Nicholas II

4 Key excerpts on "Nicholas II"

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  Russia in the Nineteenth Century

  Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change, 1814-1914

  • A. I. U. Polunov, Thomas C. Owen, L. G Zakharova(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 10

  Nicholas II: A Policy of Contradictions

     

  On January 17, 1895, Nicholas II, fated to be the last emperor in Russian history, began his reign with an address to delegations from the zemstvos, towns, nobility, and Cossacks: “I know that of late, in some zemstvo assemblies, voices have been heard of people carried away by senseless dreams of the participation of representatives of the zemstvos in matters of internal administration. Let it be known to all that I, while devoting all my strength to the good of the nation, will safeguard the principle of autocracy just as firmly and steadfastly as did my late unforgettable father.”1

  Russia faced a historic choice in the reign of Nicholas II. Would the country follow the path of reform or revolution? Would the old order remain standing or collapse? By the turn of the twentieth century, the many contradictions that were slowly gathering in Russian life had tied themselves into a single knot, making a peaceful outcome of the crisis extremely difficult. The personal characteristics and political outlook of Nicholas II, especially his uncompromising adherence to the principle of unlimited autocracy, played a major role in causing about the eventual revolution.2

  As the eldest son of Alexander III, Nicholas had been destined for the throne since childhood. He received a thorough education in, among other things, foreign languages, law, economics, and military science. His teachers included the best educators of the day. However, Nicholas lacked any practical experience in government. Alexander III had counted on gradually preparing his son for the throne and for a long time gave him no governmental responsibilities. The untimely death of the Tsar-Peacemaker thrust his son to the pinnacle of power without the preparation that he needed, and from the beginning Nicholas’s inexperience had an adverse effect on the functioning of the bureaucratic apparatus. In addition to his lack of familiarity with governmental affairs, the tsar was physically unimposing—he was short and suffered from shyness. To contemporaries, Nicholas II looked like “a pathetic provincial actor playing an emperor, a role for which he was unsuited.”3

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  The Emperors and Empresses of Russia

  Reconsidering the Romanovs

  • Donald J. Raleigh, A.A. Iskenderov(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The authors seem to suggest that no matter how sympathetic one might be to Nicholas and his plight (they are not), it is difficult to present him in anything other than a negative light. Ananich and Ganelin back the long-held view that Nicholas granted concessions only when confronted with revolution but later renounced them when the revolutionary wave had subsided and he once again had gained the upper hand. Ascending the throne without a program or policy other than the firm conviction that he must defend the autocratic order, Nicholas

  and his empress shared a “psychological reliance on Divine Providence.” Convinced of their divine right to rule, Nicholas and Alexandra are depicted not as tragic figures or as pawns in the historical drama, but as victims of circumstance. But to a large extent, the circumstances were of their own making

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  D.J.R.

  Note

  1 Marc Ferro, Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars (New York, 1993).

  Nicholas II

  Boris Vasilievich Ananich

  Rafail Sholomovich Ganelin

   

  Works on Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century present Nicholas II not as a politician and thinker but rather as the last representative of a dynasty that has since left the stage of history, a man with a tragic fate, imbued with a mystic sense of doom.1

  The eldest son of Crown Prince Alexander Alexandrovich, who became Emperor Alexander III in 1881, and his wife Maria Fedorovna, the daughter of Danish King Christian IX (Princess Maria Sophia Frederika Dagmar prior to her marriage), Nicholas was born on 6 May 1868 at Tsarskoe Selo. On that day, a ceremonial salute was arranged in St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo. By established tradition, the birth of a grand duke was celebrated by 301 shots (201 for a grand duchess). On this occasion, forty guns were fired in salute from the fortress at St. Petersburg. The grand duke was baptized on 30 May in the court chapel of the Grand Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. On that day he was awarded the Order of Andrew the First-Called (with chain), the Order of Alexander Nevsky, the Order of the White Eagle, the Order of Anna, first degree, and the Order of Stanislav, first degree. Thus, the future emperor’s military service began from the day of his birth. By Alexander II’s order he was registered in all regiments and units of the Life Guards in which his father was registered, and he was also appointed chief of the Sixty-fifth Moscow Infantry Regiment. At age seven he was promoted to second lieutenant in the Life Guards of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment. One year later, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences, he was elected an honorary member.

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  Historically Inevitable?

  Turning Points of the Russian Revolution

  • Tony Brenton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Profile Books

    (Publisher)

  4 THE LAST TSAR March 1917 DONALD CRAWFORD A T THE TURN of 1917 there was no one in Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, who could have credibly foreseen that within the year the Russian state would have disintegrated – the Romanov dynasty swept aside and its successor, the forerunner of what had appeared its future as the new socialist republic, brought down in the disorder. There was nothing in this to justify any claim to ‘historical inevitability’, but everything to remind the world that cometh chaos, there is only hindsight to explain the outcome. True, the enforced abdication of Emperor Nicholas II could be seen as inevitable, given that he had by then alienated almost the entire political establishment as well as a large part of the wider Romanov family. In the midst of a disastrous war with Japan he had survived the revolution of 1905 by reluctantly yielding to demands for an elected parliament, the Duma, albeit with ministers answerable to him. In the midst of a war with Germany he stubbornly ignored demands for a government appointed by and responsible to that same Duma. Autocracy not constitutional monarchy was to remain the model for imperial Russia. Much of the blame for his downfall could rightly be placed at the door of his interfering and dominating German-born wife, Empress Alexandra. When Nicholas took over as Supreme Commander in 1915 and removed himself to the Stavka, his front-line headquarters over 400 miles away at Mogilev, he gave his wife control of the ministers left behind in the capital Petrograd. Progressively over the next couple of years the government became her government, with ministers appointed only with the approval of her hated ‘holy man’, Grigory Rasputin. His hold over the empress stemmed from her belief that only his ‘divine spirit’ could protect the life of her haemophilic son Alexis

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  The Agony of the Russian Idea

  • Tim McDaniel(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  It was this fusion of ancient notions of autocracy with a new vision of autocratic power based on the promise of progress that eventually made political reform both imperative and impossible. Let us return to Nicholas II’s dilemma at the time of the political crisis of 1905. Virtually all of urban Russia was demanding reform, the granting of a constitution. But these groups, whom Nicholas wanted to regard as outsiders, alien to the Russian people, were largely the product of the changes brought about by his government and those of his predecessors. It was the Russian state that had been determined to encourage industry, and since the 1880s it had embarked upon an ambitious program of state-stimulated industrialization. It had welcomed foreign investors and entrepreneurs in the hope that their skills could be transferred to a new native elite. For almost two centuries the state had encouraged scientific contacts with Western Europe and inculcated Western education into the elites, producing, in the process, more than the mere embryo of an educated middle class. By the turn of the twentieth century Russian science had begun to come of age.

  And yet, as Herzen stated, educated Russians were still shackled to the state, and the new social groups were not allowed to express their shared interests—themselves created through the processes of modernization and industrialization—in an organized way. They could still only petition the father tsar. In response to these changes, the nineteenth-century tsars did attempt to extend autocratic paternalism throughout the society. They created new offices, such as the land captains in the countryside and the factory inspectors in industry, to detect abuses and redress grievances, insofar as the government felt that they were just. But the autocratic regime could not countenance the politics of representation, and it could not conceive of its subjects as an organized society rather than a loyal people.

  The problem for Nicholas was both cognitive and moral. Partly entrapped within the ancient model of rulership, Nicholas did not understand the kind of society that was rapidly emerging around him. He even hated his own bureaucracy, whose complexity and scale were beyond his comprehension. He preferred to deal with officials on an individual basis rather than in institutional settings, such as a group meeting, and he relied on personal relations of trust more than on efficiency or expertise. His moral vision was also sadly outmoded: the expression of group interest for him was merely egotism, to which he opposed the fatherly wisdom of the tsar, able to reconcile conflicting claims and petitions. Outright opposition could only be the work of traitors, who through their violation of the norms of autocratic paternalism lost any right to be heard.

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