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Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition

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Very informative book, but qualifies more as a textbook than nonfiction. Not an easy read, (keep a dictionary handy) but crammed full of essential and interesting information for all fans of Nicholas II. Would be a great reference resource for anyone researching Nicholas II or Russia during this era.

The premise of this excruciating tome is that unforeseeable social/political revolutions foiled Czar Nicholas's plan to modernize Russia. An interfering Duma and provisional government, feckless peasants and later, the Bolsheviks, collectively wrecked Nicholas's noble goals.

A preliminary note to the reader: this book does not portray an objective biography of Nicholas II or his consort; it purports to be a study of Imperial Russia's death throes and the political minutiae that preceded/caused/was concurrent with it (and the secret German agenda manipulating it).

Despite the historicity of Nicholas and Alexandra's grim role in Russia's destruction, the author posits that Nicholas wished to act in its best interests but external forces thwarted his efforts to modernize the country.

In fact Nicholas was an absolute autocrat who believed himself God's enforcer of the status quo and blindly engineered his own execution rather than permit Russia even nominal democratic concessions.

Per author d'Encausse, Nicholas was rendered impotent and disabled while still a youth by his formidable grandfather, Alexander II, who made sure Nicholas was undereducated and protected from the responsibilities of rule. However, neither as a boy nor an adult with the certainty of a colossal sovereignty ahead of him, did Nicholas read or study or show any interest in his realm. Though he loved to party and play and travel, he had no personal or emotional involvement in Russia or its future.

The only intimate interaction with reality Nicholas had was with his wife, Alexandra, who was herself unstable and possibly insane. Even d'Encausse acknowledges that in her extreme religiosity and self-importance, Alexandra's world was distorted to the point of delusion.

The four daughters of this epic union merit nominal mention. Alexi is, though only to demonstrate the extremity of Alexandra's obsession with preserving her doomed boy's patrimony. Most studies, though not this author's, portray Alexandra as an overbearing and controlling mother whose children were so cowed by her obdurate and deranged nature that they never matured as individuals. Their deaths must be laid at Alexandra's door, and at their father's too - though d'Encausse brushes off these children as collateral, barely relevant, damage.

The Russians hated Alexandra ab initio for not only for being German and her notorious secretiveness (she shunned all court activities in preference to the privacy of family and privilege - which they correctly saw as aloofness), but also for her control over her profoundly feeble husband.

This became most obvious and damming at the outbreak of the First World War when Nicholas ridiculously appointed himself supreme commander of Russia's armed forces.

While five million Russian soldiers died, Nicholas slept in, played cards, strolled along the river, napped or went on afternoon jaunts in his Rolls. If televison had been invented he would have watched cartoons all day. Seriously. He was that detached. Meanwhile, Alexandra's exaggerated sense of superiority led her to sideline Nicholas's authority to the point of dictating government appointments with Rasputin and to enforce much sterner control over the Duma and hence over Russia's seething masses who threatened to disrupt the Romanov's divine autocracy.

One of Alexandra's favorite White Queen refrains was to demand the dismissal, execution or banishment to Siberia anyone who dared oppose her. And they were usually effected. Ironically, she herself perished in gunfire in a basement in Siberian Ekaterinburg but remained so blinded by her own God-given sense of dominance that she never comprehended why she ended up likewise condemned to death. She was just plain peeved at the inconveniences of imprisonment.

And while disaster fomented, Nicholas ignored expert recommendations that he liberalize the country's political and economic strata. The few advisors who concurred with his absolutist vision fell from grace for not being obsequious or punitive enough. Nicholas hated and feared the peasantry but clung to a belief that they were beautiful and earthy and worshiped him, Father Russia, with every dirty grain of their souls. This fantasy was undoubtedly a part of Rasputin's glamour. Tragically, Nicholas never saw the populace as real human beings, a suffering, angry, hopeful - and ultimately - powerful people.

Rasputin's role in Russia's annihilation was crucial though d'Encausse dismisses him as an imperial toy. She is so wrong: Alexandra believed that he was truly a man of God, her private guru who had the power to relieve the sufferings of her hemophiliac son and heir, a personalized Jesus dedicated to her cause, and Russia's too. She granted this sly cretin the power to make strategic political decisions and worse, badgered Nicholas to do likewise, which he did of course, because he was too hapless to do otherwise.

Strangely, Nicholas could occasionally be roused from his lassitude and become ruthless and repressive when his autocratic rule was questioned or his pride pricked. Russians died by the tens of thousands when he was provoked, though it was never enough for Alexandra. Her thirst for control and blood was unquenchable and Nicholas, her "boysy", was ever indulgent.

Author d'Encausse, a self-described expert on Russian history, breezes past these problems and states baldly that the Germans were behind Russia's downfall and the peasantry, being uneducated drunks, were Prussian pawns. Then Lenin and the Bolsheviks stepped in to fill the power vacuum, which is true, but d'Encausse's asserts that without such malignant forces, Nicholas, had he been allowed to continue on his enlightened course, Russia would never have fallen.

What piffle. Nicholas and Alexandra were the direct and proximate cause of Imperial Russia's death and heedlessly masterminded their own (and their children's) extinction. Nicholas was not a reformer. He had no idea what to do, how to think or adapt or analyze at any time leading up to or contemporaneous with the critical political, economic and social changes that needed a mature and considered leader. Fatally insecure, this Czar's life's mission was to unwind time and Russia's progressive accomplishments realized under his grandfather Alexander II and even those of thug-master Peter the Great, as well as those of the more cultivated but still vulgar Catherine the Great.

His own cousin Kaiser "Willy" Wilhelm stated that Nicholas would have made a better turnip farmer than a Czar. And Theodore Roosevelt, who mediated the Japanese/Russian settlement of 1905, despised this Russian despot, calling Nicholas a preposterous little creature who knew neither how to make war nor peace.

Pardon me Ms. d'Encausse, however much you may find Nicholas "dignified" and "courageous", there was no "interrupted transition" unless it was in reverse motion: Nicholas had no interest in reforming Russia. The 1905 revolution that resulted in Russia's first Parliament (Duma) was forced upon him and he loathed it passionately, fought its changes, dissolved it when possible and salted it with sycophants.

Nicholas II was a ruinously defective hereditary ruler whose sole objective was to hold absolute power over a diverse and complex amalgam of people and territory but whose intellectual and personal limitations quashed any possibility of progress. And as a result of his fatalistic nihilism, political rigidity and incompetence Russia's revolutions were unavoidable. If Nicholas had been better at his job, the history of 20th century politics would have been profoundly different and this world would have been a safer, saner and infinitely better place for all of us, even now.

Nicholas and Alexandra are, and should be, damned for all time - not whitewashed or falsely reintroduced to history as thwarted reformists per d'Encausse.

As a final note, Nicholas was marginally intelligent, though d'Encausse urges that he has been wrongly described as a "simpleton". But he was, and so, clearly was Alexandra. Neither had the capacity to effect competent rulership on any level that did not prioritize self-interest. This reader believes that these two close blood relations (second cousins) suffered not only from a fatal belief in their own entitlement and power, but may have been so inbred as to be demented - perhaps not so spectacularly as the Hapsburgs - but equally handicapped. Nothing else can explain their deliberate walk into the wall of their own destruction.

This tome must be avoided for sanity's sake. Recommended instead are: The Last Czar by Edvard Radzinsky; Rasputin, the Saint Who Sinned by Brian Moynahan; and The Last Empress and The Man Who Killed Rasputin and The Court of the Last Czar by Greg King.