A lot of people have said (and I tend to agree) that Nicholas would have been a good constitutional monarch. He meant well, his personal life was fine, and he was great at all the ceremonial stuff. He just wasn’t competent at running a country, which was the role history placed him in. If he had been the monarch of some country where his actual powers were limited and a Prime Minister and Parliament ran the country, Nicholas would be remembered as a good monarch.
You mean George V – George VI was king during WWII.
D’oh! Yup my mistake!
My local paper just ran a WWI “timeline” featuring a squib mentioning that the war started in August 1914 (omitting the salient fact that Germany and Austria invaded their neighbors to precipitate the conflict). Later there’s the obligatory passage citing the “harsh” armistice terms poor Germany was subjected to.
Apologist, revisionist history continues apace.
It pretty well determined that Germany would hate France for a while. A major argument for Hitler to use when he ran for office.
But he had learned that an Autocracy was the only way to rule from his father, his Grandfather who was quite liberal (for a Tsar) having been assassinated. Nicholas II saw his Grandfather die after literally being blown to pieces, when he was a kid.
There was a Dumas, and as he treated advisers and Ministers, Nicholas chose to disband it rather than work with it.
Thanks for owning up, but I didn’t catch it.
I didn’t really keep up after Edward VII, Cerepe Susette and his chair. 
The terms actually were pretty harsh, weren’t they?
A Parliament of Musketeers?
Oops.
Thanks, the house of the Russian Parliament is the Duma.
As has been pointed out in one of these threads, not really, compared to the indemnities the Germans had imposed on the French in 1870.
What there wasn’t was a WWI version of the Marshal Plan, to rebuild everything regardless of who’d done what to whom; and a War Crimes tribunal, to isolate the baddies such as those responsible for the massacre of Belgians and Armenians. Instead the Germans chafed under onus of national guilt, and reacted with the period version of #notallhuns
The treaty was pretty harsh. Germany had to take sole responsibility for the war, pay reparations, disband their armed forces, and lose large parts of historic Prussia as all as the industry and raw materials of the Rhineland and Saar. How was that not harsh? Howd that fit President Wilson’s promises of peace without victory?
Wilson didn’t want to agree to it. That is why the treaty took so long.
I thought the treaty said only the Germans couldn’t station troops there. (Since the only conceivable reason to do so would be to threaten the French.)
The Saar was governed by the UK and France under League mandate until 1935. The rest of the Rheinkand was occupied by French and Belgian troops, by treaty for 15 years, and in 1923, tried to establish an independent “Rhenish Republic”.
How the fuck do you use that thing?
It’s possible that if the Kaiser’s father had lived longer (his reign was only three months due to advanced throat cancer), WWI might not have happened, as he was much smarter and more liberal than his son. There’s also speculation that Willy himself suffered from brain damage due to a lack of oxygen when he was born. He was breech, and I believe the doctors were so busy attending to his mother that it was ten minutes before they noticed the infant wasn’t breathing.
The parts of “historic Prussia” that Germany lost were the parts where Polish people lived. And the return of that territory had been one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were the terms Germany was asking for.
It also did not help that Wilhelm sidelined Bismarck early on.
That link does not work (for me at least).