter the Great and Catherine the Great were able to leverage the nature of bureaucracy to strengthen their grips on power at all levels of society. Alexander III and Nicholas II did not have that ability. Consequently both -- and especially Nicholas -- relied on posturing, assertions of personal rights and authority without the ability to deliver good government, and a brittleness of attitude that when confronted with crisis would either hold or snap . . . but never bend. It held under Alexander III. It snapped under Nicholas II.
The anti-tsarist parties of Russia did not bring on a revolution. They had one dumped in their laps. In fact, most of 1917 was spent with all the political parties (including the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks) congregated in the Tauride Palace trying to pass off power and responsibility like a hot potato. Not until Lenin got his wind later that summer did any prospect for actually governing Russia emerge.
And that, in part, is why Figes speaks of "a people's tragedy".
