I’m not well-versed in Russian history, so help me out here. Was Czar Nicholas II a Bad Guy? In the couple of documentaries I’ve seen over the years, he came off as not such a bad sort; just horribly out of touch. He seems to have been unprepared for rule, and fell back on conservative policies instead of taking notice of what was going on with his people.
So: Bad Guy? Or just insulated and clueless?
Insulated and clueless. (The following is vague and rambling, as I just woke up…fairly accurate, though not necessarily precise.)
He wasn’t really bad, just utterly sold on autocracy. He was raised to be a Tsar, and that is what his heart was all about, ruler-wise. Somewhere after the 1905 crisis (can’t remember what it was called) reforms were started, to which he agreed. Somebody stirred him up again, and, IIRC, he sabotaged same, in the name of the autocracy. Just conjure up the image of the effete, snobby, poncey king who believes that all of his subjects are as in love with his position as he is, and that is what CZN was. He foolishly took control of the war effort, which some account for much of the descent into the folly that it became. etc, etc…
He was a good husband, it seems, idolizing his wife.
That’s about all I got.
That’s OK. I wasn’t quite awake when I posted the OP.
Big believer in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and allowed pogroms as a safety valve.
ETA: considering how blithely he tolerated the murder of entire families of Jews, it’s poetic coincience that he and his own family were murdered by a Bolshevik who’d been born a Jew.
From everything I’ve read, Nicholas was very well-intentioned. He was always trying to do what was best for Russia. The problem was that he rarely knew what that was. He wasn’t stupid but he didn’t have good judgement. So he was as likely to follow a bad idea as a good one.
He may have been raised to be Tsar, but he was totally unprepared to actually take on the job. He knew that, his family knew that.
But after a shaky start, the Restoration under Czar Vlad appears to be solid.
Actually not. The Protocols were actually found to be a hoax and banned, by Nicholas himself.
That’s not to say there were not Jewish pograms in Russia, but the Tsar did NOT order them on the basis of The Protocols.
Nicholas was basically a decent guy who was a lousy emperor. He would probably have made a good constitutional monarch, but Russia was an absolute monarchy. Had his grandfather, Alexander II lived long enough to sign a constitution into law, things may have been different. However, Alexander III, Nicholas’s father, believed in absolute rule, but had the personality to back it up. Nicholas didn’t. It also didn’t help that Nicholas’s tutor was a violent anti-Semite and an even bigger believer in absolutism than Alexander III.
His father also never prepared him to rule, either, deliberately keeping him away from the government, so he didn’t know a thing when he came to the throne.
Compound that with the fact that he tended to be shy, very quiet, and insecure, and he was easily dominated by his uncles, who were always pushing their favorites on him. (As far as his wife, she was mostly so keen to push Rasputinn because he was able to heal their son when he had attacks of hemophilia). And then, you have a son and heir with a potentially fatal illness, you and your wife are obsessed with that, well, it doesn’t look good.
Basically, there were a number of factors contributing to his inadequacies as a ruler. I’m not excusing his actions – many of them were truly vile – but they were largely due to ignorance rather than malice. He wasn’t Darth Vader but Jar Jar Binks.
So again, nice guy, shitty ruler. That’s the problem with an absolute monarchy.
If you’re going to be a good autocrat your chief character traits should not include ignorant, clueless and spineless.
On the positive side of the ledger: organized an international arms reduction conference (not that it did much good), loved his kids and borzois.
One weird fantasy of mine: imagining I was Nicholas before his ill-fated marriage to Alexandra: what could I have done to push Russia toward a better form of government and avoid WWI? I’ve had trouble forseeing an outcome other than getting myself assassinated either by vengeful nobility or left-wing extremists. 
He was the worst of all leaders, a half-hearted tyrant.
My rather sporadic reading on the subject goes me the distinct impression that he wasn’t a nice man by a long shot, but hardly evil, as absolute rulers go. He was definitely clueless, and in way over his head, but he can hardly be blamed for that - anyone would be.
To be honest, almost all Russian leaders have been tyrants or bounced from enlightened to tyranny and back. The whole country’s problem is that, basically, loyalty seems to be uneliable there except at swordpoint, and that’s been the case of about the last thousand years. Civil government never existed in the first place, so all authority was essentially tyrannical in character, because the aklternative was revolution or anarchy.
Someone once said that every time Russia loses a war, the people gain a little more freedom. After the Russo-Japanese War, and at least for a while after WWI, and certainly after the experience in Afghanistan, Russian government got a bit more liberal and less oppressive.
(Of course, after the Bolsheviks took over, they reversed the gains of 1918, but for a while, at least, Russia had free elections and a legitimate parliament.)
(Can this be generalized as an historical rule? Did Britain, for instance, get a bit more liberal after losing a war, or France, or even the U.S.? Is losing a war a good thing, in an ironic way, for a nation, or for its people?)
More likely the Winter Palace massacre. It was a much more significant event at the time. The Potemkin mutiny just got a better movie.
I’d known of the Winter Palace Massacre, but somehow had thought it happened a lot later. Thanks!
There is a wonderful old Punch cartoon, where two groups of revolutionaries are charging past each other. One group are all wearing fur coats and heavy hats, but the other group are all wearing bathing suits and light clothing. “Wait…are we attacking the Winter Palace or the Summer Palace?”
As a man and father Nicholas was not a bad man. As a ruler, he was a disaster. He was indecisive, and prone to make stupid decisions. One telling incident: Nicholas was being advised by Count Sergius Witte-a brilliant man who could have saved Russia (had Nicholas heeded his advice). At any rate, when Nicholas was weighing war with Japan (1905), Witte sought to dissuade him (the army wasn’t ready, it was too far away, the Navy was too weak, etc.). Nicholas decided to go to war, and Witte said to him “Sire, remember well this day…we will most certainly regret this decision”. Nicholas thought it would be a “splendid little war”-it turned into a diaster (most of the Russian Navy was lost, and Nicholas regretted it, belatedly).
A similar incident occurred in 1914. When Russia was considering the possibility of declaring war on Austria in defense of Serbia, Rasputin of all people told him that going to war would be a terrible idea. It was unfortunately one of the few occasions when Nicholas stood up to Rasputin.
Witte, as you noted, was a brilliant man. Lots of people probably made worse decisions than he did. But making worse decisions than Rasputin? That’s shameful.
You mean free election singular and the resulting legislature was dissolved the day after it first met.
From that description, he sounds like…Mitt Romney :eek: