Priceless! 
No, there were four separate elections. The first Duma met for two months in 1906. The second one met for four months in 1907. The third Duma held together for its full five year term. The fourth Duma was elected in 1912 and dissolved itself when WWI started in 1914 but reconvened in 1915. It stayed in session through March 1917 when it took over the government following Nicholas’ abdication. It was then dissolved by Kerensky in September of 1917.
Massey could not have provided a more accurate description.
And , as Massey said, he was prone to take the advice of the last person he talked to. So he might promise new schools, get another visitor, and the priority would be changed to a battleship.
How would you compare him to someone like Kaiser Wilhelm II? (I just selected a similar leader of the time) I think it would come down to the guidance they were getting and the need to follow that advice. I’m not sure there would have been a lot of difference.
Not possible, because Russia never even considered declaring war on Austria until after the war had already begun. What Russia did was mobilize in defense of Serbia, and for Russia, mobilization was a far, far cry from a declaration of war. Russia had to mobilize even to be taken seriously as a diplomatic player in any negotiations over Serbia.
In response to Russia’s mobilization, Germany declared war on Russia.
Nicholas II had his faults, and made many poor decisions, but launching Russia into World War I wasn’t one of them. Russia went to war because she was attacked.
It’s easy to say that mobilization was a bad decision, since it provoked Germany’s attack and led to the fall of the Empire. But what was the alternative? Russia would have had to back down from mobilization upon Germany’s demand, which would have been the most craven appeasement imaginable. She would have had to abandon her ally, Serbia, to an attack which would literally have wiped Serbia off the map. This would not have gone unnoticed by Russia’s other ally, France, whom Russia desperately needed for the war against Germany which was probably inevitable whether Russia backed down over Serbia or not.
Rasputin didn’t have to worry about these things. Nicholas II did.
The sad thing was that Russia COULD have transitioned to a constitutional democracy. Under the wise Count Witte, Russia was achieving growth rates of 12% per year-capital was coming in, and Russia was rapidly industrializing. Education was making rapid gains, and the small farmers were being lifted out of poverty Things were going so well (before the 1905 war) that Lenin and his communists were getting discouraged of launching a communist revolution. Had Nicholas been a good Tsar, he could have transformed Russia-instead, he got caught up in the Kaiser’s insane war plans, and got sucked in. Then the Communists came in, and made Russia a hell for 70 years.
I’m going on memory here and no doubt this is a gross oversimplification, but I recall reading he was often preoccupied with his sickly son. Inbreeding among the European royal families produced higher incidences of certain diseases, and wasn’t his son a hemophiliac? Or some sort of other blood disease? They say that contributed to Nicholas’ projection of aloofness.
Hemophilia, from Queen Victoria’s genes.
When You Wish Upon a Tsar…
William Manchester in his biography says that in the Dardanelles campaign, it was proposed that Greece attack Turkey, so shipping lanes to Russia would be open. But the
Czar, whose regime (and ultimately life) depended on the campaign, refused. He wanted to rule in Constantinople, not the Greeks. So a far more accurate comparison is Barack Hussein Obama, who said he was interested in fairness even though it is well documented that when you raise taxes on the rich, the money you raise decreases (Obama should look at off his his supporters who dodge taxes anyway they can, like Geithner, Buffett, Kerry, etc).. Like Obama, Nicholas was not interested in exploring other views different from his own narrow mindedness, and had a cult of personality.
I’m not sure if airpower made a great difference in World War I, but the Czar limited pilots to only proper Russians.
One thing of interested to those who are familiar with the “Patty Duke Show”. Nicholas looked an awful lot like his cousin George V of Great Britain.
All the major powers of the era recognized full mobilization as the prelude to a declaration of war. Nobody had plans for mobilizing and not following up with a formal declaration. It was not a diplomatic maneuver.
I’d say what happened was that Russia went to war because Serbia was attacked.
Russia did have good reasons to go to war for Serbia. Serbia was a Russian ally and Russia would have lost face by abandoning an ally to its fate.
But it wasn’t an unthinkable option. Let’s not ignore the reality - Serbia was guilty of conspiring against Austria. The organization that killed Franz Ferdinand was being run by a Serbian army officer. It would have been possible for Russia to have decided that Serbia had brought its problems on itself and Russia wasn’t obligated to defend it from the consequences.
Whoa, somebody has been knee-deep in Fox News huh? Didn’t you know that every time you mention Obama’s middle name, a GOP voter dies? :dubious:
Nobody planned for that, but it remained on the table as an option. Mobilization was far less final in terms of cutting off negotiation than a declaration of war–especially for Russia, which took a long time to mobilize. As David Fromkin put it (Europe’s Last Summer),
After mobilizing, Nicholas continued to work for mediation and wrote Wilhelm,
All was foreclosed by the German declaration of war.
Contrary to popular belief, hemophilia is NOT caused inbreeding. However, the rest is true. The Tsarevich Alexei did suffer from it, his mother, the Tsarina Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was a carrier. (She had lost a brother when he was only two-years-old).
Alexei’s hemophilia was kept a secret from the general public, so people didn’t the truth about Rasputin. He was assumed to be the Tsarina’s lover.
While the rest of Jim’s Son’s post is partisan bullshit, he’s right about Nicholas and George V – they did indeed look a lot alike. (Their mothers were sisters)
But seriously, dude, what the fuck does Obama have to do with Tsarist Russia?
[Marlin Perkins] Just as the wildebeest herd creates a protective shield around their young, so too can Mutual of Omaha create a protective shield around your home or business [/Marlin Perkins]
What a great slogan! Mutual of Omaha, the wildebeest of insurance companies.
I’m glad that some part of your post makes sense.
Please keep your political hijacks and potshots out of IMHO.
Please keep restrict attacks against other posters to the Pit, where they belong.
ETA: Edited this post to include YogSosoth’s stab at Mitt Romney, which I’d accidentally omitted.
- Gukumatz,
IMHO moderator
Bumping this because the question about the Kaiser is a good one. Wilhelm also had a lot of insecurities, but unlike Nicholas, he made up for them by acting like a big blowhard. He was very loud, pushy, bombastic, etc. And unlike Russia, Germany was a constitutional monarcy. There wasn’t as much freedom as Britain, or the U.S., but it definitely wasn’t Tsarist Russia. You weren’t going to find the Picklehaubes busting down your door in the middle of the night.
He wasn’t a bad guy either, don’t get me wrong. But Wilhelm’s upbringing was completely differrent than Nicholas’s – he was constantly made to feel inferior by his parents, there was a lot of tension between his parents and his grandparents, etc. He was also extemely paranoid. There was also speculation that he suffered from brain damage due to being deprived of oxygen at birth (his birth was a very difficult one) Like Nicholas, he was a devoted husband and father, although he tended to be very hard on his sons and favored his daughter.
In his case, he was mostly all talk, and in a lot of cases, his mouth got him in a lot of trouble. He wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t the genius he thought to be. Basically a case of the Dunning-Kruger effect
The Kaiser would probably merit his own thread. A fascinating individual.
I am probably biased because my grandparents and their parents and brothers and sisters were victims of these pogroms. My maternal grandmother told me stories about them. Of course, if it weren’t for the pogroms, they wouldn’t have come to America and they would have faced a much worse fate.
From your cite he said, “The Protocols should be confiscated, a good cause cannot be defended by dirty means.” In his opinion, the oppression of Jews was a “good cause” but he wanted to oppress the Jews fairly. I guess that you could argue that there was some honor in that if you squint and turn your head.
Honestly, how can you say that? I’m sure that he loved his kids and his dogs and was generous to them and clearly he was sheltered and a dupe for some smart, manipulative people but nice, decent men don’t do what he did. His family was living in insanely excessive luxury while people were starving. This led to the revolution that put his people under the control of even worse monsters for decades.
If he really tried to do the right thing but failed, then “nice guy, shitty ruler” would be apt but from your own description, “nice guy” doesn’t follow logically.