WI: No Russian Bloody Sunday?

The most important lesson of the Russian Revolution is that if people are marching to your house while carying pictures of you and beseeching you as their "little father"... don't run them down with Cossaks. So, what would happen if Tsar Nicholas didn't do that?
 
It undoubtedly butterflies away another reason why so many of his subjects came to
hate Nicholas II. But as Carl Schwamberger
points out above, it would NOT have gotten
rid of all the other factors which would even-
tually come together & cause the Russian
Revolution(for example, we'd still have the
little matter of Rasputin, the mad monk)
 
The most important lesson of the Russian Revolution is that if people are marching to your house while carying pictures of you and beseeching you as their "little father"... don't run them down with Cossaks. So, what would happen if Tsar Nicholas didn't do that?

Even if Nicholas didn't just have his guards mow them down with gunfire like he did OTL, he still wasn't in any way going to meet their material demands and needs. The disillusionment with the Tsar would just continue to fester and grow over time as opposed to all of a sudden someone like Gapon and his followers going "we have no Tsar" overnight.
 
Even if Nicholas didn't just have his guards mow them down with gunfire like he did OTL, he still wasn't in any way going to meet their material demands and needs. The disillusionment with the Tsar would just continue to fester and grow over time as opposed to all of a sudden someone like Gapon and his followers going "we have no Tsar" overnight.

Why won't he meet their demands? Is it like a political impossibility, or is he just unwilling to?
 
Avoiding the Khodynka Disaster at the royal wedding would help a lot to improve the popularity of the royal couple as a whole.
 
Why won't he meet their demands? Is it like a political impossibility, or is he just unwilling to?

Both really. He personally was an incredibly stubborn man who believed deeply in the principles of autocracy. He said things like this on the eve of the February Revolution:

"Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain my confidence?"

In terms of how politically impossible it was, the small Russian elite (the old landlords and the emerging business class) Nicholas was the avatar of was almost as deeply resistant to change as he was because of how delivering meaningful change to the vast majority of the people would have major adverse effects on their power and pocketbooks. The reason why elite or pro-elite would be reformers like Witte, Stolypin and finally Kerensky couldn't deliver the reforms needed to avert mass revolt- because Russia hadn't progressed to the point that there was a meaningful pro-reform section of the elite capable of exercising power like the pro-New Deal US elites embodied by FDR or even the Bismarckian paternalists of Imperial Germany. To build up a strong pro-reform section of the Russian elite capable of averting the loss of mass confidence in the Romanov state you need a POD way before 1905.
 
...
In terms of how politically impossible it was, the small Russian elite (the old landlords and the emerging business class) Nicholas was the avatar of was almost as deeply resistant to change as he was because of how delivering meaningful change to the vast majority of the people would have major adverse effects on their power and pocketbooks. ....

Sounds like some of the businessmen I have known in the US in the past couple decades. Those guys never understood why their employees despised them.
 
So an arrogant and stupid ruling class pissed away popular support by refusing to make change that would have saved their position?

That's right. If they just would had watched how succesfully United Kingdom reformed itself as parliamentarist nation and made reforms towards that, Russian Empire could had survive. Unfortunately for them and Russia Romanovs were too much out of touch to common people.
 
A Paternalist welfare state like Bismarckan Germany was designed to pacify people away from democratic ideas. If their needs were met, the bond between tzar, church and country, grew stronger. Look at the arab spring in our own time, it started in Egypt because subsidies had to be cut back. Witte understood. Deep sixing Plevhe might have helped.
 

Deleted member 94680

Bloody Sunday was in 1905, the Revolution that removed the Tsar in 1917.

The real thing that killed the Tsar’s popularity with the people was his assuming command of the military effort in WWI.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
The first question is not if Tsarism is overthrown, but if there is any escalating revolution at all in 1905.

The second question is if there is less revolutionary activity in the land, does Russia beat Japan in a longer war.
 
The first question is not if Tsarism is overthrown, but if there is any escalating revolution at all in 1905.

The second question is if there is less revolutionary activity in the land, does Russia beat Japan in a longer war.

Even wth out the Bloody Sunday PR disaster, the Russian Empire was still going to ruled by a Czar who mixed mediocre administrative ability with little personal charisma, with a deep love of bling, and an unshakeable insistence on an absolute monarchy and.... a lack of base brutality needed to crush Bolshevik dissent.

The totality above coupled with Russia's ills meant that there was still going to be an explosion at some point in the near future.
 
The most important lesson of the Russian Revolution is that if people are marching to your house while carying pictures of you and beseeching you as their "little father"... don't run them down with Cossaks. So, what would happen if Tsar Nicholas didn't do that?
Even if Nicholas didn't just have his guards mow them down with gunfire like he did OTL,

Repeat After Me:
1. The Tsar wasn't even in Saint Petersburg during at the time.
2. He never gave orders to fire on the marchers.
3. That was done independently by the garrison of the Winter Palace.
 
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