The man known to history as Tsar Nicholas
II of Russia was born Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov on the 18th of May 1868
at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial retreat outside St Petersburg,
the capital of the Russian Empire. His father, Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich,
was the second son of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. The younger Alexander was given an ordinary
education and prepared for a life of military service when his elder brother, Tsarevich
Nicholas, died in 1
865 at the age of twenty-one. Following the death of Nicholas, Alexander
became heir to the Russian throne and married his late brother’s fiancée. Upon his father’s death in 1881, Alexander
assumed the throne as Tsar Alexander III. Although most of his ancestors were German,
the bulky bearded Alexander resembled a Russian peasant and his legendary reputation for strength
was reflected in his tendency to bend a fork with his bare hands for entertainment during
state dinners. Nicholas II’s mother
Maria Fyodorovna was
born Princess Dagmar of Denmark in 1847, five years before her father became King Christian
IX of Denmark. In 1863, Dagmar’s sister Princess Alexandra
married Prince Albert Edward, the future Edward VII of the United Kingdom. In September 1864, when she was not yet seventeen,
Dagmar was engaged to Tsarevich Nicholas of Russia, but after his death the following
year it was decided that she would marry his younger brother, Tsarevich Alexander, converting
to Russian Orthodox Ch
ristianity and taking the name of Maria Fyodorovna. The couple would have six children, of whom
the future Nicholas II was the eldest. A second son named Alexander died before his
first birthday, but the remaining children, two sons named George and Michael, and two
daughters named Xenia and Olga, all survived into adulthood. The Romanov family had ruled Russia since
1613, when the nobleman Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov was elected Tsar at the end of a fifteen-year
period of anarchy and Polish occ
upation known as The Time of Troubles. Nicholas II’s life and reign proved as troublesome
as the events three centuries earlier that placed his ancestor on the Russian throne. At his birth, the Russian Empire was the world’s
largest country, stretching from Poland in the west to the Pacific coast in the east,
bordering the Arctic Ocean in the north with its southern frontiers in Central Asia. This vast country owed its origins to the
Grand Principality of Moscow, a modest medieval state ruled by
princes of the Rurikid dynasty,
descendants of the Viking chieftain Rurik who ruled the lands collectively known as
the Rus’ from the city of Kiev in the 9th century. After the Mongol conquest, Moscow became the
most powerful of the Russian principalities over the course of the 14th century by a combination
of military force, extortion, and fidelity to the Mongol or Tatar khan. During the following century the Muscovites
claimed the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of Constanti
nople in 1453,
claiming the title of Tsar, derived from Caesar, before expelling the Tatars, subjugating the
wealthy merchant republic of Novgorod to the northwest, and beginning its expansion eastwards
towards Siberia. At the beginning of the 18th century, after
a century of turmoil, Tsar Peter the Great founded the city of St Petersburg and defeated
Sweden in the Great Northern War, proclaiming the Russian Empire in 1721. At the end of the century, Ukraine and Crimea
and parts of Poland were b
rought under Russian imperial rule by Catherine the Great. After repelling Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion
of 1812, Russia became one of the dominant powers on the European continent, and in 1814
Tsar Alexander I entered Paris in triumph at the head of a coalition army that forced
Napoleon to abdicate. Both Catherine and Alexander were inspired
by liberal ideas of the European Enlightenment, but they found it difficult to reform a system
of authoritarian rule which they relied on to maintain the i
ntegrity of their state with
its wide-open frontiers. In the decades after the Napoleonic Wars Russia
retained its reputation as the continent’s strongest military power, but despite their
resplendent uniforms on parade, the Russian army was defeated in the Crimean War, which
exposed the weaknesses in the Russian administrative and economic system. After Nicholas’s grandfather Tsar Alexander
II came to the throne in 1855, he embarked on a reform programme to modernise the Russian
Empire and main
tain its great power status on the international stage while dealing with
the increasing political consciousness of the urban classes and the rise of nationalism
in a multi-ethnic empire where fewer than half of the population was Russian. In 1861 Alexander abolished serfdom and gave
peasants free economic rights, but the newly-emancipated serfs were obliged to pay redemption dues
to the government for forty-nine years to compensate their former owners. In 1864 trial by jury was introduced, and
elected local councils known as zemstva were established for rural areas and later cities
and towns. In order to address the deficiencies in military
organisation in the Crimea, in 1874 universal conscription was introduced and corporal punishment
was banned in the army. Nicholas spent his childhood with an affectionate
and overprotective mother, and a warm-hearted but intimidating father, a combination that
may have contributed to his immaturity as a young adult. Like other European families, N
icholas’s
parents provided the general framework for his education and upbringing, but he spent
most of the childhood supervised by governesses and governors. Between seven and ten years old, Nicholas
received lessons from his governess, Alexandra Ollongren. Aged ten, his upbringing was entrusted to
the military governor General Grigory Danilovich, who invited specialist tutors to teach the
young grand duke Russian, French, English, German, mathematics, geography, chemistry,
and history, which w
as Nicholas’s favourite subject. Nicholas had a close relationship with his
tutor Charles Heath, an Englishman who taught at the Alexander Lyceum, the prestigious school
for the aristocratic elite in Tsarskoe Selo. Under Heath’s influence, Nicholas adopted
the reserved manner of an English gentleman, an attitude that would contribute to his reputation
as a weak and indecisive ruler. In March 1881, when Nicholas was thirteen
years old, his grandfather Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by the soc
ialist revolutionary
organisation the People’s Will while returning to the Winter Palace from a military inspection. Having survived six previous assassination
attempts during his reign, the mortally wounded Alexander had his legs blown off by a bomb
and was carried to the Winter Palace where he died a couple of hours later. His grandson Nicholas was among those gathered
at his bedside. While Russian tsars had often been violently
removed from power by ambitious family members in palace coups, t
his was the first time a
Russian monarch had been killed by revolutionaries who aimed to overthrow the monarchy. While he honoured his late father’s memory
by building the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood at the site of the assassination, Tsar
Alexander III reversed many of his predecessor’s liberal reforms and cracked down on left-wing
revolutionary terrorist groups. In May 1887, after an attempt on the Tsar’s
life on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II’s killing was uncovered, the revo
lutionary
terrorist Alexander Ulyanov was one of five members of the People’s Will executed for
his part in the plot. Alexander’s death led his younger brother
Vladimir to take a greater interest in revolutionary politics. After his grandfather’s death and the accession
of his father Alexander III, Nicholas assumed the title of Tsarevich and became heir to
the throne. He continued to live under the supervision
of General Danilovich until the age of seventeen, when he began his political educatio
n at the
hands of some of the leading statesmen of the empire. The greatest influence on the teenage Nicholas
was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the conservative law professor who served as the secular head
of the Orthodox Church. Pobedonostsev believed that Russia’s communitarian
political traditions were unsuited to representative democracy and regarded the peasantry, who
were largely isolated from western liberal and socialist ideas in the cities, as the
basis of Russian monarchism. Nicholas was a
lso taught economics by Nikolai
Bunge, the liberal Minister of Finance from 1881 to 1886. Though the Russian economy developed rapidly
during the reign of Alexander III and Bunge was comfortable in the world of wealthy bankers
and industrialists, Nicholas’s understanding of economic theory remained poor throughout
his life, and he would rely on the advice of ministers on economic issues. In October 1888, while Nicholas and the imperial
family were returning from the Crimea, the imperial train de
railed at Borki in Ukraine. The roof of the dining car collapsed, but
Tsar Alexander used his legendary strength to hold it up, allowing the children to escape
unharmed. At the age of nineteen Nicholas was commissioned
into the Preobrazhensky Guards, the senior regiment of the imperial army. As with elite regiments in other European
countries, the Preobrazhensky’s officers received little military training but Nicholas
was able to enjoy the society of the wealthy young aristocrats who served as
Guards officers. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
it was common for young European aristocrats and royals to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe
to deepen their knowledge of art and culture and to see the monumental remnants of Greek
and Roman antiquity for themselves. Tsar Alexander turned his attention eastwards
towards Asia, and in October 1890, Nicholas was sent on an eastern Grand Tour accompanied
by Prince Esper Ukhtomsky, an authority on Asian culture, and after brief stops in
Austria
and Greece, where he picked up his cousin Prince George of Greece, Nicholas visited
the more exotic destinations of Egypt, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Dutch East Indies
(modern Indonesia), the Kingdom of Siam (now Thailand), and parts of China and Japan, before
returning home to St Petersburg across Siberia. In May 1891, while Nicholas was in Otsu in
Japan, he was the target of an assassination attempt by a local policeman. Though he received a sabre wound to the face,
Prince Geor
ge saved his life by intercepting the second blow. Nicholas cut short the rest of his trip and
returned to St Petersburg overland in August. He had been a member of the State Council
and Committee of Ministers since his twenty-first birthday in 1889, and in 1893 he was appointed
to chair a special committee on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1890, Nicholas began an affair with the
seventeen-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska, a Polish ballerina of the imperial ballet. Though the a
ffair was actively encouraged
by his parents, as heir to the Russian throne he was expected to marry a European princess. In 1884, Nicholas was present at his uncle
Grand Duke Sergei’s wedding to Princess Elisabeth of Hesse, one of the many German
princely states that supplied brides for European royal houses. It was there that Nicholas met Elisabeth’s
twelve-year-old sister Princess Alix, who was Queen Victoria of England’s favourite
grandchild and lover of all things English. By the early 1890
s Nicholas was determined
to marry the beautiful Princess Alix, and he proposed to her in April 1894 while attending
the wedding of her brother Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse in the German city of Coburg. The highly-religious Alix initially rejected
the proposal as she was unwilling to give up her Lutheran faith in favour of Russian
Orthodoxy, but a few days later she changed her mind and would soon become a zealous convert. Despite his seemingly robust constitution,
Tsar Alexander III’s healt
h began to fail in 1894 and by late summer he was diagnosed
with kidney disease attributed to the impact of the Borki train disaster six years earlier. In the autumn the Tsar went to the Livadia
Palace in Crimea to recuperate, and by mid-October Tsarevich Nicholas was deputising for his
father. On the 22nd of October Princess Alix arrived
to receive her prospective father-in-law’s blessing, and on the 1st of November 1894
Tsar Alexander III died at the age of forty-nine, leaving his twenty-six-y
ear-old son as Nicholas
II, Tsar of Russia. On the 26th of November, less than a month
of the late tsar’s death, court mourning was lifted for the wedding of Nicholas and
his bride, who had converted to Orthodoxy and taken the name Alexandra Fyodorovna. Although she took a great interest in Russian
religion and culture, the intelligent and serious empress was ill-at-ease in St Petersburg
society and resented the court precedence enjoyed by her mother-in-law, Dowager Empress
Maria Fyodorovna. Nev
ertheless, Nicholas and Alexandra had a
happy marriage and the imperial couple would have four daughters and one son between 1895
and 1904. During Nicholas’ reign, the imperial family’s
main residence was the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Though the palace had a neoclassical exterior
yellow walls and white columns, its interiors were decorated in a Victorian Gothic style
to suit Alexandra’s tastes. The family spent summers at Peterhof, around
twenty miles to the west, and made occasional vi
sits to imperial hunting lodges in Poland
and the Livadia Palace in Crimea. Nicholas and his family enjoyed excursions
to the Finnish coast on the imperial yacht, the Standart, which was also used on occasion
for state visits to European countries. For the first decade of Nicholas’ reign,
the imperial family hosted grand balls in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg during
the winter, but after 1903 the imperial family was increasingly isolated from St Petersburg
society. Aside from occasional hol
idays and international
trips, Nicholas kept a strict routine, starting the day at 8 o’clock with a swim before
having breakfast and a walk in the extensive Alexander Park. From 9.30 he attended to court business for
an hour, before receiving reports from his ministers between 10.30 and lunch at 1.00. After a forty-five minute lunch Nicholas would
receive ambassadors and foreign guests in the afternoon before tea with the family at
5 o’clock. Between 6 and 8 in the evening there were
more minist
erial reports. Dinner began at 8.00, after which Nicholas
would join Alexandra and the children in the Empress’s boudoir. After 10 Nicholas returned to his study and
sometimes worked late into the night. After becoming Tsar on his father’s death,
Nicholas admitted that he was unprepared to take the throne. The young Tsar was indecisive and lacked confidence,
and it was often said that the most powerful individual in Russia was the last person who
had spoken to the Tsar. Empress Alexandra frequen
tly attempted to
strengthen her husband’s resolution by reminding him that he was the Tsar and was appointed
by God. Nicholas’ imperial majesty would have to
appear in its full glory before the people at his coronation in May 1896. Although St Petersburg had been the capital
since 1712, the coronation ceremony of the Tsars continued to be held in the former capital
of Moscow. On the 26th of May 1896, Nicholas was crowned
in a solemn three-hour ceremony held in the Dormition Cathedral in the Mosc
ow Kremlin. Four days later, on the 30th of May, a large
public celebration was to be held at the Khodynka field on the outskirts of the city, with Nicholas
and Alexandra set to arrive at noon. By 6 in the morning, over half a million people
had already arrived, and when rumours spread that there were not enough complimentary souvenirs
for everyone, those at the back pushed forwards, leading to a stampede which killed over a
thousand people and injured thousands more. By the time the imperial fa
mily arrived in
the afternoon, the field had been cleaned up. That evening, Nicholas and Alexandra attended
a grand ball organised by the French Embassy to celebrate the Franco-Russian alliance of
1894. While the imperial couple did not wish to
attend the ball and visited the wounded in hospitals the following day, the image of
the Tsar dancing on the day of a great tragedy made a bad first impression. Nicholas began his reign with few close friends
whom he could bring into government, and inste
ad relied on advice from ministers inherited
from his father. He continued to be guided by Pobedonostsev’s
conservativism, and for the first six years of his reign he did not deviate very far from
his father’s policies. Nicholas’ desire to please everyone around
him and his unwillingness to confront those who disagreed with him resulted in incoherent
and contradictory policymaking. Rather than decide policy collectively through
the Committee of Ministers, the Tsar preferred to make decisions by
meeting ministers individually. The Tsar’s main interests were in foreign,
defence, and security policy, and outside these areas ministers exercised considerable
power in their own departments. Later in his reign Nicholas suspected that
powerful and effective ministers were usurping his powers as Tsar and he played his ministers
off against each other to assert his own authority, undermining the effectiveness of his government. Like many of his predecessors, Nicholas was
suspicious of the bureau
crats who served him and believed that as Tsar he had a direct
connection to the people. The Tsar considered himself a father to his
subjects and was known to deal with petitions personally, no matter how trivial. Among Nicholas’ ministers, the most influential
during the early part of his reign was Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, who had spent twenty
years working in the railway industry before being appointed Director of Railway Affairs
by Minister of Finance Ivan Vyshnegradsky in 1889. Vysh
negradsky launched a programme of industrial
development funded by foreign loans and increasing taxes on peasants and protected by high tariffs
which increased the prices of imported industrial products. These policies were adopted and expanded by
Witte upon his arrival at the Ministry of Finance in 1892 and became known as the Witte
System. The Finance Minister believed that rapid industrialisation
and economic modernisation was essential if Russia was to avoid becoming economically
exploited b
y the world’s industrial powers, a fate that seemed inevitable for the Ottoman
Empire in the Middle East and the Qing Empire in China. Witte recognised that the peasants and urban
poor would suffer in the process, but argued that only by developing Russian industry using
a combination of state revenues and foreign capital and technology could Russia be able
to compete with Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Witte’s advocacy of the industrial economy
was unpopular among the Russian
landed aristocracy, who were sceptical of capitalism and favoured
the development of the agricultural economy. When Witte proposed adopting the gold standard
in 1896 in order to attract foreign investment, he faced considerable opposition among his
fellow ministers as it would increase the cost of borrowing, and it was only the forceful
intervention of the Tsar on behalf of Witte that allowed the Finance Minister to have
his way. With his background in the rail industry,
Witte took a special int
erest in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway intended to
link Moscow to the port of Vladivostok in the Far East. In May 1891, while returning home from his
Asian tour, Nicholas attended the ceremonies marking the start of construction on the railway
in Vladivostok, and after becoming Tsar he maintained his interest in the Far East, believing
that Russia was in a perfect position to exploit economic advantages from the weak Chinese
Empire. In 1895, Japan defeated China in an eight-mont
h
war, and at the Treaty of Shimonoseki Japan secured possession of the Liaodong peninsula
in southern Manchuria, including the strategic naval base of Port Arthur. Since the Japanese presence in Manchuria undermined
Russia’s own imperial ambitions in the Celestial Empire, Russia organised an international
coalition with France and Germany to force Japan to hand their gains back to China. Under Witte’s influence, Russia was given
the right to build a section of the Trans-Siberian Railway through
northern Manchuria, reducing
the length of the route. In March 1898, after Germany seized the Chinese
port of Qingdao, Nicholas ensured that Russia secured a lease on Port Arthur and the Liaodong
peninsula, while the British were given the port of Weihaiwei. In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion broke out in
northern China in opposition to foreign influence in the empire. The Chinese imperial government sympathised
with the Boxers and did little to suppress the rebellion, while the international communi
ty
sought and received help from home. Russia was among the eight nations which joined
together to suppress the Boxers, but Russian forces remained in Manchuria to protect the
railway and assert Russian economic control over the province. Although Witte’s policies led to rapid economic
growth, the industrialisation process was accompanied by the movement of peasants from
the countryside to work in factories in urban centres. The cities were unable to provide the necessary
housing and social infr
astructure to cope with the demand and living and working conditions
were poor. In the meantime, the increase in literacy
among factory workers encouraged the creation of trade unions to defend the rights of workers. In many of these unions, radical revolutionary
ideas circulated calling for the overthrow of the Tsar and his regime. This industrialization led to not only strikes
in the cities but also peasant riots in the countryside prompted by Witte’s high taxes
and tariffs, which lead to seve
ral famines over the course of the 1890s. Witte recognised the condition of the peasantry
but was unwilling to ease the tax burden, and instead proposed radical land reform. Witte suggested abolishing the peasant commune,
the centuries-old system under which a village and the land around it was owned collectively
by the peasant community, and giving peasants full property rights to their land. The political stability of the Russian Empire
was threatened not only by workers and peasants, but also
by the intellectual classes. As in many autocratic regimes, the most radical
group were university students, and in 1899 Nicholas faced student riots across the country. Although some leading instigators were expelled
and conscripted to the army as a punishment, Nicholas recognised that some of the students’
complaints were justified, and the Ministry of Education took steps to abolish the hated
classical curriculum and to give students greater choice in the courses they studied. While Nicholas
hoped that the Russian education
system could inspire a sense of patriotism and support for the state, university professors
and even officials in the Ministry of Education sympathised with liberal and radical ideas
and resisted any decrees to impose conservative sentiments upon students. By 1900, there were three distinct political
groups forming the political opposition to Nicholas II. The Socialist Revolutionary Party formed in
1901 and led by Viktor Chernov was the successor to the People’s
Will and the agrarian socialist
movements founded in the 1860s. The SRs believed that peasants and workers
should join together in leading the socialist revolution to overthrow the Tsar and were
popular in both urban and rural areas. The SRs promoted revolutionary terror and
were responsible for assassinating the hard-line Minister of Internal Affairs Vyacheslav von
Plehve in 1904. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, owed
their allegiance to the Marxist tradition and believed that the urba
n workers would
serve as the vanguard of any socialist revolution. In 1903, the Social Democratic Party split
into two factions, the extreme Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin,
while the more moderate Mensheviks were led by Julius Martov. The third strand of opposition to the Tsar
were the Liberals, who supported civil rights and constitutional government, where political
power is shared by the monarch and a democratic assembly representing the people. The Liberals, primar
ily influential in the
zemstva around the country, drew their support from middle class and upper-class individuals,
though they hoped to expand their support to the working classes. The political instability in Russia at the
beginning of the 20th century prompted Interior Minister von Plehve to remark in 1903, “What
this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.” Plehve’s comment was in reference to Minister
of War General Alexei Kuropatkin, who warned that Russia
’s Far Eastern adventures were
undermining its defences in Europe. In February 1904, Russia and Japan went to
war over control of Manchuria and Korea. Though Nicholas had hoped to avoid war, he
believed that the Russian military would easily crush the Japanese. Contrary to the expectations of the Tsar and
the international community, the Japanese inflicted a series of heavy defeats on the
Russians. In April 1904, the flagship of the Russian
Pacific Fleet struck a mine near Port Arthur, killing A
dmiral Stepan Makarov, the Russian
navy’s most talented naval officer. In early September 1904, Kuropatkin’s army
was defeated by a Japanese army half its size at the Battle of Liaoyang, forcing him to
abandon the city. Kuropatkin expected reinforcements from European
Russia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, but parts of the railroad were not yet complete. In the meantime, the Japanese laid siege to
Port Arthur and took the port in February 1905, destroying the Russian Pacific Fleet
in the process
. Later that month, the Japanese army defeated
Kuropatkin at Mukden (now known as Shenyang) and forced the Russians to retreat into northern
Manchuria. The key battle of the war took place at sea
at the end of May 1905, when Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky’s 2nd Pacific Squadron, which
had sailed round the world on an eight-month voyage from the Baltic Sea, was annihilated
by Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō at the Straits of Tsushima. After mediation from President Theodore Roosevelt
of the United States,
the Russo-Japanese War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth
in September, recognising Japanese claims over Korea and resulting in Russia’s evacuation
of Manchuria. In line with Plehve’s expectations, Russian
setbacks in the Russo-Japanese War had made revolution more likely, and on the 28th of
July 1904, while on his way to meet the Tsar, Plehve was killed by a bomb thrown by a Socialist
Revolutionary terrorist. Nicholas had appointed Plehve Minister of
Internal Affairs in 1902 fol
lowing the assassination of his predecessor Dmitri Sipyagin, hoping
that the hardline Plehve would act as a counterweight to Witte, who was beginning to lose the Tsar’s
confidence over the political instability caused by his economic reforms. Like many Russian conservatives, Plehve believed
that the workers and peasants were more loyal to the state and presided over a policy of
repression against the political parties and the radical urban intelligentsia. Plehve was a notorious anti-Semite and c
onsidered
to be responsible for the pogrom in the Moldovan capital of Kishinev in April 1903, during
which an anti-Semitic mob killed almost fifty Jews. Though Nicholas condemned the killings and
removed the local governor, he did little to stem the pogroms between 1903 and 1906,
during which over two thousand Jews were killed, the bloodiest of which claimed the lives of
four hundred Jews in the Ukrainian port of Odessa in 1905. Following Plehve’s assassination, Nicholas
appointed the liberal Pr
ince Pyotr Svyatopolk-Mirsky as his successor, seemingly in response to
his mother’s pleas not to appoint another hardliner to the ministry. Svyatopolk-Mirsky proposed a programme of
reforms including religious toleration, civil rights, and greater influence on central government
by elected representatives from across the country. While the Minister of Internal Affairs believed
that the reforms were necessary to avoid revolution, Grand Duke Sergei led the conservatives in
attempting to block the
reform programme. Not long after Nicholas rejected the Interior
Minister’s central policy of representative government in December 1904, Svyatopolk-Mirsky
resigned from office. On Sunday the 22nd of January 1905, tens of
thousands of unarmed protestors marched on the Winter Palace under the leadership of
Father Gapon, a priest and trade union leader in St Petersburg. Among Gapon’s demands for political reform
were for the Tsar to hold a constituent assembly to deliver a constitutional governmen
t in
Russia. The protestors were carrying religious icons
and singing patriotic songs, including the imperial anthem God Save the Tsar, appealing
to the Tsar as their protector. Nicholas was away at Tsarskoe Selo at the
time and while there was no question of him accepting Gapon’s demands, the decision
to police the event using infantry soldiers resulted in the deaths of several hundred
protestors as the outnumbered soldiers blocking the paths to Palace Square opened fire at
the columns of demon
strators advancing against them. While Nicholas expressed regret at the fatalities,
the events of Bloody Sunday undermined the Tsar’s claims to be the protector of his
subjects. On the 17th of February 1905, Grand Duke Sergei
was assassinated by Socialist Revolutionary terrorists in the Kremlin. Nicholas responded by offering to establish
an advisory representative body, but he refused to consider relinquishing his powers as absolute
monarch. The Tsar believed that constitutional government
woul
d make Russia more vulnerable to revolution and anarchy, while also considering it his
duty to preserve the authority he was given by God. As a hereditary monarch, Nicholas also considered
it his duty to God and Russia to produce a son and heir. Between 1895 and 1901 Nicholas and Alexandra
had four daughters in succession, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. According to the Imperial Succession Law of
1797, women could not inherit the throne unless all male claimants were extinguished. As a res
ult, Nicholas’ younger brother George
remained the heir to the throne until his death in 1899, upon which their youngest brother
Michael became the new heir. When Nicholas fell gravely ill in the autumn
of 1900, there was some discussion about changing the Laws of Succession so that Grand Duchess
Olga could succeed him, but the Tsar’s recovery averted succession talk. On the 12th of August 1904, Nicholas and Alexandra
were granted their wish of a son whom they named Alexei after the 17th century
Tsar Alexei
Mikhailovich, a pious and gentle ruler who laid the foundations for his son Peter the
Great’s modernisation of the country by pursuing a programme of moderate reform. Nicholas and Alexandra were naturally delighted
to have a boy, but their happiness was tempered when it emerged that Alexei suffered from
haemophilia, a disease inherited from Alexandra’s grandmother Queen Victoria which impaired
the ability of blood to clot, meaning that cuts and bruises could potentially prove fatal.
Alexandra’s concern about her son’s condition
caused her own health to collapse, leading her to turn more to her faith. Rather than solving a problem, Tsarevich Alexei
was another addition to his parents’ list of anxieties. The defeats on land and sea during the Russo-Japanese
War highlighted the weakness of the Russian state and its military commanders and contributed
to a decline in the Tsar’s prestige. While news of Mukden and Tsushima made their
way to St Petersburg, strikes and disturbance
s continued throughout the country, reaching
a peak at the beginning of October with strikes in Moscow and St Petersburg. When the railwaymen went on strike, it paralysed
political and economic activity and prevented officials from travelling between St Petersburg
and Moscow. After Sergei Witte advised the Tsar to make
concessions to end the unrest, on the 30th of October, Nicholas issued a manifesto drawn
up by Witte promising an elected assembly with legislative powers and to create a Council
of Ministers, whose Chairman would effectively have the powers of a prime minister. A week later, Witte was made prime minister,
but despite his promises of restoring peace, the unrest continued, and a Soviet of Workers’
Deputies dominated by Leon Trotsky was established in St Petersburg, while in December the Bolsheviks
led an uprising in Moscow. Trotsky would later describe the events in
1905 as a dress rehearsal for the revolution which would overthrow the Tsar twelve years
later. For the tim
e being, Nicholas remained in power
as the revolution was brought under control by Pyotr Durnovo, the Minister of Internal
Affairs, who reasserted government control over the transport and communications network
and arrested members of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. By the end of 1905, many liberals rallied
to the government after being horrified at the radicalism of the masses. Most liberals formed the Constitutional Democratic
Party, nicknamed Kadets, hoping to use the legislative assembly to ca
rry out further
reforms, while a conservative minority who were satisfied by the concessions granted
by the October Manifesto joined the Octobrist Party. The new constitution was published in the
spring of the following year as the Fundamental Law of April 1906. As promised, the law created the State Duma,
an elected assembly which served as the lower house of a bicameral legislature. The upper house was the reformed State Council,
whose members were appointed by the Tsar and the nobility. Nicho
las continued to assert his “supreme
authority” and reserved for himself powers to dissolve the two parliamentary bodies or
to place provinces under a state of emergency. When Tsar Nicholas II opened the Duma at the
Tauride Palace in St Petersburg on the 27th of April 1906, he was a month shy of his thirty-eighth
birthday, and had been on the Russian throne for more than a decade. During this period the Russian economy continued
to industrialise, but the revolutionary organisations which had bee
n driven underground by his father
had re-emerged. Nicholas managed to gain control of Port Arthur
and southern Manchuria, only to lose it shortly thereafter with a humiliating defeat to Japan. Despite the imperial majesty on display at
the Tauride Palace, Nicholas had barely survived the Revolution of 1905 and was forced into
taking the first steps to creating a constitutional government which he was fundamentally opposed
to. The new constitutional experiment began poorly,
and the Tsar resented
sharing executive power with Witte. While peasant disturbances continued in the
countryside, the previously decisive Witte could not make up his mind how to respond,
leaving it up to Durnovo to pacify the country through military force. Nicholas kept Witte in office long enough
to secure a foreign loan allowing Russia to remain on the gold standard before dismissing
him in May, replacing him with the ineffectual Ivan Goremykin. Although the electoral law for the Duma had
been weighted towards t
he peasantry, the traditional supporters of the monarchy, when the State
Duma opened its first session in April 1906, it was dominated by the liberal Kadets and
the socialist Trudoviks. The mainstream socialist parties, the Socialist
Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, had decided to boycott the First Duma elections. Even so, the body’s demands for parliamentary
government and land reform were too radical for the Tsar, who dissolved the body in July. Elections for the Second Duma in January 19
07
returned a legislature even further to the left after the SDs and SRs agreed to participate. The Second Duma was soon dissolved, and the
electoral laws changed to ensure a more conservative legislature. While Nicholas was struggling to adapt to
life as a constitutional monarch, the imperial court welcomed the presence of Grigory Rasputin,
a Siberian peasant and religious mystic. Rasputin was introduced to the imperial couple
in late 1905 by Princess Anastasia of Montenegro, who would later ma
rry the Tsar’s uncle Grand
Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. Over the coming years, Rasputin gained considerable
influence over Nicholas and Alexandra for his ability to stop Tsarevich Alexei’s bleeding. Despite his condition and regular warnings
from his parents, Alexei was an active child and would occasionally hurt himself. On more than one occasion when the Tsarevich
appeared to be dying, Rasputin’s intervention, whether by touching the child or through his
prayers, would seemingly cure the young b
oy almost instantly. The imperial couple regarded Rasputin’s
presence as a sign of the people’s support for the monarchy, though his political influence
was often exaggerated by political opponents who supported the separation of the state
and the Orthodox Church. Rasputin’s presence at court damaged the
prestige of the Tsar and his family and was deemed an embarrassment by educated society,
but Nicholas and Alexandra resisted calls from Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin to expel
Rasputin from St Pe
tersburg. Stolypin had succeeded Durnovo as Minister
of Internal Affairs in the spring of 1906 before becoming Prime Minister in July. Before being promoted to ministerial level
he had served as the governor of Saratov province in southern Russia, and at the age of forty-four,
he was much younger than the Tsar’s previous ministers. Stolypin continued to crack down on peasant
disturbances, and among his opponents the hangman’s noose was nicknamed “Stolypin’s
necktie” while the trains carrying pea
sants into Siberia were known as “Stolypin’s
carriages.” Although a conservative nobleman, Stolypin
and Agriculture Minister Alexander Krivoshein proposed a land reform programme to weaken
peasant communes and encouraged the development of family smallholdings. He also attempted to stimulate the economic
development of Siberia by offering to give each peasant 40 acres of land to cultivate
alongside other financial inducements. He was a talented orator who made powerful
speeches in the Duma, and
he established a close working relationship with Alexander
Guchkov, whose Octobrist Party was the largest in the Third Duma. This alliance began to fail in 1909 and 1910,
when Stolypin’s proposals to strengthen the zemstvo and increase social protections
for factory workers were opposed by the landowners and industrialists who dominated the Duma. In the meantime, Stolypin and Guchkov’s
efforts to increase legislative control over the army damaged his relationship with the
Tsar. Stolypin’s plans
to expand the zemstvo system
to Ukraine and Belarus narrowly passed the Duma but were defeated in the State Council
in March 1911. Stolypin responded by threatening to resign
unless the Tsar were to use his emergency powers to suspend the legislature and adopt
the Western Zemstvo Bill by decree. Nicholas agreed to these conditions and retained
Stolypin, but the Prime Minister’s demands infuriated both the Tsar and the legislature. On the 14th of September 1911, while attending
a performance at t
he Kiev Opera with the Tsar and his eldest daughters, Stolypin was shot
by a leftist revolutionary assassin and died four days later on the 18th. The assassin was hanged a week after Stolypin’s
death, but Nicholas gave orders to drop the investigation, prompting rumours that the
assassination had been planned by supporters of the Tsar. Stolypin was succeeded by Finance Minister
Vladimir Kovkovtsov, but the new Prime Minister lacked the presence of his predecessor and
was a weak leader. Having re
mained at the head of the Finance
Ministry, Kovkovtsov’s desire to control spending led to clashes with General Vladimir
Sukhomlinov, the Minister of War, and Alexander Krivoshein at Agriculture. Sukhomlinov had been appointed by the Tsar
in 1909 to resist Stolypin’s efforts to give the Duma greater control over the armed
forces and demanded increased investment in the army and navy. Krivoshein was responsible for enacting Stolypin’s
land reforms and provided cheap credit through the Peasant Lan
d Bank to allow peasants to
buy their own land from nobles. He encouraged the development of schools,
and by 1914 around sixty per cent of Russian children received a primary education. In February 1914, Krivoshein managed to outmanoeuvre
Kovkovstov by persuading the Tsar to appoint his friend Peter Bark as Finance Minister
and the powerless Goremykin as Prime Minister, allowing the Minister of Agriculture to become
the dominant figure in the government. In the meantime, in 1913 Nicholas had ass
erted
his control over security policy by appointing Nikolai Maklakov as Minister of Internal Affairs. With the Tsar’s support, Maklakov cracked
down on the revolutionary press and unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the Duma’s powers. In 1914, St Petersburg was hit with a series
of strikes, but the rest of the country remained calm. Widespread demonstrations of popular support
in 1913 during the celebrations of 300 years of Romanov rule convinced Nicholas that he
continued to enjoy considerable
support across the country. After its inauspicious start, the constitutional
experiment was bringing an element of stability despite Stolypin’s assassination, and there
was a chance that with a strong prime minister such as Krivoshein to carry out his agenda
and manage parliamentary politics, Nicholas could be a constitutional monarch like his
cousin King George V in Britain. However, after Nicholas limited the electorate
in 1907, most of the Russian population remained without political represe
ntation and the workers
and many peasants were ready to rise up against the Tsar at any sign of weakness in the imperial
regime. The Tsar had been saved by the Russian army
in 1905 and 1906, and after the humiliation of defeat to Japan, Nicholas desperately sought
to stay out of war. Although Russia and Britain had been close
to war over their competing interests in Asia, Russia’s defeat in 1905 dispelled British
fears of the Russian threat and led to the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente of
1907. Together with the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale
of 1904 and the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894, this created the Triple Entente of Britain,
France, and Russia. The rival European bloc was the Triple Alliance
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, though the latter’s fidelity to the alliance was
suspect, as it had its own territorial claims to parts of the Austrian empire. Following the appointment of Sergei Sazonov
as Foreign Minister in 1909, the Tsar pursued a three-pronged policy to r
emain committed
to the Triple Entente, improve relations with Germany, and to promote unity among the Balkan
states in southeast Europe against further Austrian encroachment in old Ottoman territory
after Austria’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908. Rather than confronting Austria, the Balkan
alliance went to war with the Ottoman Empire over Macedonia and Albania in 1912, before
fighting each other for the spoils in 1913. While Russian nationalists advocated a Pan-Slavic
Union with the Balkan states,
Nicholas was more concerned about German ambitions in the
Ottoman Empire. The Russian Empire’s Black Sea trade, including
its substantial grain exports, passed through the Straits of Constantinople, by modern-day
Istanbul. In 1913 a German general Liman von Sanders
was appointed commander of the Constantinople garrison. Over the previous century the Ottomans had
routinely employed foreign experts as civil and military administrators, but the Russians
feared direct German control of the Straits.
Elsewhere in Europe, a naval arms race between
Britain and Germany increased the risk of war between the continent’s most powerful
states. After the humiliation of the Russo-Japanese
War, General Sukhomlinov embarked on a modernisation programme which included the centralisation
of military administration within the Ministry of War, an increase in the size of the field
army to over 1.4 million men, introducing machine gun crews at the regimental level,
and attaching an aviation detachment to ea
ch army corps. On the 28th of June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
the heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian
Serb student. The Austrian government in Vienna believed
that the Serbian government was behind the assassination, and four weeks later, on the
23rd of July, the Austrians issued an ultimatum to Serbia deliberately intended to provoke
war. Foreign Minister Sazonov predicted that the
conflict would develop into a continental war. Russia woul
d be duty-bound to support Serbia
and Germany would join the war against Russia, in turn resulting in hostilities between Germany
and France. Since the Anglo-French entente was not a formal
alliance, it was unclear whether Britain would join the war against Germany, but even with
Britain remaining on the sidelines, the war would engulf the continent. Nicholas remained optimistic and hoped to
come to an agreement with his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, but on the 30th of
July Nicholas was
urged by his ministers to order the mobilisation of the Russian army,
and on the 1st of August Germany declared war on Russia. On the 3rd of August Germany declared war
on France, and after the Germans crossed into Belgium the following day, the British government
answered a Belgian appeal for assistance and went to war with Germany on the 5th. The First World War was greeted in Russia
with a rare demonstration of national unity, inspiring confidence in the Tsar that his
armies would achieve vic
tory, following the example of Russia’s victory over Napoleon
a century earlier. Most European military planners expected the
war to be short, but the German army was the best in Europe, and Germany and Austria enjoyed
the strategic advantage of the central position, enabling them to move their armies quickly
between different fronts. Among the three Entente powers Britain and
its empire had the greatest potential, but it would take time for those resources to
be deployed, leaving Russia and Fra
nce to do most of the fighting on land. In order to avoid a two-front war, the Germans
hoped to launch a lightning strike to capture Paris and defeat France while the Russian
army was still mobilising, before turning its attention back east. The Russians took advantage of this by sending
two armies into Eastern Prussia ten days earlier than the Germans expected, albeit without
being perfectly equipped. Despite initial Russian successes, in late
August and early September the German Eighth Army u
nder General Paul von Hindenburg and
his chief of staff Erich von Ludendorff defeated the Russian Second and First armies in quick
succession at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Setting aside these disastrous defeats, the
Russians managed to hold the Germans at bay in Poland while a Russian offensive against
the Austrians captured Galicia in Western Ukraine. By the spring of 1915 the Russian army was
facing a shortage of munitions, and after a series of German offensives in Pola
nd, by
September the Russians were forced to abandon Poland and Lithuania. The defeats in Poland led to the crisis in
the military leadership as Supreme Commander Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, with the
support of the Duma, blamed War Minister Sukhomlinov for the logistical failures. After being imprisoned in the notorious Peter
and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, the Minister of War was dismissed from office in June and
replaced by General Alexei Polivanov, and in September the Tsar dismissed
his uncle
Grand Duke Nicholas and assumed the supreme command himself. By doing so, the Tsar was partly placing a
check on the Duma leaders who supported the Grand Duke, but the latter had also proven
an incompetent military leader who lost his nerve with his armies in full retreat. Without any meaningful military training himself,
Nicholas did not expect to take over control of strategic or operational decision-making,
which he left in the hands of his chief of staff, Mikhail Alexeev. The Tsar
hoped that his presence at the front
would improve coordination between military and civil authorities, and serve to improve
morale among the peasant soldiers that made up the ranks of the Russian army. While there were many advantages to the Tsar
taking over command of the Russian army, his presence at General Headquarters in Mogilev
in modern-day Belarus kept him at a distance from the political situation in the capital
city, which had been renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the war to sou
nd less German. On the 7th of September 1915, a majority of
the Duma’s deputies formed a Progressive Bloc demanding political reforms and a government
which enjoyed “public confidence.” In other words, they demanded one favourable
to the Progressive Bloc. The Bloc’s initiatives were supported by
the Union of Towns and the Zemstvo Union, which were formed at the beginning of the
war to coordinate local authorities’ support for the war effort. Many of the Tsar’s ministers also lobbied
for Goremyki
n’s dismissal as prime minister, believing that victory could only be achieved
by maintaining political unity and working in conjunction with the industrialists and
civil society leaders that led the Progressive Bloc. Unwilling to work with Goremykin and horrified
by the Tsar’s decision to assume the supreme command without consultation, the Council
of Ministers effectively went on strike, infuriating Nicholas in turn. While the ministers were afraid that as supreme
commander, the Tsar would be
associated with military setbacks suffered by the army, shortly
after Nicholas’ arrival the military situation improved as Kiev was successfully defended,
and the munitions crisis was overcome by effective coordination between the Ministry of War and
Russian industry. In the summer of 1916 General Alexei Brusilov
led a major offensive into Galicia which broke the Austrian lines and captured hundreds of
thousands of Austrian and German prisoners. The Russian successes forced Germany to redeploy
t
roops from the Western Front, weakening its assault on the French fortress of Verdun and
its defence of the River Somme after the British launched an offensive in July. While the army had enjoyed its best year in
1916, an economic crisis at home threatened the continuation of the war effort. A shortage of food and fuel created high inflation,
and the railway network was ill-equipped to bring food surpluses from the agricultural
south to the cities in the north and west while at the same time mov
ing troops to the
frontline. While aware of these problems, the economically-illiterate
Nicholas was incapable of solving them, while his ministers were increasingly sidelined. After the ‘ministerial strike’ in late
summer of 1915, the Tsar replaced most of his ministers with individuals who were regarded
as reliable supporters of the imperial regime. With her husband away at headquarters, the
Empress Alexandra assumed a greater role in the empire’s domestic affairs. In January 1916 Goremykin wa
s succeeded by
Boris Sturmer, a close confidant of Alexandra. When the Tsar sought to dismiss his Interior
Minister Alexander Protopopov in November 1916 under pressure from the Duma, the Empress
urged him not to give in. Alexandra’s German origins fuelled rumours
that she was acting against Russia’s interests, even though the Empress was critical of Wilhelm
II and regretted the fact that her brother Ernst Ludwig was fighting in German uniform. Alexandra was rumoured to be under the influence
of
Rasputin, whom she asked for advice on ministerial appointments. The boastful Rasputin exaggerated his influence
and claimed to enjoy the favours of many court ladies, and his presence at court continued
to damage the imperial family’s prestige at a time when it could ill afford it. Nicholas’s relatives were increasingly concerned
about Rasputin, and on the 30th of December a group including Prince Felix Yusupov, who
was married to the Tsar’s niece, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Nicholas’s c
ousin,
shot and killed Rasputin at the Yusupov Palace in St Petersburg. With the country seemingly on the verge of
revolution and unable to find a solution to the economic crisis, the Kadet leader Pavel
Milyukov stood up in the Duma in November and asked rhetorically whether the government’s
failures were caused by incompetence or treason. Once again, Nicholas was asked to appoint
a government that enjoyed the confidence of the Duma, a call echoed by aristocrats and
members of the imperial famil
y. While he privately recognised the danger of
the riots and strikes in Petrograd at the beginning of 1917, Nicholas remained optimistic
about the military situation and believed that a planned spring offensive would bring
victory and improve morale at home. On the 7th of March the Tsar left Tsarskoe
Selo for Headquarters, and the following day, disturbances began as the men of the factories
joined an International Women’s Day demonstration demanding bread. By the 11th almost all of the capital
city
was on strike, though initial attempts to control the rioting by troops loyal to the
imperial regime were successful. However, on the 12th, the Petersburg garrison
mutinied and prompted Nicholas to return to the capital. Striking railwaymen blocked the imperial train
and the Tsar was forced to divert to Pskov, where he arrived on the 14th. On the 12th of March twelve Duma deputies
formed a Provisional Government to take control of the capital, and on the same day the Petrograd
Soviet of Wor
kers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was formed. On the evening of the 14th, General Ruzsky,
commander of the northern front headquartered in Pskov, presented Nicholas with a message
from President of the Duma Mikhail Rodzianko urging Nicholas to grant parliamentary government
if he wished to retain his crown. The Tsar initially refused, but when he changed
his mind the following day it was too late, and Rodzianko urged the Tsar to abdicate to
prevent further bloodshed. The other generals, assured by th
e Duma leaders
that they were in control, joined in the chorus and urged Nicholas to abdicate. On the 15th of March Nicholas agreed to abdicate
in favour of his son, but after several hours worrying about the potential fate of Alexei
during a time of war and political instability, decided that he should instead be succeeded
by his brother Grand Duke Michael, who would serve as a constitutional monarch. On the 16th of March, under pressure from
the Provisional Government’s leaders, Michael decide
d not to assume the throne until a constituent
assembly was convened to determine whether to retain the monarchy. After returning to Mogilev, Nicholas issued
a final address to the army on the 21st of March urging the men to continue fighting
and to submit to the authority of the Provisional Government. Later that day, Nicholas was arrested and
taken back to Tsarskoe Selo, where he remained under house arrest for the next five months. Though subject to humiliation by their guards,
Nicholas and A
lexandra felt a sense of relief that the heavy burdens of government were
taken away from them. There was an expectation that the former imperial
couple would go into exile in Britain, and Pavel Milyukov, now Foreign Minister in the
Provisional Government, submitted a request for asylum to the British government on behalf
of Nicholas and Alexandra. The British prime minister David Lloyd George
was inclined to agree, but the Tsar’s cousin King George V feared that granting asylum
to the former Ru
ssian autocrat would damage his standing among British socialists and
place his own throne at risk. Even had such an offer been extended, Nicholas
and Alexandra would have been reluctant to abandon Russia out of a sense of duty despite
their calamities. In August 1917, the Provisional Government
sent Nicholas and his family to the city of Tobolsk in Siberia, where they lived in the
former Governor’s residence. The provincial city remained well-disposed
towards the fallen Tsar, and Nicholas and t
he children socialised in secret with the
more sympathetic guards. The fate of the Romanovs was destined to get
worse after November 1917, when the Bolsheviks under Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government. Since Imperial Russia used the Julian Calendar
which was twelve days behind the Gregorian Calendar used most of the world, the event
is known to history as the October Revolution. The Provisional Government had been unable
to assert its political power was in the hands of the Petrograd Sovi
et, while the failure
of a summer offensive in July strengthened support for the radical Bolsheviks who demanded
an end to the war. In January 1918, the Bolsheviks consolidated
their hold on power by closing down the Constituent Assembly, where they were outnumbered by the
Socialist Revolutionaries. Keen to secure his power in Russia, in March
Lenin reluctantly approved the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and
its allies, surrendering control of Poland, the Baltic states, Bela
rus, and Ukraine. The Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Constituent
Assembly and their capitulation to Germany created the conditions for civil war. In the spring of 1918, the Czech Legion, who
were making their way east along the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to join the allies on the
Western Front, staged an uprising against Bolshevik rule. The Bolshevik leadership had not decided what
to do with the former Tsar, but Lenin’s second-in-command Leon Trotsky hoped to bring
Nicholas to Moscow for a
show trial before executing him. In April 1918 the Bolshevik revolutionary
Vasily Yakovlev acted on instructions from the central government to bring Nicholas and
Alexandra to Moscow, but on the way they were intercepted by a detachment of Bolsheviks
from the Ural Soviet, who took control of the convoy and took them to their base in
Ekaterinburg. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Grand Duchess Maria
arrived on the 30th of April and were imprisoned in the house of Nikolai Ipatiev, a military
engineer. Th
e Tsarevich had been ill and had initially
been left behind with three of his sisters, but by the 23rd of May the rest of the family
arrived along with their doctor, Evgeny Botkin, and three servants. As the Czech Legion advanced on Ekaterinburg,
at the beginning of July the central leadership in Moscow decided that the Romanovs should
be executed in Ekaterinburg. On the 4th of July, the deputy head of the
Ekaterinburg secret police Yakov Yurovsky was appointed commandant of the Ipatiev House. I
n the early hours of the 17th of July, the
family and their attendants were brought into the basement. After the twelve men of the firing squad entered
the room, Yurovsky announced that the Ural Soviet had decided to execute the whole family. A stunned Nicholas asked, “What?” before
Yurovsky repeated his orders and the firing began. Three men in the firing squad claimed that
they had fired the fatal shot that accounted for the former Tsar, but regardless of who
was responsible, Nicholas II, the
last Tsar of Russia, was dead at the age of fifty, along
with his wife, his five children, and four loyal attendants. Yurovsky ordered his men to hide the bodies
at a location where they could not be found by the counter-revolutionary White armies
who were days away from Ekaterinburg. The Soviet government claimed in public that
only Nicholas had been executed, and even when it became increasingly clear that the
whole family had been eliminated, there were rumours that Tsarevich Alexei or one of
his
sisters may have survived and escaped. The memory of the dead Tsar served as a rallying-point
for the monarchists and counterrevolutionaries who opposed the Bolsheviks, but by 1921 Lenin’s
forces had won the Civil War and his Soviet regime would remain in power until 1991. From their exile in London, Paris, New York,
White emigrés continued to hope for a collapse of Soviet communism and the return of the
Russian monarchy. In 1981, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad
canonised Nicholas II and
his family, and in 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia
also agreed to confer sainthood on them. In the meantime, the remains of Nicholas,
Alexandra, and three of their daughters were discovered in a ditch near the Ipatiev House
in the late 1970s, and after DNA identification in 1998 they were buried in a special chapel
in the St Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg. In 2007 further remains were discovered at
a nearby site and later identified as those of Tsarevich Alexei and either
Grand Duchess
Maria or Anastasia. In 2015 the Russian Orthodox Church ordered
the exhumation of the five sets of remains in the chapel for further testing. While renewed investigations confirmed the
identification of the remains in 2020, as of 2024 they have not yet been reburied in
the chapel. The legacy of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia continues
to be debated among historians of Russia, and it is closely related to the question
of whether it was possible to avoid the horrors of Communist rule in
Russia in the 20th century. Nicholas had been exposed to revolutionary
violence in his early teens with the assassination of his grandfather Tsar Alexander II, and
the political instability would only increase during his own reign. After the unexpected death of his father Alexander
III in 1894, Nicholas came to the throne unprepared for government. Despite being a well-educated and intelligent
man, Nicholas was indecisive and unsocial and initially found it difficult to stand
up to his minister
s. As Tsar, Nicholas was able to make his mark
in foreign policy, but defeat in the Russo-Japanese War dented his prestige and fuelled domestic
opposition to his rule. When peasant uprisings and strikes broke out
in response to heavy taxation and poor working conditions, Nicholas wavered between granting
concessions and suppressing unrest by force. Although personally a kind and gentle man,
his unwillingness to surrender the powers which he considered to be given to him by
God and his belief tha
t the Russian political system was unsuited to representative democracy
meant that he only agreed to establish an elected legislative assembly in October 1905
in order to keep his throne. After doing so, he could only work with the
Duma when the electoral laws were amended to exclude the majority of the population. Despite all the difficulties he faced, Nicholas
ultimately relied on the army to crack down on disturbances, and it was only the First
World War which created the conditions for Nicho
las to give up his throne in March 1917. Though a prisoner after his abdication, Nicholas
felt a sense of liberation after being relieved of the burdens of government, but any hopes
of a comfortable retirement were extinguished by the Bolshevik Revolution, leading to a
brutal end at the Ipatiev House. What do you think of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia? Was he a weak and incompetent ruler and a
brutal autocrat who was responsible for cracking down on political opposition and encouraging
anti-Semitic
pogroms, or did he not go far enough in using force to maintain political
stability in the empire? Please let us know in the comment section
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. The man known to history as Vladimir Lenin
was born as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on the 22nd, April 1870, or the 10th of April, using
the old style Julian calendar, in the city of Simbirsk over 700 kilometres to the east
of the Russian capital, Moscow. His father was Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov who
had bee
n born into a serf family in Russia in 1831, but had earned his freedom in his
youth and then studied physics and mathematics at Kazan University. He subsequently enjoyed a successful career
as an educator and public school overseer in Russia and rose to become a state councillor,
a position which meant that in the early 1880s the Ulyanovs became part of the minor Russian
nobility based on Ilya’s contributions to public education within the Russian Empire. Vladimir’s mother was Maria Alexandrovn
a
Blank, who was of mixed German, Swedish, Russian and Jewish ancestry. It seems likely that Vladimir never knew of
his mother’s Jewish heritage. She and Ilya had eight children in total,
two of whom died in infancy. Vladimir was the third eldest, arriving after
Anna in 1864 and Alexander in 1866. Vladimir’s childhood was comfortable, in
line with his father’s increasingly successful career. For instance, as well as living in a well-appointed
home in Simbirsk, the Ulyanovs also holidayed at a ma
nor in Kokushkino in the countryside. Vladimir also emerged as his father’s son,
displaying a considerable intellect by his teenage years, excelling at school and becoming
an accomplished chess player. But the upper middle class idyll of his childhood
years was soon shattered. When he was fifteen years of age his father
died prematurely of a brain haemorrhage in January 1886, an event which had a profound
impact on Vladimir who after this, began to become an increasingly reactionary and rebellio
us
character. The situation was massively compounded the
following year when his older brother, Alexander, who had left to attend Saint Petersburg State
University some time earlier, was implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate the ruler of
the Russian Empire, Alexander III. Vladimir’s brother, along with several others,
were executed shortly afterwards for their role in the conspiracy. Vladimir would never be the same again and
his descent into extremist politics in Russia can be traced to thi
s event. Vladimir’s subsequent actions and those
of his brother Alexander in 1887 must be viewed in relation to the political landscape of
Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. For centuries Russia had largely lain outside
of the mainstream of European politics and culture but beginning with the reign of Peter
I in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, efforts had been made
to modernise and reform the country to make it more like other European states such a
s
France and the Austrian Empire. This work was continued by his near successor,
Catherine the Great, who was German herself and wanted to make Russia a modern nation. This all occurred as the Russian Empire was
expanding dramatically and by the end of the eighteenth century Russian explorers and colonists
had reached as far as the Bering Straits and Manchuria, extending the Russian state as
far as the Pacific Ocean, while in the west Catherine began a series of conquests which
brought parts of
the Caucasus, Poland and Ukraine under Russian rule. Yet despite all of this, the country remained
backward in many respects. Serfdom, under which Russian commoners were
tied to the land and their manorial lord as a quasi-slave, still predominated across the
country; the economy remained resoundingly rural; the Orthodox Church had a huge influence
over society; and the country was incredibly authoritarian, being ruled by the Tsars and
the nobility in their own interest. In a world where nations
like the United States,
Britain and France were emerging in their modern form in the nineteenth century, the
Russian Empire looked politically and socially backwards by comparison. These issues were compounded by events in
the years before Vladimir’s birth and while he was growing up. In 1855 Alexander II ascended to the throne
as Tsar of Russia. He was a liberal reformer who wished to drag
Russia into the modern world. Thus, in 1861 he brought serfdom to an end
and emancipated the serfs of Russ
ia in one of the most striking social reforms of the
nineteenth century. He also sought to reform the courts, policing
and education system. However, in 1866 he only just survived an
assassination attempt and thereafter his liberal inclinations were toned down. But the reforms he had initiated had let the
genie out of the bottle so to speak in Russia. New ideas were being discussed in a more tolerant
environment, driven by writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bulgokov,
wh
o questioned Russian society and discussed ideas and political theories like anarchism,
nihilism and communism. Many Russians wanted further reforms of society
as a result, notably the creation of a parliament and an end to the autocratic state ruled by
the Tsars. Groups such as the Narodniks and the People’s
Will emerged as politico-terrorist organisations agitating for these changes and it was the
latter group which in 1881 succeeded in assassinating Alexander II. This ushered in a period of e
ven greater discontent
as he was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, who was opposed to the reforms his father
had implemented and wanted to crack down on liberal dissent in Russia. Thus, the country Vladimir was growing up
in during the 1880s was a powder-keg of political discontent and instability. It was in this political environment that
Vladimir arrived in 1887 to Kazan University to commence his studies. He was almost immediately involved in a protest
against the government’s crackdown on
student societies which were perceived as hotbeds
of political dissent. His role in this, resulted in a brief arrest
and his expulsion from the university, but his brief spell there had ignited the fire
of political radicalisation. In the months that followed, Vladimir began
reading voraciously of various Russian and European political writers. Amongst others he was soon attracted to the
writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two German political philosophers and social
critics who had bee
n deeply critical of the manner in which industrial society was developing
and who had postulated in their 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, that bourgeois capitalist
society should be replaced by one in which the industrial proletariat took everything
in society into communal ownership. This appealed to Vladimir at a time when industrialisation
was beginning to rapidly advance in Russian cities like Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan
and Samara. However, it was not the only intellectual
infl
uence on him at this time and his political views were still under formation, although
there is no doubt they were radical even before he reached his twentieth year. In 1890, Vladimir’s mother was able to use
her family’s connections within the Russian education system to ensure that he was able
to sit exams at the University of St Petersburg in lieu of completing his studies at Kazan
University. He passed with first class honours and thereafter
took up a position as a legal assistant in Samara
during the 1890s. Throughout these years he continued to foster
his political radicalism and was involved in numerous political organisations. Russia’s radical politics was buoyant at
this time owing to events in 1891. A dry autumn was followed by a bitterly cold
winter where temperatures dropped to below -30 degrees Celsius in some parts of the country
along the course of the River Volga. This was followed by a particularly dry spring
and summer in 1892, all of which combined to cause harvest f
ailures across much of Russia. Famine struck thereafter and this was compounded
by the incompetent response of the government of Tsar Alexander III and other pillars of
Russian society such as the Orthodox Church. By the time the famine abated in late 1892
over 350,000 people had died of starvation and millions more were malnourished or badly
impacted in some other way. As criticism of the government escalated radical
groups such as the communists and nihilists gained ever greater numbers of sup
porters
in Russia. As the political radicalism of Russian society
increased, Lenin found himself feeling marginalised in provincial Samara and so it was, that in
1893 he set off for the capital, Saint Petersburg. There he continued to work as a legal assistant,
but his energies were primarily poured into working to foster the Marxist and communist
movement in the city. Socially revolutionary groups such as these
were effectively outlawed by the government of Alexander III, however his premature
death
from kidney failure in 1894 brought his son Nicholas II to the throne, but while he was
more liberal than his father the political environment would remain repressive. No sooner had he arrived in the capital than
Vladimir became involved with a revolutionary communist cell in the city whose members primarily
came from the Technological Institute of Saint Petersburg. They termed themselves Social Democrats in
emulation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which was Marxist and communis
t in
its ideology. Already by the spring of 1894 Vladimir was
under observation by the secret police in Saint Petersburg as he had come to their attention
as a rising Marxist figure. Nevertheless, his politics only became more
radical in the months that followed, particularly so after he met and entered into a relationship
with Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he referred to as Nadya, a schoolteacher who espoused
radical Marxist political views. By that time he had also become involved in
the undergroun
d publishing of Marxist pamphlets in the city. It was this activity which eventually saw
him and several dozen of his associates arrested by the authorities in 1895, just as they had
been preparing to publish a communist newspaper called The Worker’s Cause. Lenin was refused legal representation following
his arrest and was detained for over a year before he was sentenced. This was a formative period in his life, as
he began working on a book entitled The Development of Capitalism in Russia whil
e in jail. Eventually late in 1896 he was sentenced to
three years in exile in Siberia, the cold, vast and inhospitable region of Russia beyond
the Ural Mountains. This was not a prison sentence, but the Russian
state viewed exile to Siberia as effectively removing a political threat from civilization,
so remote and under-populated was Siberia. He was joined there by Nadya in 1898 and they
were wed within weeks. Owing to medical complications which Nadya
suffered from, though, they would never h
ave children. Vladimir continued to write throughout this
time, eventually publishing The Development of Capitalism in Russia under the pseudonym
‘Vladimir Ilin’ in 1899. His exile ended in the early spring of 1900,
but the authorities forbade him from returning to Saint Petersburg and so it was, that he
briefly settled in Pskov, a city south of the capital. Here Vladimir became involved in publishing
a new revolutionary newspaper entitled Iskra meaning The Spark, however he quickly realised
tha
t he would be re-arrested and suffer an even greater sentence if he continued to operate
on Russian soil. Consequently, in the summer of 1900 he left
for Switzerland, connecting with some revolutionary groups there before relocating to Munich in
the German Empire where he was joined by Nadya in 1901. It was at this time that he began writing
under the name which he would become synonymous with: Lenin. By 1902 he and Nadya had moved again, this
time to London, where Lenin ran Iskra from afar, wit
h the paper being smuggled into Russia. It was during this time in exile in London
that Lenin composed his most famous written work, ‘What is to be Done?’ in 1902. In this, he rejected the view held by many
communists that it was inevitable that the proletariat would move society towards a socialist
state in advance of a communist one. Adherents of this view claimed that the role
of communist parties was simply to shepherd that process along. Instead Lenin believed a more interventionist
line wa
s needed in order to ensure the victory of communism over capitalism, if needs be
by overt armed struggle. His belief was that the working conditions
of the proletariat and other factors did create a greater desire for a socialist state amongst
the workers of countries like Russia, Germany and Britain, but they would not move towards
socialism and then communism without a revolutionary movement to guide them there. Once this was achieved in one nation, Lenin
believed that the state would serve t
o drive the international communist movement. As such Lenin now conceived of the Russian
communist movement as what he termed the “vanguard of the proletariat,” a movement which would
lead the proletariat of Russia and then Europe towards communism. But inherent in this view was a danger. If the communist parties in Russia were responsible
for the communist movement both at home and internationally, then surely all manner of
conduct by the Russian communist movement could be justified as necessa
ry for the greater
good of international communism? In London Lenin also became involved in one of the critical episodes in the early history
of the Russian communist movement. While Lenin was in exile in Siberia in 1898,
the disparate revolutionary cells and groups that constituted Russian communism had united
into the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP, formed at an underground conference
held in the city of Minsk in March 1898. The party was soon being targeted by the Russian
sec
ret police, the Okhrana, and several of its leaders were arrested and imprisoned within
months of its establishment. Accordingly, a decision was taken to hold
the RSDLP’s 2nd Party Congress abroad when it was held in 1903. However, when the delegates met in London
in a chapel on Tottenham Court Road in August, divisions soon began to appear. One faction, led by Julius Martov, argued
that party membership should be kept broad in order to appeal to as many people as possible
back in Russia, as ind
ustrial workers there still only constituted 3% of the population. However, the other faction, which Lenin quickly
emerged as the leader of, argued that membership should be restricted to more committed revolutionaries. When a vote was held on the matter in November,
the party split in two. Lenin’s group became known as the Bolsheviks
and the other faction were known thereafter as the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were the smaller grouping,
though confusingly Bolshevik actually means ‘majority’ and
Menshevik means ‘minority’,
a contradiction owing to the fact that the majority of the editorial board of Iskra voted
in favour of Lenin’s faction. The split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks
did not result in the creation of two autonomous political parties immediately. Rather these now became two factions operating
within the RSDLP. Nevertheless the division between them was
extremely acrimonious, fuelled by Lenin himself who in the summer of 1904 published a treatise
entitled One Ste
p Forward, Two Steps Back, which bitterly attacked the Mensheviks. These actions were successful and by early
1905, the Bolsheviks were acquiring control over the central committee of the RSDLP. The timing was propitious, as important events
were occurring in Russia in the first months of 1905. On the 22nd of January that year, a procession
of several thousand unarmed workers marched on the Tsar’s Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg
to peacefully present a petition for an improvement of workers’ r
ights in Russian factories. In a striking overreaction, government forces
opened fire on the protestors, killing over 150 people and injuring hundreds more in what
became known as Bloody Sunday. This, combined with Russia’s defeat in the
Russo-Japanese War, incited a revolution across Russia in 1905, with workers striking in many
cities, portions of the army mutinying and agrarian unrest across the countryside. The Revolution of 1905 was the spark which
led Lenin to return to Russia for the firs
t time in five years. He was soon in Saint Petersburg where he was
central to establishing a new communist newspaper entitled Novaya Zhizn, meaning New Life. Through this and his other writings, he advocated
in favour of trying to expand the RSDLP membership at this time of intense revolutionary fervour
in Russia, but the moment was already passing the party by. In October 1905 the Tsar, Nicholas II, issued
what is known as the October Manifesto. In this he made wide-ranging concessions to
the m
yriad protestors throughout Russia. These included a declaration that many civil
rights which had been established elsewhere in Europe as far back as the eighteenth century
would now be granted to Russian citizens, while the Manifesto also promised that a new
Russian parliament to be known as the Duma would be created and political parties could
be established to elect members to this legislative assembly. This had the effect of ending the political
crisis and concluding the Revolution of 1905,
however, thereafter, Nicholas reneged on most
of his promises. While a State Duma was established, Nicholas
disbanded the first one which was elected in 1906 when the membership of the parliament
was deemed to be too radical. Further Dumas were conservative and ineffective
organs of government. Meanwhile martial law was quickly imposed
in 1906 and political dissent was crushed across Russia in the years that followed. As the political crackdown gathered pace in
1906 and 1907 Lenin and the Bolshe
viks considered their options. The Revolution of 1905 had clearly been a
false dawn. What then was the path forward? One faction, led by a rising figure within
the Georgian branch of the communist movement, Joseph Stalin, advocated engaging in a terror
campaign whereby state institutions would be attacked, a programme which would have
the added benefit of helping finance the RSDLP. There were few supporters of this, though
Lenin was not entirely opposed to it. By early 1906 in the face of the cr
ackdown,
he had slipped over the border into the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was a constituent
part of the Russian Empire, though ruled somewhat autonomously. Here the Bolsheviks were able to operate with
some freedom for a time in 1906 and could easily get their printed material into Saint
Petersburg and Moscow from just across the Finnish border. Yet it was soon realised that there would
need to be a return to the tactics employed between 1900 and 1905. Once again the RSDLP leaders would hea
d into
exile further to the west in countries like Britain where their activities were more tolerated
than in the autocratic east. By 1907 Lenin was back in London where the
Bolsheviks successfully resumed control over the RSDLP against the Menshevik faction at
the party’s Fifth Congress which took place that summer. A decision was then taken to move the party’s
headquarters to Paris, where Lenin and Nadya had relocated by the end of 1908, as part
of their never-ending lives as nomadic revolutio
naries, but not before Lenin had spent several months
undertaking research in the British Museum in London in the summer of 1908, work which
became the basis of his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The subsequent move to Paris also proved transient
and over the next several years Lenin spent stints, usually consisting of a few months
at a time, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Prague and Krakow. These were years of decline for him as his
influence with the RSDLP seemed to ebb as some elements wi
thin the party favoured entering
into parliamentary politics back in Russia, despite the fact that the State Duma Tsar
Nicholas II had established in 1905 was little more than a smokescreen to pretend that parliamentary
representation had been granted in Russia. Moreover, both his and Nadya’s health were
declining. Lenin was probably suffering from the early
stages of acute atherosclerosis, a disease which leads to an abnormal build-up of fat
and cholesterol on the artery walls, though some have
hypothesised that his health problems
may have stemmed from neuro-syphilis. Whatever the exact cause of his ailment, it
began to cause considerable problems during these years in exile, as his star waned within
the Russian communist movement. Meanwhile, in 1912 the split between the Bolsheviks
and the Mensheviks was formalised as they divided into two separate political parties. The opportunity for Lenin to re-establish
himself as a central figure within the Bolshevik Party and for the Russian
communist movement
to reignite itself emerged in the strangest of fashions, specifically the outbreak of
a European war. For years tensions between the major European
powers had been building over a myriad of issues, most notably the rise of the German
Empire as a challenge to British supremacy, colonial rivalry amongst all the major powers
in the Scramble for Africa and a similar Scramble for Asia, and regional tensions over the changing
political situation in the Balkans where the Ottoman Empi
re was collapsing after centuries
of dominating the region. Russia was particularly concerned with the
latter issue where it was in competition with the Empire of Austria-Hungary to succeed the
Turks as the dominant regional power. Thus, when a regional crisis arose there in
the summer of 1914 it soon escalated into a war between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Within days Germany had joined Austria-Hungary
and the British and the French had in turn declared war on the governments in Berlin
and Vien
na in support of their Russian ally. The First World War had commenced. By the end of it, Russia would be transformed. When the war broke out in the finals days
of July 1914, Lenin was in Galicia, a region which straddles the borders of Poland and
Ukraine today but which formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth
century. He was briefly imprisoned by the Austro-Hungarian
authorities owing to his Russian citizenship, but he was soon able to prove that he was
anything but a
supporter of the Tsarist regime of Nicholas II. Thus he was released and he and Nadya headed
to neutral Switzerland where they spent the next two years as the war raged around them
in Europe. There he continued to write and theorise,
publishing Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917. By now Lenin’s political thought was beginning
to mature and he was willing to diverge from orthodox Marxism in a way which few communist
ideologues were by the 1910s. In particular he rejected Marx’s
idea that
every society had to gradually transition from autocracy in the shape of kings and emperors
to a bourgeois democracy governed by the middle and upper classes before it could transition
to a socialist revolution and then communism. Lenin, always with an eye to the situation
in Russia where no bourgeois democracy could be said to have yet emerged, theorised in
Switzerland in the mid-1910s that it was possible for a state to move straight from autocracy
to a socialist revolution, effectiv
ely skipping the development of a bourgeois democracy. Such an experiment would soon be attempted
in Russia. As Lenin’s political thought was evolving
in the peaceful Alpine region, Russia’s war effort was proceeding dismally. The Russian army was poorly commanded and
badly trained and in the German imperial army on the Eastern Front it faced the most effective
military in the world. Matters were compounded when Tsar Nicholas
II decided to take command of the army himself. 1916 actually saw Russ
ian gains, most notably
through the Brusilov Offensive which resulted in the capture of extensive territory in Poland,
while Romania’s entry into the war on the side of Britain, France and Russia also aided
the Russian war effort in the Balkans. However, by the end of the year food shortages
and social unrest were escalating within Russia itself as the war crippled supply lines and
caused scarcity everywhere. Disaffection at the Tsarist government was
also running at an all-time high owing to co
ncerns about the influence over the imperial
family of Grigory Rasputin, a mystic and self-proclaimed holy man. Eventually this spilled over on the 23rd of
February 1917 into mass protests in Saint Petersburg, which had been renamed Petrograd
in 1914, and then other Russian cities. Over the next week the Tsarist government
gradually lost control of the country and by early March it was clear that the military
was no longer willing to intervene in a decisive way to save Nicholas II. With his fami
ly surrounded in Petrograd and
himself surrounded by hostile troops as he attempted to make his way back to the capital
from the Eastern Front, the Tsar eventually took the advice of the army chiefs and several
senior members of the Duma and abdicated the throne on the 3rd of March 1917. The brief February Revolution had brought
the Romanov dynasty to an end after 300 years of ruling Russia. In Switzerland Lenin was soon abreast of what was occurring back home. Within days he was preparing to re
turn to
Russia again after many more years in exile. His power within the Bolshevik movement had
revived during the war owing to his stance that the communist movement should refuse
to play any role in the conflict, instead lambasting it as a clash of capitalists and
imperialist regimes. He was facilitated in his efforts to head
back to Russia by the German government who provided a sealed train to him and a few dozen
other Russian dissidents to travel from the Swiss-German border to the North S
ea, the
belief being that Lenin would serve to destabilise Russia’s politics and potentially aid the
German war effort on the Eastern Front. By March the company had reached the Baltic
Sea, where they headed by ferry to neutral Sweden and then onwards by land north through
Sweden and into Finland. Along the way they received updates of developments
in Petrograd where the State Duma had formed a provisional government, one which looked
set to be dominated by a mix of centrist revolutionaries and
the liberal aristocracy. But this new regime had immediately run into
trouble as the Russian lines on the Eastern Front literally collapsed in the face of mounting
desertions and a lack of leadership. Thus, when Lenin’s train pulled into Petrograd
on the 16th of April 1917 the new regime was already experiencing difficulties. He immediately set to work bolstering the
Bolshevik cause, addressing large rallies of proletarian workers in the city in the
late spring and early summer, as well as distr
ibuting the ‘April Theses’ which he had written
on his journey back to Russia and which called for a new government based around workers’
councils called ‘soviets’. Tensions built in the weeks that followed,
culminating in mid-July, a period which has become known as the July Days and during which
workers and soldiers engaged in violent demonstrations against the government, fuelled by Bolshevik
agitation. In the aftermath of the July Days the provisional
government moved to suppress the Bolshev
iks and Lenin and many of his followers fled over
the border to the semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. Other senior members of the party such as
Leon Trotsky, an emerging theorist and organiser, were arrested in Petrograd. From Helsinki in the early autumn of 1917
Lenin and his followers began plotting a new counter-revolution in Russia to overthrow
the provisional government. They were not alone and elements within the
Russian army and navy were plotting similar initiatives against the pro
visional government,
which was effectively living on borrowed time owing to poor handling of the war and failure
to stabilise the domestic situation. Throughout the autumn the political situation
remained tense in Russia, with the commander-in-chief of the Russian military, General Lavr Kornilov,
attempting a military takeover. In order to suppress this, the provisional
government was forced to turn to the communists and their workers’ soviets in Petrograd
for help, a development which strengthe
ned the cause of the Bolsheviks. Lenin was consequently able to slip back across
the border into the capital in early October, where Leon Trotsky had been elected as head
of the Petrograd soviet. The Bolsheviks had also managed to outflank
their rivals within the Russian communist movement, the Mensheviks, by this time. The latter had played a greater role in the
State Duma over the years and had co-operated more with the provisional government since
March, whereas the Bolsheviks were increasing
ly able to capitalise on their persistently uncompromising
attitude since the 1900s. Thus, by the time Lenin returned to Petrograd
in October the time was wholly propitious for the Bolsheviks to try to seize power in
Russia once and for all. The coup which occurred in Petrograd on the
7th of November 1917 or the 25th of October in the Julian calendar which Russia used at
the time, was one of the seminal moments in modern world history, lauded thereafter by
the communist movement as the October R
evolution. It followed from several weeks of planning
by Lenin, Trotsky and others in Petrograd in early and mid-October. Armed militias were prepared in Petrograd,
Moscow and other cities to move against the government. It is a sign of how powerful the movement
had become that the provisional government was aware of what was being planned, but could
not stop it, despite efforts to effectively shut down the city of Petrograd on the 24th
of October to forestall a further revolution. Lenin and Tro
tsky responded by calling on
the Military-Revolutionary Committee and the soviets to occupy government buildings on
the 25th of October. By the end of the day most of Petrograd and
Moscow were under Bolshevik control. The following day Bolshevik Red Guards, as
their revolutionary soldiers were termed, entered the Winter Palace in Petrograd and
effectively removed the provisional government from power. That evening a congress of Russia’s workers’
councils, the soviets, was convened in Petrograd,
which culminated the following day, the 27th
of October, in the declaration of a new socialist government. In order not to alienate the bulk of the Russian
population, most of whom were still agrarian agricultural workers, talk of a communist
state was initially limited, but that is what was effectively established in late October
1917. Within days the revolutionaries made some
of their views and intentions known to the wider political community across Russia. This was a polyglot empire which st
retched
from the Baltic Sea in Europe to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic Circle south into
the deserts of Central Asia. It incorporated a vast array of different
people including Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians,
Moldovans, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Armenians and the various ethnic peoples of the thinly populated
Siberian region beyond the Ural Mountains. It was with the goal of assuring this vast
array of people that the new government would rule Rus
sia for all its people that the Declaration
of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia was issued on the 2nd of November 1917, just days
after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. This affirmed that all ethnic people living
under Russian rule were equal and sovereign and had a right to self-determination. It also abolished religious and national privileges
in line with Marxist ideology. The document, which was signed by Lenin and
Joseph Stalin, who had risen to become a senior figure within
the Bolshevik movement since
his first emergence during the Revolution of 1905, is a striking testament to the idealism
of the Bolshevik revolution at its outset. The Declaration was effectively saying that
the imperialism which had characterised the Russian Empire would not be maintained. The subject people of the Tsars could decide
their own political future. Within months the communist regime would begin
to completely renege on this promise. The October Revolution did not result automaticall
y
in the creation of a one-party state. The provisional government had been preparing
to hold elections for the formation of a new constituent assembly prior to the Revolution
and the Bolsheviks followed through with this plan early in 1918. There were, after all, other elements within
the revolutionary movement in Russia which had a claim to power, notably the Mensheviks
and other leftist and revolutionary groups. Accordingly a Russian Constituent Assembly
met in January 1918, but events were o
vertaking it as the Bolsheviks, who in March 1918 were
to formally rechristen themselves as the Russian Communist Party, aspired to absolute power. In the months that followed real power was
increasingly vested in the hands of the workers’ councils or soviets in cities like Petrograd
and Moscow, while centralised power was monopolised by the Political Bureau or Politburo of the
Russian Communist Party. In tandem the party began a concentrated campaign
of expelling Mensheviks and members of other
socialist and revolutionary groups from the
soviets and other political bodies. Thus, by the end of 1918 the Russian Communist
Party had effectively turned Russia into a one-party state which they controlled. Lenin emerged in the course of this formative
year as the head of the new communist state. Perhaps most importantly he was the chair
of Sovnarkom, the name of the Council of People’s Commissars which effectively oversaw the governance
of the soviets or workers’ councils throughout Russia o
n behalf of the Russian Communist
Party. It would subsequently become one of the main
executive branches of the government of what was evolving into the Soviet Union. The chairs of Sovnarkom would later serve
as the official head of state, but these titles and roles were still evolving in 1918. As well as chairing Sovnarkom Lenin also sat
on the Politburo and the Council of Labour and Defence. Thus, when Lenin relocated to the Kremlin
in Moscow, the ancient centre of government prior to the movi
ng of the capital to Saint
Petersburg by Tsar Peter I in the early eighteenth century, he did so as the most powerful figure
within the new communist regime. This came at a cost though. With the political environment still highly
unstable there were three serious attempts on his life alone in 1918. The third assassination attempt on the morning
of the 30th of August 1918 resulted in Lenin being shot twice and badly wounded, with blood
entering his lungs. His health, which had been precarious for
years, rapidly declined in the period thereafter. In tandem with this reorganisation of the
government in 1918 to establish a country ruled by the Politburo, Sovnarkom and the
soviets, 1918 saw the Communist Party begin to introduce a number of major economic reforms
in line with Marxist ideology. As early as the 8th of November 1917, less
than two weeks after the October Revolution, a Decree on Land was issued by the new government. This declared that all the land across Russia
which was owned
by the old Russian nobility and the Orthodox Church was now confiscated
by the state and was to be presently redistributed amongst the peasantry in line with communist
ideology. A debate would follow involving Lenin and
others over what kind of agricultural policy should be followed thereafter. Lenin favoured the establishment of large
collective farms run by the state, but this would not be resolved for some time. In the cities major industries and factories
were also brought under state owner
ship and the new ownership structure effectively handed
control of them over to the soviets. New rules were introduced to reform the labour
laws as well. For instance, the working day was limited
to eight hours a day, a highly liberal decision given that workers across Europe in many countries
like Britain and Germany had been agitating for decades to have the working day gradually
reduced from as much as fourteen or twelve hours a day. In tandem with these economic and property
reforms a wide a
rray of legislation was passed by Lenin’s government in late 1917 and 1918
to transform the social and legal landscape of Russia. For instance, communist ideology rejected
religion. Accordingly in January 1918 the new government
decreed the immediate separation of church and state at a time when organised Christian
churches across Europe still had a major influence over education and other social matters. In tandem the new communist state stepped
into the breach and began providing free educatio
n to all. In a country like Russia where only a very
small proportion of the population were in receipt of a comprehensive education in the
early twentieth century this was a major development and a campaign to begin tackling widespread
illiteracy was also initiated. Other aspects of Russian life such as banking,
transport, trade and communications were also soon being brought under state ownership,
while the old Tsarist legal system was quickly replaced by one presided over by People’s
Courts.
This differed from most judicial systems across
Europe and the common law courts of Britain in particular as they were presided over by
a mix of a judge and two people’s assessors. The latter were like jurors in the common
law system, but with greater powers which included the right of decision in cases in
co-operation with the judge. Of course beyond these economic and social
reforms, there was still a war to be dealt with. 1917 had been a terrible year for the Russian
war effort on the Eastern
Front. In the course of it mass desertion and the
unwillingness of many Russian military commanders to fight first for the Tsarist regime and
then for the provisional government following the February Revolution had seen the German
Empire advance along a wide front stretching from the Baltic Sea south-east through Poland
and Ukraine. Lenin’s government quickly accepted that
it could not hope to extricate Russia from the conflict without the loss of territory
and so it entered into negotiations
almost immediately with Berlin with a view to terminating
Russian involvement in what Lenin had always lambasted as a capitalist, imperialist conflict. Accordingly, on the 3rd of March 1918, just
four months after the October Revolution, Russia and the Central Powers led by Germany
signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under the terms of the agreement Russia effectively
renounced control over all its territories in the Baltic States region, Poland and Ukraine. Germany annexed much of the Russian t
erritory
in Poland, while the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were made into independent
German vassal states. A new Ukrainian state acquired its independence,
as did Finland. Further to the south-east Russia also ceded
some territory to Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire. This was an incredibly punitive peace agreement,
one which stripped Russia of a vast amount of its prime agricultural land and industrial
cities, as well as some of the most densely populated areas of the Russia
n Empire. But in agreeing to it, the nascent communist
state extricated itself from the war with Germany in order to concentrate on consolidating
its control over Russia. Lenin’s government desperately needed peace
with Germany and the other Central Powers in the spring of 1918, for the revolution
which they had initiated in October 1917 had not been accepted by a great many elements
within Russia and civil war was developing across the nation. The primary enemy of the new regime were known
as t
he White Army in contrast to the Red Army of the soviet regime, but in reality the ‘Whites’
were a very broad array of counter-revolutionaries who were unwilling to accept the new regime. They included large segments of the old Russian
aristocracy and the Orthodox Church, both of which overnight had found themselves stripped
of the great wealth and power which they had enjoyed in Russia for centuries. Other elements amongst the Whites included
fractious elements within the Russian army and navy
who were unwilling to accept the
communist takeover, as well as other centrists and leftists who gravitated towards the counter-revolution
once it became clear that the Bolsheviks were going to monopolise power and that there would
be no form of democratic communism in Lenin’s Russia. By the spring and summer of 1918 significant
parts of Russia had fallen into the hands of this unorthodox alliance of anti-Bolsheviks. The early stages of the Russian Civil War
were difficult for Lenin’s government
. This was owing to events elsewhere. By the late autumn of 1918 the First World
War was winding down as Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to collapse internally. The war eventually came to an end on the 11th
of November 1918 when Germany surrendered, the Kaiser Wilhelm II already having abdicated
his throne by that time. With the wider global conflict over, the victorious
powers, particularly Britain, but also France, the United States and Japan, determined to
ensure the overthrow o
f the new communist state in Russia. The great powers in London and Paris were
determined that a radical socialist government would not come to control one of the most
powerful states in Europe and so from late 1918 Britain and others began supplying enormous
resources to the White Army. Expeditionary forces were also dispatched
to Russia by Britain and others, while the newly created state of Poland which was formed
following Germany’s defeat went to war with Russia with western aid. As this oc
curred, the early stages of the
civil war in 1918 and 1919 were very difficult for Lenin’s government and it seemed for
some time that the new regime might not survive long. The immense emergency which confronted the
fledgling Soviet state in 1918 and 1919 must be borne in mind when assessing the early
development of that same state. Faced with multiple threats to its very existence
Lenin and his closest associates such as Trotsky and Stalin began unleashing state terror to
retain control of the
territory which remained in Soviet hands. This was occurring as early as December 1917
when Lenin ordered the creation of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution
and Sabotage. It is better known as the Cheka and the first
of the extremely powerful secret police services established by the Soviet state over its 74
year history. The Cheka was tasked with rooting out anyone
deemed to be a counter-revolutionary or enemy of the state. Its leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was given wide-r
anging
powers to undertake this mission. Within weeks hundreds and then thousands of
perceived enemies of the state were being arrested and executed without trial. A great many others were detained and sent
to labour camps which were being established in the remote inhospitable climes of Siberia. Lenin tried to distance himself from what
became known as the Red Terror, but there is no denying that he was the head of the
Soviet state during a time when the worst elements of the Tsarist regime wer
e revived
in order to create the architecture of a security state which would broadly define Soviet Russia
for the next seven decades. The Red Terror was but one element in the
brutal policies adopted by the nascent Soviet state in order to fight the civil war and
secure the regime. Another was the use of blocking units in the
war effort. The idea for these had come from Leon Trotsky
and essentially involved using units of Red Army soldiers who stood behind the Soviet
front lines and gunned down
any Soviet soldiers who attempted to retreat. Brutal as these methods were, they soon proved
effective. The war effort reached a low ebb in the summer
and autumn of 1918, as a British and French expeditionary force landed at Arkhangelsk
on the White Sea before the war against Germany had even been concluded, a legion of Czech
and Slovak soldiers which had penetrated deep into Russia seized the city of Kazan and Vladivostok,
the main port in the east, was attacked by the Japanese. Thereafter Tro
tsky mobilized the Red Army
in an effective manner. Kazan was retaken in September 1918 and Samara
followed in October. However, these efforts were offset when newly
independent Poland declared war in November. Yet the initial onslaught of 1918 by the western
powers and their proxies had failed to crush the communist state and the end of the First
World War brought distractions for the Entente powers as wars broke out in Ireland, Turkey
and other regions. In 1919 the Red Army went on the offensi
ve. In early February Kiev fell as the communists
began reasserting the control over Ukraine which they had lost with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By April the British, French and American
troops in Ukraine were forced to pull out of the region as the port of Odessa fell to
the Russians and communist control of Ukraine was established. In August the British and French expeditionary
forces around Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the north by the White Sea were evacuated. Thereafter the western powers
were largely
reduced to fighting the Soviets indirectly through their proxies in the White Army, Poland
and some of Russia’s other neighbours, though a token American and Japanese presence was
maintained in the far east of the country. Meanwhile the war in the west now concentrated
largely on Russia’s clash with Poland. At first the Poles made major advances, seizing
Kiev early in 1920, but after a Soviet counter-offensive threatened Warsaw an armistice was agreed
in the autumn. Thus, by the end
of 1920 the Russian Civil
War had largely been won by Lenin’s regime, though mopping up operations continued in
many locations until the recapture of the port of Vladivostok in October 1922 brought
the war to an end. Lenin had left the leadership of the Red Army
during the civil war to others, most notably Trotsky. Instead he had spent the late 1910s formulating
a new approach to international socialism and communism. This was in response to calls by the British
Labour Party in 1918 for a new i
nternational conference of socialist parties to be called
the Labour and Socialist International. But the Russian leader had become disillusioned
with the more moderate socialist movements which prevailed in Western Europe during his
years in exile and was committed to establishing a new international socialist movement which
would be led by Soviet Russia. Accordingly in March 1919 the First Congress
of the Communist International was held in Moscow, better known as the Comintern. There was much
optimism at this about the
possibility of a world revolution of socialism, given that communist revolutions had occurred
in Germany and Hungary in the weeks preceding the First Comintern. But these were soon suppressed and in his
later years Lenin must have been aware that no immediate overthrow of the international
capitalist system would occur. Nevertheless the establishment of the Comintern
was extremely significant as in years to come it would serve as a major instrument of international
co
mmunism led by the Soviet Union. One final policy of the Soviet regime under
Lenin warrants attention. In the spring of 1921 as the civil war was
winding down the Soviet leader promulgated the New Economic Policy. This represented something of a change of
course for Lenin, who was always a staunch ideological Marxist. It may have surprised many then when he outlined
plans for a new economic system which would allow the capitalist free market to continue
operating on a limited basis in Russia for
the foreseeable future. It was declared that Russians could also own
small amounts of land and businesses, though major industry and large agricultural estates
remained under state ownership. The purpose of the New Economic Policy was
to stabilise the Russian economy in the aftermath of the war and introduce some growth into
the system at a time when the worst famine since that of 1891 and 1892 had spread across
the country. Ultimately the New Economic Policy resulted
in a major boost to the Ru
ssian economy as it exited the war and pointed towards the
benefits of at least allowing a limited amount of private ownership and free trade to continue. Yet the New Economic Policy would be gradually
abandoned in the course of the 1920s as the process of state management of industry and
farm collectivization intensified. The about-face in the early 1920s to adopt
the New Economic Policy of course raises questions as to how we should perceive Lenin’s political
thought overall. After all this wa
s something of a new departure
from classical Marxism. But then Lenin had been willing to depart
from the nineteenth-century German political theorist’s writings for some time, to the
extent that Leninism became its own brand of communist thought by the 1920s, one which
continued to influence communist regimes globally throughout the remainder of the twentieth
century. Essentially Leninism’s core idea was that
a socialist revolution need not be preceded by the development of a bourgeois democrac
y
and capitalist system, one which created a large urban proletariat which would implement
the socialist revolution and then create a communist state in due course. Instead Lenin espoused the idea of a dictatorship
of the proletariat, no matter how small it might be in a given state and that this vanguard
party of the proletariat would then lead the rest of society towards socialism and communism. This was an important development. Marx would have scoffed at the idea of communism
developing in c
ountries like China, Mongolia or Angola where there was little industrialisation
let alone a large urban proletariat, but Leninism, with its message of a small vanguard of the
proletariat leading any nation to communism would have a profound impact on the twentieth
century. Lenin, though, would not live to see any of
this. His health had been steadily declining throughout
the 1910s, though the exact cause of his ailment has never been definitively established. It deteriorated sharply following t
he multiple
assassination attempts in 1918, in particular when he was shot twice and badly wounded that
autumn. Thereafter his physicians, of which there
were dozens called in during the late 1910s and early 1920s to try to resolve his problems,
concluded that he might be suffering from blood poisoning brought on by the fact that
the bullets from this most serious assassination attempt had never been removed from his body. Eventually in April 1922 he underwent an operation
to have them surgicall
y removed, but it did not bring about any improvement. Instead throughout the early 1920s he was
increasingly restricted to Moscow as he suffered from an unusual combination of symptoms including
insomnia, a sensitivity to sound and other stimuli, headaches, nausea and general fatigue. All of this eventually culminated in the summer
of 1922 in the first of several strokes which he suffered in the space of just a few months. These left him partially paralyzed and increasingly
restricted to a whee
lchair. As Lenin’s health declined precipitously
in the early 1920s thoughts inevitably turned to the succession and what arrangement might
be put in place if he died or was rendered completely unable to lead the new Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR as it had been newly christened in 1922. Lenin had never established himself as a dictator
in an absolute sense, but he had become the pre-eminent figure within the Soviet state
based on his many years at its forefront in exile and his in
tellectual leadership. Therefore it was conceivable that nobody would
succeed him, but rather the Politburo would rule the Soviet Union collectively as a body. Yet even Lenin doubted that such an arrangement
could work and believed that a pre-eminent figure would succeed him. To that end in the midst of his illness in
the winter of 1922 he dictated his last testament. Here he discussed the respective qualities
of the viable candidates. Foremost amongst them was Joseph Stalin, who
had risen by th
en to become the General Secretary of the Communist Party. But Lenin had become wary of the Georgian
he had first met 17 years earlier at the time of the Revolution of 1905, claiming he was
overly ambitious and poorly equipped from an intellectual standpoint. Instead Lenin gave his approval for Leon Trotsky
to succeed him. The dictation of the testament was one of
his last lucid major acts. In March 1923 Lenin suffered another stroke,
as a result of which he lost the ability to speak. Thereafter
he continued to decline before
falling into a coma in the first weeks of 1924. He died on the 21st of January. The political machinations to succeed Lenin
began immediately. Trotsky was convalescing from an illness in
the warmer weather of the Caucasus region when Lenin died and Stalin sent him incorrect
details of the funeral arrangements so that he missed the state funeral which was held
in Moscow on the 27th of January. Lenin’s body was subsequently embalmed and
placed on public display in a
Mausoleum in Red Square in central Moscow, where it is
still viewable a century later. Despite Lenin’s warnings, many of the other
senior members of the Soviet regime and the Politburo favoured Stalin in the aftermath
of Lenin’s death. Stalin entered a political alliance with two
of the senior members of the Politburo, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, one which he used
to undermine Trotsky in the years that followed. He eventually drove him into exile and then
turned on his former allies. By 1
929 Stalin had monopolised power completely
in his own hands and established himself as a dictator in a manner which Lenin never had. For the next quarter of a century he ruled
the Soviet Union in a totalitarian fashion, murdering millions in his quest to retain
absolute power. The man who was born as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
and became known to the world as Lenin, the pen-name he adopted in the early 1900s, was
one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. He hailed from an upper
middle class bourgeois
background and then reacted violently against that same background from a very young age,
a development brought about in part by the execution of his brother by the authoritarian
Tsarist regime in the late 1880s. Over the next quarter of a century he emerged
as the leading intellectual figure within the Bolshevik movement, theorising about how
communism could function in Russia and moving beyond Marx’s thought in the process. As a result, when the First World War created
a propitious environment for a communist state to emerge in Russia in 1917 he became the
leader of it, with his message that the Russian proletariat and the communists, as small in
number as they might be compared to the population of the Russian Empire as a whole, would act
as a vanguard for the development of communism in Russia and then the world. The Russian Revolution was born of idealism
and the =goal of overthrowing the autocratic imperial regime which had ruled Russia for
centuries. But
nation states can rarely escape their
past entirely and that proved to be all too true of Soviet Russia. Within weeks of the Bolsheviks seizing power
they had begun to create a communist state which in many ways mirrored the Tsarist regime
which preceded it. The Cheka was created as a secret police which
effectively succeeded the Okhrana, the secret police under the Tsars. Political dissidents were soon being sent
off to labour camps and exile in Siberia, much as they had been in imperial times.
And the possibility of a democratic legislative
assembly being established within a new communist state was quickly dashed as a dictatorship
of the soviets and the Politburo was created, with Lenin at its summit. This soon drew withering criticism from other
communist leaders elsewhere in Europe and Russia, notably Rosa Luxembourg, the leader
of the German Revolution, and Peter Kropotkin, the intellectual forefather of Bolshevism. In saying this it should be noted that Lenin
was not Joseph Stal
in. But the state which he more than anybody else
brought into being in the late 1910s and early 1920s was a highly totalitarian one which
allowed for Stalin’s rise. What do you think of Lenin? If he had lived long enough would a more benign
Soviet Union have emerged or might he ultimately have become as oppressive and totalitarian
as Stalin subsequently became? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
Comments