Nicholas II- alternatives?

I wasn’t sure whether to post this under pre or post 1900 but opted for the later, as we will be discussing the effects of my premise as concerning the post 1900 era.
Nicholas II was IMO a very tragic figure; by all accounts a very nice man who loved his family and wanted badly to do good for his country and its people. One of his biggest problems was his wife, a neurotic German princess who kept trying to force her husband into behaving like an autocrat, something he was not suited for. I wonder if things would have been different if for some reason he’d married someone else. Perhaps a princess from a country with a constitutional monarchy, like Sweden or Denmark. Such a wife might have influenced him toward loosening up, permitting more authority for the Duma etc. The whole thing with Rasputin would not have happened if his heir had not had hemophilia. Nicholas would have made a fine constitutional monarch. Given all Russia’s problems the monarchy may not have survived WWI anyway, but things might have turned out for the better. Ideas?
 

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I wasn’t sure whether to post this under pre or post 1900 but opted for the later, as we will be discussing the effects of my premise as concerning the post 1900 era.
Nicholas II was IMO a very tragic figure; by all accounts a very nice man who loved his family and wanted badly to do good for his country and its people. One of his biggest problems was his wife, a neurotic German princess who kept trying to force her husband into behaving like an autocrat, something he was not suited for. I wonder if things would have been different if for some reason he’d married someone else. Perhaps a princess from a country with a constitutional monarchy, like Sweden or Denmark. Such a wife might have influenced him toward loosening up, permitting more authority for the Duma etc. The whole thing with Rasputin would not have happened if his heir had not had hemophilia. Nicholas would have made a fine constitutional monarch. Given all Russia’s problems the monarchy may not have survived WWI anyway, but things might have turned out for the better. Ideas?

IMO, the only way that Nicholas II can be a different man is that his father get killed while he is a very young boy, and his gradnfather lives longer than 1881 and grandfather has the main role in his education.
 
IMO, the only way that Nicholas II can be a different man is that his father get killed while he is a very young boy, and his gradnfather lives longer than 1881 and grandfather has the main role in his education.

I agree to a point. Alexander III did very little to educate his oldest son or prepare him for his role. Why, I don't understand.
Some things may be pre-ordained. I still wonder if a different approach toward mild democracy might have mattered in the early 1900's.
 
One of the problems here is the origin of the Romanovs in particular and the Tsardom in general.

The first Romanov Tsar, Michael I, survived the time of troubles because he was protected by the ordinary people of Russia. Combine that with the fact that the Tsar was tightly bound to the Orthodox Church of 'Holy Russia' and was viewed by the ordinary populace at the time as the 'Little Father' who was always trying to look out for them (rebellions at the time focussed on the Boyars as 'wiked councillors') and you end up with a very powerful image of the Tsar as the embodiment of the actual father of the people and so it would be unthinkable for the people to actually harm him.

None of this should have been a problem in the late 19th Century, except we start getting romantisism in Russia, and in particular in the Imperial Court. And due to Peter the Great's modernisations, we have a worrying blend of romanitism towards this period of the 17th Century, particularly during the reign of Alexander III. Nicholas II was effectively raised in an evironment that was constantly harking back towards the pre-industrial period, and it seems quite likely given that apart from everything else, he had ended up both with a longing of the past and a belief in the Romanov Legend of Michael's salvation and that general idea of 'the father figure who must guide his many children, forcefully if necessary.

This of course is something of a hindrance to modern concepts of democracy. It would need to be a forceful woman who could persuade Nicholas to go against this grain of upringing.
 
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