Nicholas adapted himself to the new conditions with an amazing ease and air of indifference that was in contrast to the sullen resentment of the Tsarina. Her bitterness was directed as much against the Tsar as against her fate. She could not soon forget that double abdication. Her rage became uncontrolled when at last the truth was inescapable, and she exclaimed, 'He might at least in his fright have remembered his son. Her intuition, always sharper than that of Nicholas, seemed to realize the danger to their lives.
Keep your sorrow for another occasion. The Tsar, for his part, seems to have abdicated in spirit and in truth. Though following with keen and intelligent interest the progress of the war and the movements of the Russian army, he never attempted to exercise political influence or indulge in critical comment. He accepted obscurity with the same fatalistic confidence he had shown in clinging obstinately to his waning autocracy. Did he ever, in those long and lonely days, fall into revery that was something more than mere regret, or seek to determine, in his own mind, the historical responsibility for the processes that had culminated in this almost solitary confinement?
Four years previously, in February , Russia had commemorated, with all the pomp and Oriental pageantry her court excelled in, the Tercentenary of the Romanovs, and celebrated the achievements of the three hundred years that had elapsed since his ancestor, young Michael Romanov, son of the Patriarch Philaret, had ascended the throne and founded a powerful dynasty.
But yesterday the word of a Romanov might have stood against the world; to-day there were only a handful of servants and a few aged courtiers to do him reverence. The ease with which the monarchy fell, and the swift, utter abandonment of the Emperor by friends and people alike, should have furnished ground for salutary meditation.
The three hundred and four years of Romanov rule which had come to such an anticlimactic end would yield for his speculations an unfolding panorama of bewildering complexity, unending political tumult, and vast geographic expansion.
It records a race between education and disaster. Disaster won easily. Now that the sinister voice of his mentor, Pobyedonostsev, was stilled, and with nought save the measured tread of jailers outside his door to influence his prison thoughts, the ex Emperor may have seen in their true bearing the terrible realities which so many ardent spirits sought in vain to make him understand. Truths which in the warm glow of prosperity and security one is apt to consider as unpleasant annoyances, mere jeremiads of the hypercritical, become sombre revelations in the cold, pitiless light of adversity.
I know of no figure in the history of fallen empires more tragically ironic, in the Greek sense, than the dethroned Master of Tsarskoe Selo, already marked to atone in blood for the sins and imbecilities of three centuries of misrule.
The capital error committed by his ancestors who controlled the destiny of Russia and moulded the forms of her political life lay in their failure to create in the minds of the people a consciousness of national solidarity. Historically, Russia developed into two entities, distinct, antagonistic, and perpetually at odds with each other. Government was not conceived as a delegation of power to be exercised for the common good by a responsible trustee, but as a vested right to be jealously safeguarded and administered for the aggrandizement of a favored minority.
Rulers and ruled were never fused into a single, unified community. To be sure, there once existed strong democratic tradition in Russia.
Ancient Slav civilization, as represented in the early republics of Novgorod and Pskov, was gay, boisterous, full of color, intensely individualistic and vociferously independent. These city-states were as jealous of their freedom as were ever Florence and Ghent. Its Declaration of Independence was drawn up five centuries before the Philadelphia document—and was much shorter, too: 'If the Prince is bad, into the mud with him.
In Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich was summarily deposed and expelled by the hard-headed burghers because he was 'too fond of sport and neglectful of his duty.
But these native tendencies, though cropping out sporadically in late centuries, were systematically suppressed by the Emperors,—particularly during the reign of the Ivans and Peter the Great,—as each succeeding Tsar reverted to the belief that the Russian land and the Russian folk were the private asset of the sovereign, his otchina.
By the close of the seventeenth century the democracy that flourished in Novgorod was a legend. Then, too, the Tatar domination had left its imprint on Russia's soul as definitely as the Norman invader left his mark on Anglo-Saxon civilization. Two centuries of vassalage under Eastern despots of the school of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane could not fail to modify enormously the social and political structure of Slavic communities.
The taint spread from the head downward, from prince to peasant, as each learned from the Mongolian overlords the full manual of Asiatic callousness, ruthlessness, and absolutism.
The foreign yoke was lifted with the fall of the Golden Horde in Slavery ended, but the slave driver remained. Did the Master of Tsarskoe Selo ever philosophize?
He would have discovered a reproachful symbolism in the fact that the Russian term naigaku , 'the knout,' is one of the purely Tataric words still remaining in the Russian vocabulary. He had himself often invoked it. Still other ghosts would rise to plague him. There were the 'reforms' of the first Peter, called by the Westernizers 'the Great,' but by the Slavophiles 'Antichrist.
Was it not this same Peter who drove Russia into strange paths unsuited to her historic traditions? He had forsaken Holy Moscow and built himself an abomination, named in vainglorious egotism 'Peter's City,' among the fogs and bogs and marshes of an alien territory.
He let loose swarms of officials, clerks and other tchinovniki to batten on the substance of the people; rushed them into foreign wars and intrigues, drove his subjects to domestic revolt by extravagant taxation, ordered men to defile the image of God by forcing them to shave off their beards, and even ordained the cut of the clothes they should wear. Did he not persecute the Church of Christ by abolishing the Patriarchate? Did he not murder his own son?
Verily, he had opened his 'window to Europe,' but opened it on to a swamp exuding miasmic effluvia. He exposed the pure soul of orthodoxy to the blighting infection of atheism and deism from France and made Russia's poor brain reel with the dizzying wisdom of Prussia.
What the Tatars began the Ivans, both Great and Terrible, continued, Peter perpetuated; and Nicholas was paying the penalty. The final expiation was beginning in the very palace that had become, in popular imagination, a symbol of isolation and estrangement.
It was to Tsarskoe Selo that Nicholas and the imperial family fled in when the thousands of petitioners, led by Gapon, marched to the Winter Palace to seek redress of wrongs from 'the little Father'—and were massacred by his waiting Cossacks.
Bloody Sunday marked a turning point in Russian history and sealed the doom of the ruling dynasty. Hilaire Belloc has a brilliant essay in support of his thesis that the French Revolution became inevitable on the day and in the hour when the Commons, excluded from the Council Hall at Versailles, rushed in indignation to the Tennis Court and there held a separate Convocation, in defiance of king, nobles, and clergy.
Did Nicholas Romanov realize that the Russian Revolution became inevitable when the first peaceful petitioner fell that Sunday afternoon before the Winter Palace? Only once in eight years did the royal family reside in Petrograd—and that for four days only, on the occasion of the Tercentenary.
They lived in virtual seclusion at Tsarskoe Selo, the fifteen miles to the capital constituting a moral chasm between them and their people. And here he was, an actual prisoner in his favorite retreat, this well-intentioned and urbane, but woefully weak and indecisive, monarch.
Harassed and crushed by the weight of an inherited responsibility too heavy for his shoulders, wearily answering 'Yes' or 'No' to importunate counselors who knew how to play shrewdly on his fears, his prejudices, and his superstitions, he had lived, as it were, a phantom king in a haunted palace. On the very day of his coronation he had succumbed publicly to exhaustion when entering the Cathedral of the Holy Archangels at Moscow.
Fatigued by the weight of the ponderous crown, and staggering under the heavy ceremonial robe of cloth of gold fringed with ermine, he let the sceptre he was carrying slip from his grasp to the ground. In the impressionable minds of those who witnessed the incident, it remained an evil omen. The court gossipers recalled the ill-fated Louis XVI complaining, during his coronation at Rheims, that the crown was too heavy and was hurting his head.
Never master of his own will, Nicholas spent his life awaiting the judgments of the Pobyedonostsevs, the Sturmers, and the Protopopovs who surrounded him, and of the Empress who ruled him. Kerensky was to convey the next decision of Russia's newest master, Monsieur le peuple. On August 10, the Premier of the Provisional Government waited on the ex-Tsar and announced a momentous resolution. The imperial family was to be transferred to Siberia. The double date was frequent in old Russian writings and represents the difference between the Gregorian calendar in use in Western Europe and the Julian calendar which Russia tenaciously observed.
Russia was, in consequence, thirteen days behind the rest of the world, in a calendar sense. The Bolsheviki abolished the Julian calendar during our stay in Moscow, and adopted a system that brought Russia in line with common usage.
The change occasioned many embarrassments. Thirteen days thus disappeared mysteriously from one's life, as the calendar suddenly jumped thirteen days overnight! Some of the employees in our relief stations inquired if they would be paid for the lost working days. Of course their fears were groundless. In point of fact, the next pay day—we paid off every fortnight—came within a day after the previous one. It was a bit complicated for the ordinary muzhik and he simply marked it off as another Bolshevist trick—Author.
Among other rooms, we visited the study of the Tsar, which has been preserved unchanged by the Soviets. Another American, Mr. Art Czars was created on No, because we have our own government. Big Government. No illegal aliens have been appointed as czars yet. It is currently George W. Bush who had forty-seven czars. Prior to people like Lenin and Stalin as well as Putin coming to power Russia was ruled by a system of Czars.
In total the country had 19 Czars. Mainly Lenin, but many people helped him. Log in. History of Russia. The Romanovs. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. The Czar's government collapsed because of extravagant spending and unfair rule.
Study guides. History of Russia 20 cards. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist Yeltsin and the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine announced the formation of. Israel withdrew from Gaza and Jericho in. NATO powers led a military peacekeeping force in. Which countries that had been united as one nation for 75 years agreed in early to divide themselves into separate republics. History of Russia 22 cards. When is a census conducted. Post by CJK » 02 Jul Post by Orwell » 02 Jul Post by amcl » 02 Jul Post by antfreire » 17 Jul Post by steverodgers » 17 Jul Post by steverodgers » 18 Jul Skip to content.
Quick links. Why did the Czar's regime collapse in ? Discussions on all aspects of the First World War not covered in the other sections. Hosted by Terry Duncan. Russian losses were proportionate to other nations involved and were only a fraction of what was lost in World War II.
The only real explanation given is that there were food shortages in Petrograd. But I never understood why these shortages existed, who was responsible for them, and why there was no effort to fix them. Furthermore it is unclear to me why the troops mutinied. Re: Why did the Czar's regime collapse in ? Post by pugsville » 01 Jul Why were there food shortages. Post by CJK » 01 Jul pugsville wrote: - loss of railways transport capacity with railways supporting the war effort.
Post by pugsville » 02 Jul The Civil the actual size of armies was much smaller than during ww1. The Red Army wasn't the same size as the tsarist army. But Transport remained a problem. The Whole economy had ground to halt in much of Russia, most of the nation had reverted to pretty primitive substance economy greatly reducing the demands for transport.
The Red Army "requisitioned" supplies from the peasants basically by terror. There were food shortages, no doubt they were areas of plenty but you have to transport them to the areas in need. Why should the Peasants provide food to the government if they are getting nothing in return? Russia's limited industrial capacity was almost totally devoted to the war effort. They got paper currency for which there were no goods to buy. Made more sense to produce for consumption, lack of transport, lack of labour, lack of horse power, lack of return, lack of support for the government, it all feeds into the peasants not being inclined to produce food they get little for.
The Godfather was adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by Mario On the morning of March 15, , General George Washington makes a surprise appearance at an assembly of army officers at Newburgh, New York, to calm the growing frustration and distrust they had been openly expressing towards Congress in the previous few weeks.
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