AHC: Make Tsar Nicholas II a communist.
- Thread starter LNSS
- Start date
Comrade Nicholas would demand none of his generals get purged and the Soviets do much better in World War 2
If Comrade Nicky became a Communist he might live long enough to be purged by Stalin...
Dolan
Banned
Or if Stalin and Trotsky exhausted themselves in power struggle, Comrade Nicholas could present himself as the moderate candidate and turned Soviet Union into People's Tsardom of Russia.
GiantMonkeyMan
Banned
Nicholas II was from all accounts a moron politically and spent the last of his days reading to his children from the pages of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion... Maybe his children could have been "educated", given different names and fostered with politically safe families, but Nicholas himself was a lost cause.
In fairness the same could have been said for Puyi who basically spent the entirety of his life in a gilded cage prior to being captured by the Soviets, even after re-education and his release by the Chinese he struggled with things like street signs and how to use money.
The big problem is that it was advantageous to the Soviets that Nicholas die. If the Chinese Civil War had been fought between the CCP and a coalition that included elements which wanted to restore Puyi to the throne and the CCP were on the back foot whilst having Puyi in captivity, it feels likely that Mao would have had him killed similar to the Tsar.
By the Revolution its too late to convert Nicholas II. Alexei maybe could have been, but not the tsar himself. To get Nicholas to fit you'll need him to at least get sympathetic to the communists before he takes the throne of Russia. Maybe he gets a decent education, and falls into radical circles by accident at university, and ends up using his influence to shield his socialist buddies from police crackdowns.
Maybe if he did not end up on the throne, and left the inner circle due to shame or grudges he could join up with the expatriate revolutionary thinkers and become a Russian version of Philippe Égalité ( the duke of Orléans).
Oh, but he became one. And with his family, they sat upon the roof at Yalta, admiring Stalin's success.
In 1890 he went on a world tour. He's young (22 IIRC.), far from the court and has lots of spare time, sounds like the best moment to stumble in some interesting books (The problem is "How?").
Starting earlier would be way better though.
Starting earlier would be way better though.
Considering that Nicky was a bit of a Christian fundamentalist (combine this with the old divine right of kings idea, and you see why he thought he needed to rule Russia as an autocrat) this could be difficult. Some of his children might become genuine supporters of the regime, and if Nicky lives to see WW2 (IF there is a WW2, the royal family living could easily derail the war) he might become a supporter of the new regime for nationalistic reasons.
Not executing the tsar and his family has far reaching benefits however. The murder of the children was especially shocking. Even the French Revolution had not gone that far. It alienated the still important royal families abroad, it alienated many allies within Russia, thus greatly worsening the Russian civil war, and the increased factional divisions likely played an important role in the failures to make the system accountable to the people it claimed to represent and in the purges, though both of those last had many other factors.
So if the Bolsheviks try to convert the former Tsar to their ideology, even if it fails to bear even minimal fruit until a major war happens, you could see a very different regime emerge in the interim, with more buy-in from the middle and upper class, more Mensheviks and more SRs involved in politics and with a less damaging civil war.
I expect that if any of the former royals became sufficiently enthusiastic in their support in the regime, it would come too late to be particularly useful for propaganda purposes.
I doubt that anyone would try to push for a restoration, and probably the former royal family aren't of great interest during Soviet times. Though if there is a Stalinist period in this alternate Soviet Union, some may not survive the purges and some may be left with health problems from spending time in the gulags.
fasquardon
The Bolsheviks, had a sudden White advance not scared them into ordering his execution, were planning a show trial for the Tsar à la Louis XVI's trial. IIRC, Trotsky was very into this idea and was going to head the prosecution that tried the Tsar for his crimes against the working class and sentence him to death. Puyi's re-education was a useful bit of political theater for the CCP because he wasn't really ever in an actual position of power and did not represent their main political enemy, the KMT. He was the puppet symbol of the Japanese and his fate really had no political consequence in the post-Civil War order, so the new regime could afford to do things like deciding to make him a communist. Nicholas on the other hand was the principal enemy of the Bolsheviks and represented everything they were struggling against - he had directly ruled the Empire that the communists were now in a life or death struggle to bury in history. By the political logic of the time, he had to be made an example of and there wasn't any other way about it. Doubly so given the weight of the French Revolution in the minds of every Bolshevik at the time: not "guillotining the King" would be a severe political misstep on the part of the highest leadership.
Also, this is just a theory but I think the "conversion" of one's enemies had deeper roots in Chinese political and popular culture that gave it some extra significance. This didn't really exist in Russia and so it takes some of the wind out of the hypothetical proposal too.
Also, this is just a theory but I think the "conversion" of one's enemies had deeper roots in Chinese political and popular culture that gave it some extra significance. This didn't really exist in Russia and so it takes some of the wind out of the hypothetical proposal too.
Last edited:
All of what you say is true. Added to that, Nicky's screw-ups made him justly hated by large segments of the population. Even so, I don't think it is impossible to imagine the Bolsheviks taking a different course.
For example, taking the view that executions are a bourgeoisie instrument of oppression, and that the new socialist state should take the high road and re-educate criminals in an effort to free them from the pathologies of capitalist and feudalist society that caused them to become criminals.
i.e., bring the thinking of the 1970s back into the 1910s and have the Soviets treat the Tsar as a mentally ill man and trying to "cure" him with the very best of modern medicine.
Had lobotomies and electrotherapy caught on in Russia at this time? This could get quite dark for poor Nicholas II...
fasquardon
It's definitely possible with a PoD during 1917, I think you'd need a less intense Civil War period and/or a more moderate Bolshevism (think Lenin governing alongside a significant Left SR faction). These circumstances would give the Bolsheviks more leeway to be sympathetic to the living symbol of Tsarism and Old Russia on earth, and then I could definitely see some alternative fates being explored for the Tsar. I'm not entirely sure how one would even go about trying to reform Nicholas politically (Puyi was easier given his complete lack of interaction with the outside world I suppose), but if done tastefully I think it could make a really interesting AH vignette!!
I think a true conversion would be pretty much impossible. But I could imagine Nicholas coming around to some sort of Nationalist Bolshevik fudge for his personal beliefs that would let him justify to himself mouthing support for the regime. I think Nicholas did have a real sense of duty towards the Russian people, so I could imagine if something like OTL's Barbarossa happened in TTL, an aged and tired Nicky would say to himself "well, they're still evil cretins, but I still need to support my people in this hour of national emergency".
fasquardon
He would need to be Reeducated. If he was leaning left before he took power, then as Tsar and Autocrat of all Russia, he would likely promote socialist thinkers and policy makers. They would moderate compared to OTL, but they would still probably be able to improve the lot of the people and butterfly the revolution
It wasn't just his mistakes. If it was just mistakes then maybe, maybe Nicholas could have been spared. But he flat out murdered thousands of his own people willingly and with both eyes open in the repression after 1905. Nicholas II was guilty in a way that say Louis XVI really wasn't. He deserved to be shot.
However, like Puyi, I do not think there actually were people wanting Nicholas back in power. The Bolsheviks certainly weren’t the ones who were responsible for ending the monarchy.