The problem with dynasties is their propensity to produce duds. For every Louis XIV, there is a Louis XVI. For every George H. W. Bush, a George W. Bush. And for every Peter the Great or Catherine the Great, a Peter III or Nicholas II.
To be sure, Nicholas’s inheritance was an unenviable one. Ascending to the imperial throne when he was 26, he became the undisputed ruler of 125 million people spread across a landmass that stretched from the frontiers of Germany and Sweden to the shores of the Black Sea and the Pacific.
By 1914, Russia was the fifth-largest industrial power in the world—behind the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France—but more than 80 percent of the population remained semi-literate peasants who worked on the land. Although czarist Russia was a police state, with draconian censorship and a dearth of civil rights, there were only 9,000 policemen in the provinces, responsible for law, order, and obedience to the state. The country was surrounded by potential enemies and yet the greatest threat to the regime came from within: from the Poles and Ukrainians whose distinctive sense of nationhood was strong and increasing, and from revolutionary Socialists who plotted political upheaval and the expropriation of private property.
No one other than an exceptionally capable administrator and ruthless political operator—in other words, Stalin—could have single-handedly maintained such a nation in the early 20th century, especially in wartime. And yet, as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows repeatedly in his book The Last Tsar, Nicholas II was particularly unsuited to the task. Although patriotic, paternalistic, and princely (at least in his appearance), Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov was stubborn, stupid, and superstitious. As the army chief of staff, General Mikhail Alekseyev, a man who would play a pivotal role in the abdication drama, noted:
“Nicholas is passive and has no energy. He lacks the courage and confidence to seek out honourable people and constantly fears people who are forceful…. He lacks the power of intellect in order to seek truth tenaciously and he lacks conviction in order to accomplish his decisions…. He does not possess an iota of creativity…. His mental forces are readily channelled into triviality…. He loves flattery…. He has a special kind of arrogance, somewhat mixed with awkwardness and suspicions…. His egoism turns into distrust, contempt and hatred of people. He is scornful and envious.”
Hasegawa, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, does not focus on the long-term causes of the Russian Revolution. Rather, he provides a minute-by-minute narrative of the events leading up to the abdication of the czar and the end of Romanov rule. In it, he demonstrates the importance of personality, circumstance, and contingency. As he writes: “Nicholas II faced repeated opportunities to pursue and encourage paths that would have diminished but preserved the Romanov dynasty.”
“He does not possess an iota of creativity…. He has a special kind of arrogance, somewhat mixed with awkwardness and suspicions.”
An obvious opportunity came in the months following the 1905 revolution, when the regime, having teetered on the brink, made concessions, including the creation of a bicameral parliament, the State Duma. This was the moment when Russia should have evolved, belatedly, from an 18th-century despotism into a constitutional monarchy, but the czar reversed his position, in April 1906, and re-imposed autocracy.
Another came with the outbreak of the First World War—a conflict that both the arch-conservative former minister of the interior, P. N. Durnovo, and the charlatan mystic Grigory Rasputin predicted would end in disaster for the regime. Nicholas II could have used the wave of patriotic sentiment to bolster the monarchy by forming a national government, including the liberal opposition responsible for the war. Not only did he decline, he made the catastrophic decision, in September 1915, to assume supreme command of the armed forces and prorogue the Duma. Henceforth the failures at the front, as well as deprivations at the rear, would be his personal responsibility.
“We venture once more to tell you that … your decision threatens with serious consequences Russia, your dynasty and your person,” wrote all but two of Nicholas’s senior ministers in a collective protest.
Two-thirds of Hasegawa’s text is dedicated to the eight days of political machinations following the outbreak of the February Revolution, in St. Petersburg, concluding with the abdication of the czar. His achievement is to remind us of the importance of contingency. If the high command had acted speedily and decisively, it might have been able to suppress the revolution with loyal troops. If Nicholas II had accepted the recommendation of the chairman of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, and formed a government that could command the support of the parliamentary opposition, he might have kept his throne. And had the czar abdicated in favor of his son the 13-year-old Tsarevitch rather than attempting to pass the throne to his brother Grand Duke Mikhail, in contravention of the succession laws, the monarchy might, just might, have survived.
Hasegawa’s tale is one of suicidal intransigence and catastrophic myopia. And yet without the wider context—without the strains placed on the state by industrial war, without the decade-long alienation of the educated classes from the regime, without a thorough examination of conditions in St. Petersburg and other Russian cities, and without international comparisons—it is only part of a much larger picture. Kings may not be “slaves of history,” as Tolstoy claimed, but nor can they be abstracted from it.
Tim Bouverie is the author of Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War
