Re: Reflections on Nicholas II - His Character Traits Good and Bad #2

[Vera_Figner]

And, how many of you knew that on the 19th Jan during the ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters that someone had loaded a cannon with real shot and had aimed it at the Neva where Nicholas II would be standing and when the cannons were fired as part of the ceremony the shot just missed Nicholas II?

AGRBear

Damn! Too bad he missed! Would have saved the wife and kids at least!

[Tsarfan]

Well, I still think that what the Tsarist Government did on Bloody Sunday (gunning down recalcitrant workers, students, etc.) was nothing new, either then or today, western nation or non-western nation. Look at the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1914 -- National Guardsman gunned down 66 striking coal miners and their families.

Look at the Paris Commune.  The French Army slaughtered between 17,000 and 30,000 people in one week.  

Here's another example; On October 2, 1968 Mexican troops mowed down 300 to 500 unarmed students in Mexico City's Plaza de las Tres Culturas.

And, of course there's Tiananmen Square which isn't in a western country, however.

All these things occurred and certainly will occur again.  However, that was not my original point.  I was not talking about governments suppressing open insurrection (the Paris Commune), or second-world dictatorships (China), or unstable Latin American governments (Mexico City), or reactionary local U.S. authorities (Colorado . . . or pretty much anyplace in the deep south and parts of the midwest).  I said I did not think it would have happened in London, Berlin, or Vienna.

My point was that Russia pretended to great power status on the modern European stage yet operated outside the pale of political responses acceptable to that community.  Look at the horror that Bloody Sunday engendered across Europe and the U.S.  I've sat at microfiche machines and read the actual press coverage in New York, Washington, Berlin, and London in the week following the massacre.  The revulsion was universal and sincere.  The West broke faith with Nicholas that day, and the consequences extended all the way to England's refusal twelve years later to grant Nicholas and his family asylum.

The very fact that Russia's reaction to protests bears comparison to communist China, Mexico, and one of the U.S.' most reactionary states says it all.

[RichC]

If you are saying that Russia's government under Nicholas II was less sophisticated in how it controlled it's population than the governments in London, Berlin or Vienna, I would agree wholeheartedly with that.  But I don't really see any moral difference (perhaps I'm just being dense here) between killing unarmed civilians in St. Petersburg, Amritsar, Paris, Beijing, Colorado, or anywhere else.  You mentioned earlier that the troops know what their bosses want; well, the bosses in the Colorado killings were the Rockefeller family -- you can't get more establishment than that.  

I realize you didn't intend this, Tsarfan, but the things you said about Bloody Sunday got me thinking and reminded me of more contemporary news reports regarding how the current Russian government handled the hostage crises in the Caucasus (the school where all the children died) and in Moscow (the theatre).  There were a lot of news reports about how they bungled the rescue efforts, how western teams would have been more successful, and how there was perhaps more emphasis on catching the terrorists rather than saving innocent hostages.  But then one thinks of Waco where 77 died.

[pinklady]

Donielle and Bluetoria,
Of course I agree with both of you that Nicholas 11 was not entirely to blame himself for the state of Russia and the Revolution, one person could never be solely responsible for such a mess.
On another note, as incompetant as he was as an Autocrat, it was simply disgusting and appalling what happened to him and all those he loved in that basement, without a trial, and even with a trial, the children were innocent, and should never have been comdemned to  death.
Nicholas 11 and his family were just one of many appalling cases of  murder in the 20th century, a century disgusting when we think we are so "modern".

[Tsarfan]

But I don't really see any moral difference (perhaps I'm just being dense here) between killing unarmed civilians in St. Petersburg, Amritsar, Paris, Beijing, Colorado, or anywhere else.  You mentioned earlier that the troops know what their bosses want; well, the bosses in the Colorado killings were the Rockefeller family -- you can't get more establishment than that.  

I realize you didn't intend this, Tsarfan, but the things you said about Bloody Sunday got me thinking and reminded me of more contemporary news reports regarding how the current Russian government handled the hostage crises in the Caucasus (the school where all the children died) and in Moscow (the theatre).

You're anything but dense, RichC.  In respect to who kills unarmed innocents, I agree there is no moral difference.  It's no better or worse for Beijing to do it than St. Petersburg.  But in respect to why they are killed, I think the question gets grayer.  For instance, in the Caucasus crisis, the hostage-takers were threatening to kill all the hostages, and there had been some prior incidents to indicate the threat was serious.  I think the government, though perhaps ineptly, was attempting to head off what they reasonably feared could turn into total carnage.  Whether it's immoral to sacrifice some innocent lives in such an attempt is a question I've never been able to decide for myself.  

I'll certainly make no excuses for the Rockefellers, or for Pullman, or for their ilk.  But, while they may represent the evil side of capitalism, they still are not executing central government policy.

I promise to drop this thread of discussion after I try to clarify my line of reasoning one last time:  Nicholas sent the signals of what he expected of his military and police forces.  He had consistently sent signals in the past that he wanted a violent response to signs of civil unrest and that he felt a peaceful defusing of a situation was an opportunity missed for showing the government's resolve in the face of protest of any form.  His commanders acted on those signals.  It was government policy.

[pinklady]

I promise to drop this thread of discussion after I try to clarify my line of reasoning one last time:  Nicholas sent the signals of what he expected of his military and police forces.  He had consistently sent signals in the past that he wanted a violent response to signs of civil unrest and that he felt a peaceful defusing of a situation was an opportunity missed for showing the government's resolve in the face of protest of any form.  His commanders acted on those signals.  It was government policy.

Yes, I do agree with you Tsarfan. And I think I said why I thought that before, the main reason being he wanted to hand what his father had handed him, he wanted to leave to his son, the "empire intact". And in this he had the support of the Empress, who kept urging him to be strong on many issues, but also one of her reasons was "Baby's" inheritance. I think that is it in a nutshell, they didnt want reform, they wanted Alexei to inherit what Nicholas had inherited in 1894, but they didnt want to adapt and change to the times and it cost them and Russia dearly.

[Tsarfan]

they wanted Alexei to inherit what Nicholas had inherited in 1894

I think this was true . . . and very convenient for them.  They got to hold onto all their prerogatives, and do it in the name of a child's rights.

In an earlier post, RichC pointed out that Nicholas and Alexandra -- for all their touted devotion to tradition and heritage -- floated an idea before Alexei's birth to change the Fundamental Law in order for Olga to inherit.  I wonder what they would have attempted had they had no children?  Might Nicholas have looked back to Peter the Great and tried to ordain that his wife could succeed him?

[Elisabeth]

Well, I still think that what the Tsarist Government did on Bloody Sunday (gunning down recalcitrant workers, students, etc.) was nothing new, either then or today, western nation or non-western nation. Look at the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1914 -- National Guardsman gunned down 66 striking coal miners and their families.  Nobody was ever prosecuted.  True, the killings didn't take place on the steps of the US Capitol, but nevertheless, the government was treating these workers as enemies, right?   They weren't foreigners or colonial subjects.


Look at the Paris Commune.  The French Army slaughtered between 17,000 and 30,000 people in one week.  They weren't foreigners or colonial subjects; they were fellow Frenchmen and women and children -- they were the citizens of Paris who had had it with a bad government that foolishly got them mixed up in a war with Germany.  And this happened a mere 34 years before Bloody Sunday.

Here's another example; On October 2, 1968 Mexican troops mowed down 300 to 500 unarmed students in Mexico City's Plaza de las Tres Culturas.

And, of course there's Tiananmen Square which isn't in a western country, however.    

What happened on Bloody Sunday was a sick, vile act against innocent people.  But I think Bloody Sunday could happen in any country.  

I do agree with you completely, Tsarfan, that it was massacres like Bloody Sunday which led to the massacre in the Ipatiev House.

I think cold-blooded ideological fanaticism, as personified by types like Lenin and Yurovsky, led to the murders in the Ipatiev House, not massacres like Bloody Sunday - which, BTW, was caused by the usual Russian governmental incompetence (as was Beslan, where the police didn't even succeed in securing the perimeter, but let in a lot of locals with their own guns!), not actual governmental policy, and proved to be a godsend to Western reporters and Russian radicals everywhere: very good propaganda value, heavy on the symbolism, designed to endure.

Please, I am not diminishing the tragedy of individual loss of life; indeed, I would be the first to say that Bloody Sunday was a horrific event -  but RichC is absolutely right to point out that it was hardly unique and that in this historical period the Western world indulged in equally egregious and flagrantly illegal, violent excesses in their own countries, against their own people, time and time again. Nor was Russia the only place where ordinary workers lived in abysmal conditions at the turn of the twentieth century - or am I the only American here who was forced to read The Octopus, How the Other Half Lives, and The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible in high school?

Tsarfan, I think you're being a little naive to assert that the American government was not violently anti-labor at the turn of the century and even beyond - unions and workers' rights in this country were won at a hard cost in blood, sweat, and tears. Remember Joe Hill? Hanged for all his toil and trouble? There's even a ballad about him!

Also, in response to an earlier comment of yours - historically peasant rebellions have been very successful in one place at least - China, where over the course of centuries they were responsible for the establishment of several new dynasties. Imperial Russia certainly rivalled China in the frequency and violence of its peasant rebellions, if not in their overall success rate. The tsarist government and the upperclasses were rightly terrified of a recurrence, which they got in 1905 and 1917.

[Tsarfan]

I think cold-blooded ideological fanaticism, as personified by types like Lenin and Yurovsky, led to the murders in the Ipatiev House, not massacres like Bloody Sunday.

Tsarfan, I think you're being a little naive to assert that the American government was not violently anti-labor at the turn of the century and even beyond.

Also, in response to an earlier comment of yours - historically peasant rebellions have been very successful in one place at least - China.

The immediate cause of the Ipatiev house murders was certainly a decision of the Ural Soviet carried out by Yurovsky.  Lenin's direct complicity is less certain.  (See The Fate of the Romanovs by King and Wilson.)  However, causality has many tentacles, and there is a legitimate question whether Lenin (and the Ural Soviet) could have arisen without a chain of events that included Bloody Sunday.  I'm still not willing to absolve Nicholas of responsibility for that chain of events.

(Yurovsky was a more complex character than the label of "cold-blooded fanatic" conveys.  He was a bright man born into impoverished circumstances in a Siberian backwater.  His conversion to "fanaticism" was a slow process that arose from the unrelenting difficulties of finding a path to prosperity for himself and his family in a society that did not appreciate such ambition in the low-born.  In his later writings, he commented that he carried out Nicholas' execution as a duty to a revolution that he felt could not be stabilized with the threat of a restoration hanging over it.  He also commented that, as he got to know the imperial family in captivity, he came to regret what he felt to be the necessity of killing them.  I admit this is a pretty good definition of cold-blooded pragmatism.  I'm not so sure it qualifies as fanaticism.)

At the turn of the 20th century the American government had already begun a realignment of its sympathies away from big industry and toward labor unionism.  The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890 to break up the monopolies.  The federal courts were beginning to carve out exceptions to the long-standing Philadelphia Cordwainer's case that embedded the common law hostility to trade unions.  This all culminated with the Wagner Act (aka The National Labor Relations Act) in 1935 that so thoroughly swung the pendulum in favor of labor that the Taft-Hartley Act was needed in 1947 to return to center.  (I have a J.D. with a specialization in labor law and spent the first seven years of my career in labor relations.)  Granted the process took decades, as is typical in a pluralistic society.  But America was moving down that road at a time when Witte was having the rug pulled out from under him on industrial reforms in Russia.

I appreciate your pointing out China's peasant rebellions.  I know embarrassingly little about that country.  However, I still feel that urban revolutions have generally posed more risk to central governments than rural ones, at least in the West.  

[Elisabeth]

The immediate cause of the Ipatiev house murders was certainly a decision of the Ural Soviet carried out by Yurovsky.  Lenin's direct complicity is less certain.  (See The Fate of the Romanovs by King and Wilson.)  However, causality has many tentacles, and there is a legitimate question whether Lenin (and the Ural Soviet) could have arisen without a chain of events that included Bloody Sunday.  I'm still not willing to absolve Nicholas of responsibility for that chain of events.

In their interpretation of the events leading to the murder of the imperial family, King and Wilson closely follow Mark Steinberg, an American professor of Russian history whose methodology is Marxist and whose specialty is the Russian working class. (I think they even thank him in their acknowledgements for his input.) In his book, The Fall of the Romanovs, Steinberg goes out of his way to excuse Lenin and company for any role in the murder of the imperial family. This is not an opinion widely shared by Russian historians. It is still a matter of intense debate, as well it should be.

For any careful scrutiny of the timeline of events from the Grand Duke Michael's murder in June 1918 to the murders in Ekaterinburg and Alapaievsk in July demonstrates that the Kremlin had every inkling of what was coming (if they didn't, simply put, they were fools) and every opportunity to give its (undoubtedly tacit) approval to the Ural Soviet for the IF's murder well in advance of July 16-17, 1918.

(Yurovsky was a more complex character than the label of "cold-blooded fanatic" conveys.  He was a bright man born into impoverished circumstances in a Siberian backwater.  His conversion to "fanaticism" was a slow process that arose from the unrelenting difficulties of finding a path to prosperity for himself and his family in a society that did not appreciate such ambition in the low-born.  In his later writings, he commented that he carried out Nicholas' execution as a duty to a revolution that he felt could not be stabilized with the threat of a restoration hanging over it.  He also commented that, as he got to know the imperial family in captivity, he came to regret what he felt to be the necessity of killing them.  I admit this is a pretty good definition of cold-blooded pragmatism.  I'm not so sure it qualifies as fanaticism.)

The "necessity" of killing women and children? However much he personally regretted it? That's precisely the mindset that defines an ideological fanatic. (Think Eichmann or any other number of 20th-century scumbags.) Normally, this good, hard-working everyman would be incapable of committing such a horrific crime, but given the right political circumstances, the  historical necessity, the Marxist dialectic, the whatever.... Of course Yurovsky was an ideologue of the Bolshevik type! He was utterly, even disgustingly typical: his asceticism, his cold and calculating (impersonal, professional, Chekist) approach to the murder of women and children, his excuses for their suffering (their "greed" prolonged their "agony," and so on), his self-pity (for indeed, what trials and tribulations a man has to go through to fulfill his professional duty!), his pride in his historical accomplishment (killing unarmed civilians with all the cruel ineptitude of the typical Russian tyrant). I'm sorry, but to feel sympathy for a character like Yurovsky engenders nothing but moral nausea... or should engender nothing but moral nausea.

It's the usual equivocation with crimes against humanity committed by Communists - somehow they're not as bad as other crimes, because they were committed for the sake of an ideal, and after all the guy had a bad childhood, and he was poor, and it was all so unfair.

Rot.

(If only we were so lenient with Nicholas, who killed how many thousands to the Bolsheviks' millions?)

At the turn of the 20th century the American government had already begun a realignment of its sympathies away from big industry and toward labor unionism.  The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890 to break up the monopolies.  The federal courts were beginning to carve out exceptions to the long-standing Philadelphia Cordwainer's case that embedded the common law hostility to trade unions.  This all culminated with the Wagner Act (aka The National Labor Relations Act) in 1935 that so thoroughly swung the pendulum in favor of labor that the Taft-Hartley Act was needed in 1947 to return to center.  (I have a J.D. with a specialization in labor law and spent the first seven years of my career in labor relations.)  Granted the process took decades, as is typical in a pluralistic society.  But America was moving down that road at a time when Witte was having the rug pulled out from under him on industrial reforms in Russia.

Here I defer to your greater knowledge and expertise. With only one proviso: you must admit that proletarian life was no picnic in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America (seriously, am I the only one here who had to read How the Other Half Lives in high school??).

I appreciate your pointing out China's peasant rebellions.  I know embarrassingly little about that country.  However, I still feel that urban revolutions have generally posed more risk to central governments than rural ones, at least in the West.  

But the Russia of which we speak was never quite of the West, except in the wishful thoughts of its "Westernizers." And this was due in no small part not only to Russia's geographical distance from Europe and its lack of strong institutional checks to autocratic power, but also and perhaps just as importantly to its outrageously enormous peasant population and its eensy-weensy weak and humble middle class (indeed, all these issues were not unrelated). With Russia you always come down to the lack of a middle class and the fact that the country was (and is) too vast and under-governed. The governmental infrastructure at the local level has always been (and is to this day) inadequate. Thus the foundering of Stolypin's reforms and other tsarist attempts to modernize the country. Of course Nicholas could have encouraged the zemstvos (and their "senseless dreams") but other, stronger leaders have had to resort to terror to impose their will.

N.B. It seems we condemn Nicholas whenever he or his government resorted to violence, as Peter and Stalin certainly did, and condemn him when he did not. Kind of a no win situation for the last tsar, no?    

[AGRBear]

Here are two different looks of life in Imperial Russia.

Serge Schmemann was viewing the Slavic peasant who were still struggling under the yoke of their inheritance, the lack of knowledge on how to pull themselves out of proverty:

I found an interesting passage on this topic, in the book "Echoes of a Native Land" by Serge Schmemann. The author, an american, went back to Russia to the village his ancestors used to own (they were the Osorgins) and did extensive first hand research there. He writes:
"On the eve of the revolution, despite whatever changes were underway in the countryside, the village was a dark and backward place.  Most peasants were illiterate, only half had iron plows, reaping was still done with sickles, threshing with flails.  The "three field" cycle of cultivation, which Europe had abandonded after the Middle Ages and General Kar tried to eradicate on his estate was still the norm.  The average yield of grain from peasant lands was only slightly higher than that of a fourteenth century English estate.
. . .
Yet I wonder if (the Osorgins) really knew the squalor and poverty in which their people lived.  Irina Yakovlevna Denisova described to me how she and the other village girls marvelled at the lovely smocks of the (Osorgin) "young ladies" as they rode past to go to church and her awe at the toys she found inside the Osorgin house after they were evicted.  She also remembered life as the youngest of ten children in a fetid log house with an earthen floor, filled with black smoke because her father could not afford to fix the chimney or to burn fuel other than straw.  In winter, calves and goats moved in and shared the stale air.  Many of the children died young."
pp. 209.

Here is a slice of German-Russian life which gives a  different  view of life in Russia about this same time:

Black Sea area of Russia:  1841 the State Councilor von Hahn set up the  regulations which stated that every head of the household was required to send his children, apprentices and servants from age 7  to school everyday from Oct 1 to the end of March, plus catechism class every Sunday.  If the child was absent there had to be a good reason, if not, fines were set.  If the head of the household couldn't pay the fine, he was subjected to half a day of communal labor for each day the child missed school.  A child could quit school at the age of 13.

School was six hours a day. Reading, writing and arithmatic plus language, German, Russian and Latin

Teachers were supose to graduate from the Central School and wages were between 450 to 600 rubles.  In some villages a teacher was given money for each student, hay from the communal alotment and 160 acres of "crown land" to use....  

When looking at photographs of schools just before 1917 there are on the walls various study posters of  maps, animals of far away places, etc...

These kind of school scenes could be found in the middle states of the  USA from the late 1800s  into the 1920, only the language was English.

AGRBear

The production of grains in the Black Sea area was booming.  They were shipping out tons of grain just out of Odessa every day during harvest.  There had been 9 million sheep in 1916 by 1921 there were less than 90,000 and only 30% of the land was being tilled as there was ....


AGRBear

[AGRBear]

I can't find the article on production of farm land in South Russia from about the 1890s to 1916/17.

Here are a couple of numbers.

GR farmers in the govt. of Cherson sowed over 800,000 dessiatins [=2,160,000 acres) in rye and winter "red" wheat per annumn and harvested on average about 13 million bushes of rye and 6,850,000 bushes of winter "red" what.  Although the yield wasn't the same in the rest of Europe, this was a huge increase in productivity in South Russia.

To pull a plow horses were needed.  One plow needed four to six horses for the black earth steppes.  Only half of the 5 million peasants in the southern part of Russia by the Black Sea owned one horse or one ox wheras the rising middle class in the GR community, which number about 1,700,000, owned at least one horse or ox and the rising  middle class  owned 12 to 20 or more horses....

Just a few figures, I  found.  Will keep looking for that article which I put in a really safe place.

I am sure that other communities were starting to gain their own kind of prosperity.  See Figes A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY.

The cottage industry was more prosperous than the factories.....

I'm not saying Russia was in great shape, it was some 100 years behind the times and just entering the industrial age when compared to Europe.  What I am saying, there was progress occuring.  True, perhaps too slowly but it was happening under Nicholas II.

By 1917 Nicholas II didn't have a large enough middle class base but it was getting larger by the hour and the day.

It was WW I which halted everything from moving forward.  And, it was the mismanagment of the men in service under the old generals who were sending calvary toward Krupp cannons....

Poor, middle class and officers, who were usually from upper middle class to aristocracts,  became cannon fodder.

All Russians became victims, even Nicholas II.


AGRBear

[etonexile]

Russia had the 5th fastest growing economy in Europe in 1914...If only the AD Franz-Ferdinand's car hadn't reversed into the wrong road in Sarajevo....if...if.... :-/

[Tsarfan]

 The "necessity" of killing women and children? However much he personally regretted it? That's precisely the mindset that defines an ideological fanatic.
 

I know I'm on thin ice here, because killing Nicholas' family is hard to justify by even the greatest stretch of Realpolitik.  But I'm going out on that ice . . . .

First, I've never understood why killing defenseless women and children is viewed as more horrific than killing equally defenseless adult males.

Second, as I've said in several earlier posts, I feel context matters in assessing historical events.  Lenin's hold on power was incredibly tenuous in the summer of 1918.  There was a large range of opposing forces -- from leftist Social Revolutionaries to right-wing monarchists -- who were spottily edging into uneasy relationships focused on ousting the Bolsheviks.  In those circumstances, which would induce paranoia in most reasonable people, it was not hard to imagine that a freed Romanov could become a catalyst around which the opposition, even momentarily, coalesced.  Women and children had sat on the Romanov throne before.  In extreme circumstances it was possible to imagine the counter-revolutionary forces turning to whatever Romanov they could get their hands on.  (I know there were Romanovs out of reach of the Bolsheviks, but there was heightened risk with the family members most directly connected to Nicholas.)

Was it fanaticism to view them all as a threat?  We will probably never agree.  I happen to view fanaticism as an irrational set of views that has no anchor in logic.  As despicable and cold-blooded and chilling as Yurovsky's logic might have been, it was logic nonetheless.  In 1918 Bolshevism still held out hope for many Russians of a better life.  The desire to protect it, even at horrible moral costs, was not quite the dastardly desire it was to become under Stalin.

Uh, oh . . . is that ice I hear cracking?

[AGRBear]

If the Bolsheviks had not killed Nicholas II and his family, one [male or female] of them would have been used by the opposition against the Bolshviks.  It's always good to have someone to rally around.  And, since many wanted to make a govt. similar to that of England,  one of the Romanovs would have been used.  So, the Bolshviks went after as many Romanovs as the could and killed those they could.  The only reason the Romanovs in the Crimea, where many had collected, were not killed was because they were saved by the Germans and then taken on board the British boats and they sailed off  to live another day.

But, it appears there wasn't a strong enough Romanov to rally around  after 1918, accept maybe one but he wasn't in line, and, then there was the war weary world.....

So, whomever it was who gave the order to execute Nicholas II and the others,  the person was right in regards to keeping the Romanovs from ruling, again, because the Romanovs never regained the throne.

Sad fate for the Romanovs but true.

AGRBear