Was Tsar Nicholas II a good ruler?
- Thread starter Irrisa
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Crazy Boris
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He wasn’t great, definitely in the lower tier of Russian rulers, but not terrible. Granted almost anything is better than what came after. I think he was more a victim of circumstance than anything, forced to lead Russia into a massive war it was unprepared for while stability at home was breaking down. It’s not that everything was perfect in Russia before WWI, far from it, but the war is what pushed the empire over the edge and created the hellish spiral straight to Lenin-town. Wrong guy in the wrong place and his family and country payed the ultimate price. A good man, but he ultimately falls short as a leader.
Still doesn't change the fact that Nicholas II was a bumbling, incompetent moron.
The ones I have sympathy for are the Czarina and the children; if you've got a beef with Nicky, put him on trial. Don't let an animals like Yakov Yurovsky and his goons stab them with bayonets repeatedly and bash in their skulls with rifle butts.
Also, I remember hearing on Behind the Bastards that Nicholas and Alexandra were abusive parents, specifically treating their five daughers as essentially one singular person, relegating them to deliberately worse living conditions, and generally being cold, demeaning, uncaring, fairly neglectful, and otherwise psychologically damaging.
Does that justify those same children being murdered in a cellar in Yekaterinberg? Of course not, but the guy was an antisemitic child abuser who kept around a mystical serial rapist while maintaining an oppressive secret police network.
If he had died of old age he'd been considered a less-than-mediocre ruler and an awful person.
Does that justify those same children being murdered in a cellar in Yekaterinberg? Of course not, but the guy was an antisemitic child abuser who kept around a mystical serial rapist while maintaining an oppressive secret police network.
If he had died of old age he'd been considered a less-than-mediocre ruler and an awful person.
"Sociopathic" isn't really a diagnosis used anymore, and it's hard to say that Lenin had antisocial personality traits with any level of certainty.
Also, Nicholas did oversee pogroms, which were organized massacres of Jews in Russia. They were both murderous, there's just a difference in scale and in intent.
Ah, yes... I remember that one. Interesting how an innocuous-enough question can transform over the course of several pages to, well... this:
(Credit to Calbear for the image
)Jonathansouth
Banned
He was a terrible ruler but he was a loving father to his children and nobody deserves what happened to him and his family.
No, but having his soldiers fire on protestors and then endorsing the Black Hundred massacres certainly was.
To the question, frankly Nicholas II was a terrible ruler. He the worst mix of things in a monarch, an absolutist and an incompetent simultaneously. He wanted total control of the country, and guess what? He used that control to run it into the fucking ground. You hate the Bolsheviks, well then you should hate Nicky II, because he's the incompetent dumbass who created the situation that revolution became inevitable. When warned that revolution was coming Nicholas did not care. At every turn if presented with two options he picked the worst one. Literally if he had flipped a coin when faced with a yes/no decision he would have done better, since at least then he'd have staticically picked the right one 50% of the time rather than 0%. His vacillating stupidity led to war with Japan, which Nicholas didn't dream would happen because he "did not wish it." He hated competent men who served him meanwhile, and fired the architect of Russia's industrialization, brought him back to negotiate a positive peace in a war that Nicholas II's stupidity had caused, blamed him when that treaty didn't declare Russia had won despite the fact the war had been an unmitigated disaster, and fired him again. And then the man's replacement was assassinated and Nicholas gave exactly zero fucks, despite THAT man being the one to bring down the Duma Nicholas had lied about accepting. Even until almost the DAY OF his abdication he refused to see any need to compromise his power, and was already planning how to lie his way out of any sort of reduction of power. Despite the fact his own soldiers were ready to machine gun his train if he tried to proceed.
Frankly even his family life doesn't win him any favors, as his refusal to see the issues created by his wife and his son's prayer man eroded support that his government had even among the upper class who SHOULD have been Nicholas II's base of support. There's a reason it was those people who murdered Rasputin and refused to back him in February.
He actively mismanaged WWI as well, making sure that lucrative wartime production only went to his good buddies while factories of people he didn't like stood idle, all while those good buddies didn't deliver or wasted the money on other projects, or BOTH. As a monarch Nicholas II had no positives. He might not be the most incompetent monarch in history, but it certainly wasn't for lack of trying. He deserved to be shot*.
The Soviets, bad as they were, were really just the tsarist state with a red paint job and run by more competent people.
*His kids didn't. But Nicholas definitely did.
Among English monarchs, Henry VI is probably a better analog to Nikolai II. The analog for Charles I is Pavel or Pyotr III.
This is probably a BS based upon misinterpretation of the existing facts. It was a long term tradition to bring up the children of the imperial family in rather strict conditions. For example, a tutor of Nicholas I was routinely beating him and his younger brother, Michael, and they (and AII, AIII, NII) had been passing through the intensive military drill before they were in their teens.
Living conditions and food of the imperial family also were rather harsh, especially starting with AIII: budget of the imperial family was almost permanently in the red and AIII (and NII after him) had been showing an example of a frugal life. But even during the reign of NI food at the imperial table was quite modest, to put it mildly. There was a description of an imperial dinner made by a respected Russian writer invited to it. He belonged to a middle level gentry and the food was well below his usual level both in quality and quantity.
Other than that, there are no indication of NII and his wife being bad parents. Actually, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, who actively disliked Alexandra, blamed her for being too much of a mother at the expense of her imperial duties and NII for being too much of a father of a family.
Ersatz furnaceAh, yes... I remember that one. Interesting how an innocuous-enough question can transform over the course of several pages to, well... this:
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(Credit to Calbear for the image
I have no sympathy for any monarch European or otherwise but early Soviets were more competent at what ? Murdering torturing and starving people on a even larger scale
Being better than Lenin or Stalin doesn't make you good. Both NII and Lenin can be bad - it isn't mutually exclusive.
Running the country. I didn’t say they were better people. I didn’t say they were empathetic, good, cared much for the common people, or really cared much at all about anything other than their own power and enriching themselves while talking big about how everything was totes going to get better. You know, someday.
The Soviet leadership were horrible. But they were more effective. And yeah, unfortunately being more effective meant being better at killing a lot of people. That’s not an excuse for any of the stuff the Bolsheviks did. Just a rather bitter note that the revolution was in the end was worse than complete failure, because the Soviets were just the tsar’s government come again, only this time not run by people who would let themselves be overthrown by amateurish blunders and utter refusal to acknowledge reality. For several decades at least.
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Nicky was a idiotic man, a incompetent moron whose obsession with power lead to evil acts. He was definitely a decent family man, but he couldn’t extend that to the rest of his country in anyway, failing to even recognize the problem and try to deal with them. In the end, his life was a failure which lead to the waste of his country, the transition to an evil totalitarian regime and the brutal and pointless death of his entire family.
I re-iterate, one of the most blatant unforced errors (not the biggest, far too many dead to claim that, but it did way too much PR damage to ignore) the Bolsheviks did was not putting Nick Alexandrovich and his family on the first boat to a place that would not send them back. Dead, he is as proclaimed a Sainted Martyr. Alive, people in the White Movements and Anti-Communists in general remember that he was The Idiot That Got Us Into This Mess and maybe his daughters do something useful with their lives.