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Nicholas II

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Imperial Russia →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188912759


Nicholas II

Also known as: Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov, Czar Nicholas II

Born: 1868
Died: 1918
Occupation: tsar

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"Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain my confidence?" NICHOLAS II,


Last Russian tsar, whose failures as a leader combined with the deep problems of his country to bring on revolution in 1917.


BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, ruled the largest country in the world. He was an amiable individual, a devoted father and husband. But, almost from the start of his reign, he faced a Russian population increasingly hostile to the government, and popular anger soon centered on the Tsar and his family.

When Nicholas took the throne in 1894, Russia contained 130 million people, most of them peasant laborers living in rural villages, who had been freed from serfdom only in the 1860s. Serfdom had tied Russia's peasants to a given chunk of land and placed them under the control of a local nobleman or government official. But the terms of the decrees that freed the serfs continued to keep most peasants dissatisfied. They never received enough land to meet their needs, they remained under close government control, and they had to carry a heavy burden of state taxes. The population was also growing with explosive speed.

Life in the Russian Empire was disrupted as well by the government's policy of building up a system of modern industry. Although Russia had been the most powerful country in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, by the 1850s, the country found itself humiliated in confrontations with advanced, industrialized countries of Western Europe like Britain. Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1854-56) was only the first in a series of military and diplomatic catastrophes.

Thus, by the start of the 1890s, officials of the Russian government like Finance Minister Sergei Witte were putting the government's resources into a program of building railroads and steel mills. This meant more taxes for the peasants to pay for the industrial program. It also meant creating dangerous industrial slums populated by poor, angry factory workers in government centers like St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Two other elements made the situation still more dangerous. First, the Russian state was an empire. No one could be certain of the exact number, but there were probably 100 separate nationalities within the Empire. Many of these peoples deeply resented the control of a brutal central government led by ministers of Russian nationality. Second, ever since the 1870s, revolutionary leaders from the educated part of the population had been at work to push the peasants into open rebellion. By the start of the 1890s, Marxist revolutionaries joined in the effort to overthrow the system. They were political rebels who believed the factory workers were the key to revolutionary change.

In 1894, Tsar Alexander III died suddenly of kidney disease. Only 49 years old and seemingly in robust health, Alexander had been expected to rule for several more decades. Suddenly raised to the throne, the 26-year-old Nicholas, who was occupied in the preparations for his marriage, expressed his fear and dismay. His future brother-in-law heard him blurt out: "I know nothing of the business of ruling."

The late Tsar had been strong enough to bend coins with his fingers. His son Nicholas was a slim, almost timid-looking individual whose boyhood had been marked by tragedy. At the age of 12, he had seen his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, dying at the hands of an assassin's bomb. The boy was terrified and only calmed down when he saw his father, now Tsar Alexander III, riding off to take up his duties guarded by a cavalry regiment of fierce Cossacks.

Nicholas's tutors had taught him a number of foreign languages, including excellent English. His most influential tutor, former law professor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, filled his head with the conviction that the Romanov family ruled as the agents of God, and that no tsar could surrender any part of his unlimited powers without throwing away a precious part of Russia's traditions.

The young heir to the Russian throne spent the happiest years of his life as a junior officer in a fashionable cavalry regiment. Only one incident marred this period. In 1891, he had narrowly escaped being stabbed to death by a religious fanatic in Japan during a world tour. But, by 1894, he was doubly content. He was happy in the role of a young military commander in the imperial guards. He could look forward to years of enjoyable service, free of serious responsibilities and with lots of leisure for drinking with his fellow junior officers. That same year, the beautiful Princess Alix of the German state of Hesse-Darmstadt, a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, agreed to be his wife.

The young Tsar's reign was marked from the start by sadness and tragedy. He and Alix had planned a gala wedding. Instead the young couple married in haste only a week after his father's funeral. The new Empress had just converted from the Lutheran religion to the Russian Orthodox faith, taking the Russian name Alexandra. Struck by the gloomy atmosphere in St. Petersburg, she described the marriage ceremony as "a mere continuation of the masses for the dead."

The coronation festivities for Nicholas II led to a particular horror. Half a million Russians, many of them peasants from distant parts of the Empire, had come to Moscow at the Tsar's invitation to help celebrate the coronation. They gathered for a feast at Khodynka Field, five miles out of Moscow. There were too few police to control the crowd, and no one in authority had remembered that Khodynka Field was covered with ditches and trenches left over from military maneuvers. When the great horde of people rushed across the field to the food stalls awaiting them, at least 1,300 people were trampled to death.

Although Nicholas visited the injured in the hospital and established a generous fund to aid the families of the dead, his reputation among the Russian population was hurt by the memory of Khodynka Field. Why, people asked, had he attended a party at the residence of the French ambassador the night following the tragedy? How could he hold a giant military review at Khodynka Field little more than a week after so many of his unfortunate subjects had been killed there?

Among educated and liberal Russians, the Tsar's reputation fell during his first years on the throne. In 1895, a group of local government officials addressed the Tsar, asking him to allow the people's representatives some voice in influencing the policies of Russia's government. According to some sources, it was Pobedonostsev who wrote Nicholas's reply: the young Tsar declared harshly that he would maintain his powers intact. He insisted that those who hoped for political changes should abandon such "senseless dreams."

The Tsar's desire to cling to the past at all costs soon crashed into the reality of Russia's problems. By the first years of the 20th century, the country was struck by massive peasant revolts in rural areas as well as industrial strikes in many major cities. Nicholas dismissed such troubles as the work of evil-minded agitators. In his view, no loyal Russian would deliberately challenge the tsar's authority.

A crisis not even Nicholas could ignore came when Russia went to war against Japan in 1904. The two countries had been competing for years over territory and influence in the Korean peninsula and the Chinese province of Manchuria. One of the Tsar's advisers enthused that "a victorious little war" against Japan would help bring the Russian population together. Nicholas himself was bitter toward the Japanese ever since the encounter with a Japanese assassin in 1891. Like most Russians, he thought Russia's military might would quickly crush the "Japanese monkeys," as he called them.

The war was a disaster from the beginning. The Japanese fleet pinned down most of the Russian war vessels in the Far East by blockading the Tsar's naval base at Port Arthur. Japanese armies landed in Korea, defeated Russian forces sent to halt them, and then advanced to besiege Port Arthur. This crucial center of Russian power in the Pacific fell in early 1905. Later that year, the Russian Baltic Fleet arrived in the Far East after sailing halfway around the world, only to be defeated disastrously by the Japanese at the Straits of Tsushima between Japan and Korea.

At home, Nicholas found popular unrest rising. The economic strains of the war and the failure of the government to lead the nation effectively were having their effect. In January 1905, on "Bloody Sunday," crowds of Russians tried to petition the Tsar to help them. Hundreds were shot down in front of Nicholas's Winter Palace. The Tsar and his family isolated themselves at the Tsarskoe Seloe palace outside St. Petersburg. The country was shaken by strikes, peasant unrest, and a growing call for political change.

Nicholas answered by moving only inches away from the position Pobedonostsev had taught him. He considered setting up a Duma (a Russian parliament), but he insisted that it could only have the right to advise him, not to make laws. Opponents of the Tsar, ranging from Marxist revolutionaries to middle-class reformers, rejected such half measures. By the fall of 1905, the Empire was paralyzed by a general strike. Everyone from bakers to ballet dancers refused to work.

In October, Nicholas faced a choice. He called in Sergei Witte, who advised him to establish a genuine parliament accompanied by a constitution. Clinging to his instinctive desire to preserve his powers in full, Nicholas looked for a member of his government or someone in the imperial family who would take over as military dictator. But there was no one. Nicholas could not find a dictator to put down national unrest at the cost of a bloodbath.

The Tsar found himself compelled to issue the "October Manifesto," granting the two concessions he had always rejected: a Duma with the power to make laws, and a Constitution. The Revolution of 1905 had apparently overturned much of the old order, but Nicholas remained stubbornly committed to the old ways. Almost from the moment he issued the October Manifesto, Nicholas showed his distaste for the changes that had been forced upon him. Ridding himself of Witte--the architect and first prime minister under the new system--in early 1906, Nicholas insisted on keeping the title of "autocrat" (or unlimited monarch). He repeatedly restricted the power of the Duma and frequently spoke of eliminating it entirely.

As Russia remained torn by internal divisions after the Revolution of 1905, the Tsar's prestige continued to decline. Exerting an important influence on him, the Empress Alexandra strengthened Nicholas's own conservative inclinations, in particular his view that restrictions on his power violated Russia's political and religious heritage. She insisted to her "Nicky" that he play the role of a strong, unmovable monarch, a fitting descendant of Peter the Great in the 18th century.


The Influence of Rasputin

The popular image of the Tsar, badly damaged by horrors like Bloody Sunday, suffered from the presence of disreputable figures around the imperial court. Sometime after 1905, Alexandra came in contact with a strange holy man from the Russian provinces, Rasputin. Rasputin's influence, first on the Empress, and through her on Nicholas, grew over the next several years.

Leaders of the Russian government tried in vain to limit Rasputin's power and even to ban him from St. Petersburg, but they never succeeded for long. Rasputin seemed able to treat the physical ailments of Alexis, the only son of Nicholas and Alexandra and the heir to the Russian throne. The boy suffered from hemophilia, and the slightest injury put him in danger of bleeding to death.

In 1913, the public showed its distaste for the imperial family and its sleazy circle of hangers-on. The year brought the celebration of the Romanov dynasty's 300th anniversary. There was an ominous silence during the Tsar's public appearances instead of the cheers called for by the occasion.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 put Nicholas and his family on the road to disaster. As in the war against Japan, Russia suffered one military calamity after another in fighting Germany. Military defeats, in turn, cut away at the prestige of the Tsar and his ministers. In the fall of 1915, urged on by Alexandra, Nicholas left St. Petersburg to take personal command of the defeated Russian armies at the fighting front. This left the Empress, increasingly influenced by Rasputin, to wield the powers of the tsar. A clear danger signal for the future of the monarchy was the growing rumor that Alexandra, who had been born a German princess, was actively betraying the Russian cause in World War I. By the end of 1916, such accusations were even heard in speeches in the Duma.


Revolution Forces Abdication

By the start of 1917, the political and military situation was desperate. Many observers expected an upheaval, perhaps in the form of a military coup. The Tsar's answer to the British ambassador, who had urged Nicholas to consider further political reforms, showed the distance between the monarch and the situation facing the nation: "Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain my confidence?"

In March, food riots and labor strikes in St. Petersburg grew to massive proportions. When the army garrison refused to put down the unrest, the power of the old government crumbled. Nicholas wandered by train trying to travel from his military headquarters back to his capital. Strikes on the railroads stranded him at the military center of Pskov.

When Nicholas found that not even his military commanders were willing to help him remain tsar, he searched for a member of his family to take the throne. His young son Alexis, still in fragile health, could not do it. Nicholas's brother Michael was unwilling to become tsar in the midst of a popular revolution. Thus, the monarchy ended with Nicholas's abdication.

The former Tsar and his family continued to be the victims of war and revolution. They might have escaped to Britain, but the government in London hesitated to accept them: Nicholas's presence there could jeopardize the continuing alliance between Britain and the post-revolutionary government in Russia.

As the revolution in Russia deepened, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were sent to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. Civil War broke out in the spring of 1918, and White armies, containing supporters of the Tsar, approached the Urals. On the night of July 16, the Tsar, his wife, their five children, and several members of their household were ordered by Lenin to be executed. Rousing them in the night, a local commissar escorted them to the cellar with a firing squad. The 11 victims were buried in an abandoned mineshaft, then reburied in an open field.


-- Contributed by Neil Heyman, Professor of History, San Diego State University, San Diego, California


PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born on May 18, 1868; executed on July 17, 1918; eldest son of Tsar Alexander III and Princess Dagmar of Denmark; married: Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, 1894; children: (four daughters) Anastasia, Tatiana, Olga, Marie; (one son) Alexis. Predecessor: Alexander III. Successor: replaced first by Russian Provisional Government in March 1917, then by V. I. Lenin at the head of the Russian Communist Party in November 1917.

CHRONOLOGY
1887 Commissioned a junior officer in imperial guards
1891 Trip around world; survived assassination attempt in Japan
1894 Became tsar of Russia
1904 Start of war with Japan; birth of son, Alexis
1905 Russian Revolution of 1905; Nicholas forced to grant constitutional government to people of Russian Empire
1908 Rasputin entered personal circle surrounding imperial family
1914 Start of World War I
1917 March Revolution forced Nicholas to abdicate
1918 Nicholas and his family executed in beginning months of Russian Civil War


FURTHER READINGS

Charques, Richard. The Twilight of Imperial Russia. Oxford University Press, 1965.


Crankshaw, Edward. The Shadow of the Winter Palace. Viking, 1976.


Lincoln, W. Bruce. The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias. Dial, 1981.


Fuhrmann, Joseph T. Rasputin: A Life. Praeger, 1990.


Lincoln, W. Bruce. In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War. Dial, 1983.


------. Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918. Simon & Schuster, 1986.


Massie, Robert. Nicholas and Alexandra. Atheneum, 1967.


Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. Knopf, 1990.


Radzinsky, Edvard. The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II. Doubleday, 1992.

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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