Last Tsar. Nicholas II, His Reign & His Russia by Sergei Oldenburg

Briefly: it is a very comprehensive biography of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II. Also, since it is hard, impossible, even, to disentangle his life from the last 20 years of the country he ruled, it is also historical research: hence the title.

Basic information (taken from here):

The English language edition was published in 1975 by Academic International Press in Gulf Breeze, Florida. Of particular note is the 18-page introduction Searching for the Last Tsar by Associate Professor of History Patrick J. Rollins (now deceased) of Old Dominion University (est. 1930), a public research university in Norfolk, Virginia. As Rollins notes in the study’s preface:

“Oldenburg’s [Last Tsar. Nicholas II, His Reign & His Russia] is a major document in modern Russian historiography. The final contribution of a Russian nationalist historian, it provides uniquely sensitive insights into the character, personality, and policies of Russia’s last tsar. It has no rival as a political biography of Nicholas II and is without peer as a comprehensive history of his reign.”

His comprehensive study of Nicholas II is apologetic in nature. Oldenburg substantiates that the revolution interrupted the successful progressive economic development of Russia under Nicholas II: “in the twentieth year of the reign of Emperor Nicholas II, Russia had reached an unprecedented level of economic prosperity”.

Oldenburg was able to undertake such a study of Russia’s last tsar, having had access to a unique collection of documents. These included copies of authentic historical acts of the Russian Empire held in the Russian Embassy in Paris on Rue Grenelle. Long before the First World War, duplicates of the originals had been made as a precautionary measure, and sent to the Russian Embassy in Paris for storage. In October 1917, the Provisional Government appointed Vasily Alekseyevich Maklakov (1869-1957), to replace Alexander Izvolsky as Russia’s Ambassador to France.

When he arrived in Paris, Maklakov learned about the takeover by the Bolsheviks. Regardless, he continued to occupy the splendid mansion of the Russian embassy for seven years, until France found it necessary to recognize the Bolshevik government. Fearing that the Embassy’s archival documents would fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Makloakov packed them up, including Oldenburg’s manuscript, the Okhrana archives, among other items and arranged for their transfer to the Stanford University.

Oldenburg’s fundamental historical research on the life and reign of Emperor Nicholas II, is sadly overlooked or simply ignored by Western historians.

First, yes, Oldenburg's research is really thorough and comprehensive. But I would say all the unique official documents and data are not the only things which make the book great: whatever the issue discussed is, he extensively quotes the positions of the whole Russian society about it—from every part of the political spectrum and every group of interest. In a sense, you regularly get a detailed cross-section of the whole vast country. This book is a masterpiece and should be a required read for anyone who wants to understand the period.

Second, indeed, it's interesting to note that despite the quality of research in the book, it isn't really any popular in the West. The most popular edition on Amazon occupies honorable ~5 000 000-th place in the bestsellers ranking. As noted in this master's thesis:

The only work which has discussed with any depth the reign of Nicholas is Sergei Oldenburg's work, The Last Tsar. Originally published in two volumes in Russian in 1939, this work has received little attention by historians.

…

The work is available in a four volume English translation, but is either ignored or totally unknown to historians. In the introduction to the first volume of Oldenburg's work, editor Patrick J. Rollins observed: "The real emperor, according to Oldenburg, was a strong-willed, independent minded monarch who personally directed Russia's foreign and domestic policies and who took counsel only with himself." But for some obscure reason, Oldenburg's work is used primarily—best exemplified by W. Bruce Lincoln—to recount Nicholas' fears at his succession to the throne, his 'senseless dreams' speech to the zemstvos which historians have emphasized as best portraying Nicholas' personality, and his Abdication Manifesto which is available in almost all collections of documents of the era.

It's way too easy to explain it away as "snobby liberal historians hate Nicholas and don't want to take a look at anything which contradicts their narrative". However, I'm pretty sure the circumstances of the book writing play at least as huge a role here. Are there many relatively popular Russian historians in the Anglosphere? The only one who I could think about might be Lev Gumilyov, and that must be in large part due to his and his father's tragic life (and death) in the USSR; also, curiously enough, as a response to "last tsar" query Amazon manages to show me something by Radzinsky. But "Russian émigré-historian" is someone who belonged to a small and scattered community which wasn't backed up by the resources of any nation-state. However good your books are, any popularity contest is going to be an uphill battle in such a condition; this battle was probably won only once by Nabokov.

***

Of course, there are many things in the book. The first years of the Emperor's reign; the Russo-Japanese War; the Revolution of 1905, which didn't dethrone the Czar, but made him establish the Duma (parliament, pronounced as "doom-ah"); the agrarian reforms; the First World War, but...

But the real meat for me—of course—would be the circumstances of the Revolution of 1917 and the people who created it.

Imagine you're watching a horror movie. The producer was really lazy, and the movie feels like nothing but just a bunch of hastily lumped together cliches. A bunch of drunk teenagers wanders outside the city, goes The Ways You Are Not Supposed To Go, enters The Abandoned Building You Are Not Supposed To Enter, reads some Old Books In Forbidden Languages You Are Not Supposed To Read (all this while a couple of sober and level-headed characters scream as much as they can "JUST WHAT ARE YOU DOING, LET'S GO HOME WHILE WE CAN"), and then they summon some ancient entity which tortures, devours and inflicts other fates-worse-than-death to these teenagers and everyone and everything they ever held dear.

Those are basically the parts of the book related to the build-up to Revolution and the revolutionaries. Well, not quite—it stops right after the Revolution and the Czar's abdication (no surprise, given the title). But it certainly gives the reader the taste of horrors to come, and it's not like I haven't known what happened next.

***

The description of revolutionaries reminded me a lot about that de Maistre's idea about how the French Revolution was a culmination of Enlightenment—and, hence, a kind of a providential divine punishment for all the cool and fashionable people of France who cheered for Enlightenment and republicanism in 18th century and who got murdered by it. This in a sense certainly applies to the Russian Revolution too. The people who wanted to remove the Czar were playing with fire, but they thought this fire was a small cool firecracker; it turned out to be a (no pun intended) Czar Bomb, obliterating all their plans and strategies in a heartbeat.

A couple of good examples: 1) general Ruzsky who actually convinces the Czar to abdicate (while having the—I don't know—, gall or insanity to claim that it's actually for the Czar's and his dynasty's own good and safety, of course) gets murdered by the communists the next year; 2) the head of the "progressive Bloc" in Duma Guchkov who spent most of the 1916 working hard on creating the revolutionary conditions, after just the first ~week of the Revolution still cheers the dethroning of uncool monarch, and yet when he sometimes tries to understand who is actually in charge, he is like "wait wait wait, hold on, no, no, not like this, Oh God, NO!!!"; needless to say, it only gets worse from there.

These examples are not an exception, they are more like an iron rule: not a single "moderate", "constitutional", "liberal" revolutionary in the Army or in the Duma gets what he wants (the most lucky ones were those who at least were able to escape to the West); to remember that famous Mencken quote: they certainly got what they deserved, and they got it good and hard.

***

But why did these people cheer for the Revolution? Why did they all want—the things they wanted?

Contrary to all the narratives about how it's only dumb people who believe dumb things—probably because they are not educated enough, people of any intellect can be captured by all kinds of fads (or dare I say, toxoplasmas?). Moreover, since these fads often are functions of not only IQ, but social standing, religious beliefs, and political persuasion... Yeah.

The hate intelligentsia felt towards the monarchy is just that: a fad. "the Czar, is, like, boring and uncool, but democracy and socialism are pretty lit". And this fad certainly doesn't appear to me as arising from pure search for truth, free from any piece of self-interest. Anyway.

During the Revolution of 1905 and subsequent mayhem they tried to do their best to squeeze any concessions from the uncool Czar (ideally, of course, to make him resign). The Czar can't really find enough societal support for him to continue being the sole Ruler, so he has to concede a bit and establish the Constitution and the Duma. Duma doesn't have much power: it's just a legislative body, and Nicholas reserves for himself the powers to suspend it, enact laws without its support, and declare the re-elections. Of course, these are the powers of the exceptional circumstances, not to be used on a day-to-day basis. He uses them several times (mostly in the appropriate moments; once—maybe not exactly, probably asking him to do it that time was the only mistake of his PM Stolypin, otherwise an amazing statesman). However, he doesn't do much to Duma during the wartime, which certainly feels like a mistake (cf. e.g. Habsburgs in Austria, who just cancelled all the elections and the Reichstag in 1914).

This system wobbles its way through 1905-1914, sometimes producing completely disastrous results, sometimes—somewhat decent ones, when the Duma doesn't have too many batshit insane revolutionaries and its members are in the good mood. If this is any improvement over the good old autocracy, I'm a ballet dancer.

The interesting thing about this structure is that it looks like a disaster pretty much regardless of your political positions. Democracy—politics—populism tends to select for the worst kind of statesmen; this was as true in 1916 as in 2016. The right wing of parliament was foolish, chauvinist and vulgar; the "supporters of constitution" wing, the ones who apparently wanted to subject the government to the rule of law, didn't really care about the actual laws; and the left wing instead of helping workers or peasants was just mostly excited about "property redistribution".

Then the war happens. I'm... really not sure of what to think about its beginning. I remember reading an opinion that Serbian state apparatus was complicit in the Sarajevo murder, and Habsburgs had the perfect right to retaliate. Anyway, Oldenburg doesn't give too much attention to the Sarajevo incident (and he seems to think Russia was right in helping Serbia—although Russia formally was not even a Serbia ally!).

However, it doesn't look like the Czar had much choice there. Curious enough, no matter how strong Russian intelligentsia hated their Czar, they hated the Central powers (German Empire + Habsburgs' monarchy) much more. These nations were even less cool, they were even—for the intelligentsia it was the greatest insult— reactionary.

And Russian intelligentsia was strongly Anglo-philic, and the United Kingdom kind of was going to take (and took it alright) the anti-German side.

So, yeah, for the first months of war everyone is crazy, liberals forget about their hate for the Czar and unite with him to smash the hated Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns (but also to gain more political power through controlling the war industries; which somewhat happens). Right-wing Slavophiles jump the bandwagon too to help Slavic nation of Serbia. There are some reasonable people who predict how incredibly disastrous this whole endeavor will end up; they certainly appear to be in the minority.

Then the war doesn't end overnight, and everyone becomes kinda jaded. The liberals realize that they won't be able to defeat Germany any time soon, so they forget about it and start to work around the clock to bring the Czar down though any kind of slander and lies they can, using the Duma as a bully pulpit and utilizing their connections from the war industries to go around the censorship (which is—like all the imperial apparatus—meek and vegetarian, and much more liberal than in e.g. France; the communist nickname of Nicholas "Bloodthirsty" looks like a fantastic case of projection). A lot of "right-wingers" and "monarchists" start to defect to the liberals' side and spout their lunacy (ffs, what was wrong with someone like Purishkevich to actually pull something like that?).

Then in early 1917 the Duma's term is about to end, and the Czar is thinking about not convening it again, but before this happens, Petrograd — i.e. Saint Petersburg, which at the time was Russian capital — becomes engulfed in bread panic which then becomes bread riot (this is more or less the first time there were any major issues with food there: that the food supply in the Russian Empire was pretty much way ahead of every other major warring country is, like many Russian Empire-related things, an acknowledged but overlooked fact). The riot is suppressed, but then immediately — after months of revolutionary propaganda—an army regiment mutinies too. This mutiny is suppressed as well, but several others flare up, and soon Petrograd is controlled — if this word is applicable here — by the soldiers. The Czar tries to move the loyal regiments to the city and get there himself, but he is stopped by either dumb or Revolution-sympathizing general (see above, also, while I can believe he was thinking that the Duma was controlling something (in reality the true power in the city at the moment has already belonged to organizations like the "Councils of Revolutionary Soldiers"), I'm not sure if he was dumb enough to think that the Duma controlling city was actually something good, given what the Duma thought about the Czar; anyway...). This is the early March of 1917, and that's how the Empire ended: not with a bang but a whimper.

***

Right now almost every country in the First World is a liberal democracy (even if it has some decorative royal figure). Some centuries ago almost all of them were absolute monarchies; at some point most of them were both monarchies and democracies at the same time; there were two centers of power: the monarch, and the electable body. These transitions were often slow and peaceful (like in e.g. England after 1688), and the reasons behind them may be not exactly clear. Curtis Yarvin once wrote that if you had claimed e.g. in England after the Glorious Revolution that this arrangement was unstable, you would have been instantly labeled as an ultra-right "Tory" absolutist-monarchist — but the history would have slowly proved you right. The history of representative democracy in Russian Empire demonstrates very well why this happens: you can't really have more than one center of power. They will try to compete with and subjugate each other until only one such a center will remain. In England this center turned out to be the Parliament which defeated the Crown. In Russia the Duma was pushing, pushing and pushing, never capitulating completely and always preparing to pump the pressure up again whenever possible. Probably the most serious issue with the Czar was that he didn't have enough guts to play as hard a ball as the situation required. Not so seldom he was trying to make a compromise with the Duma by appointing more liberal ministers. Needless to say, unless these ministers were following the Duma's positions rather than Czar's, they were obstructed and boycotted: the Duma never gave any quarter to the Czar. While, in my opinion, the very least every single member of "progressive bloc" deserved was lustration, probably not so radical methods could have helped too — at least, for a while. In short, so much for the "checks and balances". Thank you Montesquieu, very cool!

It's interesting how you can notice this pattern even in temporary political struggles and positions of people who gained power: in 1917 no one needed moderates except as temporary useful idiots. Two stable positions were "I trust the full power in Czar", and "I trust the full power in People". "I trust a bit in Czar, but he should give some way to People" isn't really a way to win friends and influence people: it's a way to gain some temporary alliance which will end when the radicals will make your anti-Czar arguments more refined and more pure (and probably murder you for being not revolutionary enough).

***

To sum, great book. It sort of confirms my priors about the Empire, and it somewhat changes them when it comes to Duma specifically and parliamentarism in general: I didn't held Russian politicians of the era in high esteem, but I didn't expect them to be that bad in the art of, well, managing the state (although they were certainly pretty good in intrigues and manipulating mass opinion!). Again, highly recommend it to anyone; regardless of your political affiliations, if you are even slightly interested in early 20-th century history, reading it most likely will be pretty rewarding for you.

***

Some random thoughts and quotes:

It was quite interesting to brush up on the actions of far-left revolutionaries in rioting Petrograd in March. Lenin's October formula "To capture post offices, telegraph offices, and train stations" has been quite famous in Russia, but it was curious to see that socialists even in March had pretty strict contingency plans on the subject of "What to do when the SHTF in Petrograd" (to wit: free their leaders from prisons, telegraph the situation to other cities, ask workers at every factory to appoint a representative to the Workers' Council, etc., etc., etc., evil those people might be, but their coordination and strategic thinking are certainly quite impressive and instructive).
Oldenburg gives an interesting quote about the events by Winston Churchill, from "The world crisis. 1916-1918":

Surely to no nation has Fate been more malignant than to Russia. Her ship went down in sight of port. She had actually weathered the storm when all was cast away. Every sacrifice had been made; the toil was achieved. Despair and Treachery usurped command at the very moment when the task was done.

The long retreats were ended; the munition famine was broken; arms were pouring in; stronger, larger, better equipped armies guarded the immense front; the depots overflowed with sturdy men. Alexeieff directed the Army and Koltchak the Fleet. Moreover, no difficult action was now required: to remain in presence: to lean with heavy weight upon the far-stretched Teutonic line: to hold without exceptional activity the weakened hostile forces on her front: in a word, to endure—that was all that stood between Russia and the fruits of general victory. Says Ludendorff, surveying the scene at the close of 1916:

'Russia, in particular, produced very strong new formations, divisions were reduced to twelve battalions, the batteries to six guns; new divisions were formed out of the surplus fourth battalions and the seventh and eighth guns of each battery. This reorganization made a great increase of strength.'

It meant in fact that the Russian Empire marshalled for the campaign of 1917 a far larger and better equipped army than that with which she had started the war. In March the Czar was on his throne; the Russian Empire and people stood, the front was safe, and victory certain.

It is the shallow fashion of these times to dismiss the Czarist regime as a purblind, corrupt, incompetent tyranny. But a survey of its thirty months' war with Germany and Austria should correct these loose impressions and expose the dominant facts. We may measure the strength of the Russian Empire by the battering it had endured, by the disasters it had survived, by the inexhaustible forces it had developed, and by the recovery it had made. In the Governments of States, when great events are afoot, the leader of the nation, whoever he be, is held accountable for failure and vindicated by success. No matter who wrought the toil, who planned the struggle, to the supreme responsible authority belongs the blame or credit for the result.

Why should this stern test be denied to Nicholas II? He had made many mistakes, what ruler had not? He was neither a great captain nor a great prince. He was only a true, simple man of average ability, of merciful disposition, upheld in all his daily life by his faith in God. But the brunt of supreme decisions centred upon him. At the summit where all problems are reduced to Yea or Nay, where events transcend the faculties of men and where all is inscrutable, he had to give the answers. His was the function of the compass-needle. War or no war? Advance or retreat Right or left? Democratize or hold firm? Quit or persevere? These were the battlefields of Nicholas II. Why should he reap no honour from them? The devoted onset of the Russian armies which saved Paris in 1914; the mastered agony of the munitionless retreat; the slowly regathered forces; the victories of Brusiloff; the Russian entry upon the campaign of 1917, unconquered, stronger than ever; has he no share in these? In spite of errors vast and terrible, the regime he personified, over which he presided, to which his personal character gave the vital spark, had at this moment won the war for Russia.

He is about to be struck down. A dark hand, gloved at first in folly, now intervenes. Exit Czar. Deliver him and all he loved to wounds and death. Belittle his efforts, asperse his conduct, insult his memory; but pause then to tell us who else was found capable. Who-or what could guide the Russian State? Men gifted and daring; men ambitious and fierce; spirits audacious and commanding —of these there was no lack. But none could answer the few plain questions on which the life and fame of Russia turned. With victory in her grasp she fell upon the earth, devoured alive, like Herod of old, by worms. But not in vain her valiant deeds. The giant mortally stricken had just time, with dying strength, to pass the torch eastward across the ocean to a new Titan long sunk in doubt who now arose and began ponderously to arm. The Russian Empire fell on March 16; on April 6 the United States entered the war.

This moment was not mentioned in the book, but one of the important aspects of Communist propaganda (and "post"-communist, democratic actually too: they are quite synoptic on the topic of Russian monarchy) was "Czar was so disastrous a Commander, that Russian army lost lots of area in 1915". The Army lost a lot of area indeed: it's not for nothing they called the events of 1915 "The Great Retreat". And yet, if you look at the actual map, you'll see that this land lost (and actually partially recovered in 1916) is just peanuts compared to the vast, enormous extents the Communist army gave away in 1941 (and in much more disorganized manner, with much more severe personnel losses). Talk about throwing stones from the glass houses! (also, to be precise, the Czar appointed himself the commander-in-chief after The Great Retreat)
There's also an interesting piece on "what the monarchy did wrong" from some monarchical address used as the afterword in the book. I read the book in original, so here is my translation of the excerpt:

One of the most important reasons why the power consciously diverged from society was the distinctive policy of using the lower class as a support base over the heads of the middle class. This idea—of contraposition of "good people'' and "evil intelligentsia"—a kind of a "right-wing populism"—was familiar to many Rulers, starting with the emperor Nicholas I. And this is the antithesis to the idea The Great Catherine built her power on. This is the policy of Ivan the Terrible against the boyars, or of Gustav III against the Swedish nobles, etc., this piece is not the place to evaluate this policy; and yet both late Emperor and Empress had this thought sometimes; it was somewhat close to Witte too, but to a much lesser degree—to Stolypin.

One of the dangers of this path is that it can easily lead you down the road of losing the understanding of what's real in politics and what's not. Some fictions and conventions start to appear. The living bond between the power and people is replaced by the bond theoretical. The belief that people are kind of real, good, devoted to their monarch, was alive in the Ruler until his last days. He could have been right—but the Czar's voice couldn't get to people through the inimical atmosphere. And so the Ruler had the distorted image of society and people, and people and society had the distorted image of the Czar.

Eschewing any true information about the Czar and his family, Russian intelligentsia was extremely biased and eager to listen to what underground revolutionary lampoons wrote about him—usually it was just extremely lunatic fantasy, to whispers of courtroom gossips, to insinuations of disfavored dignitaries. The belief that the Ruler was ignorant, narrow-minded—some even dared to say "retarded"—that he was a man lacking in the will, and yet, evil and insidious—was quite common among intelligentsia. Even his military rank—which He was stuck in, because His Father died when the Ruler was 26 years old—was used to rebuke him, when they were speaking of "small colonel", of his "rank"—for some reason—"of army colonel", etc. That's how there appeared the atmosphere between the monarch and people which didn't let any good through and let only evil pass.

(I would say I mostly agree with this, though it's really not obvious to me how to break this vicious cycle of "intelligentsia despises the government => they don't want to collaborate with the government => the government lacks smart people => intelligentsia despises the government even more" without resorting to direct concessions to intelligentsia which, of course, only make them realize that the power is weak and make them want to ask for more, until the sovereign is dethroned).

The book also demonstrates very explicitly and utilizing many sources just how much most of the talking points about the Revolution we still repeat (e.g. the Rasputin story) were pretty much political propaganda created hastily just for the purposes of taking power. Not that I didn't know it, and yet: kind of sad.
Another curious thing: lots of parliamentary quarrels, animosity and disagreements are just incredibly… petty? Going back to Guchkov: he was a leader of Octobrist Party, basically moderate monarchists/right-wingers; the Czar thinks of him well enough to give him a certain prominent position; after that they two have a private conversation, which Guchkov then partly leaks to the media; the Czar is really pissed off, and Guchkov goes full "well, then screw you too" and later leads the effort to force the parliamentary sovereignty on the Czar. This is not how the government of any country should look like, this is some kindergarten-level crap.