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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.60, The Abyss that Lies Ahead of You

We ended last week with the murder of Rasputin, which the murderers hoped would jolt Nicholas and Alexandra back to their senses and change the disastrous course they were on. And while the death of Rasputin did have a major impact on the imperial couple, it was not what the assassins intended. It drove Nicholas and Alexandra closer together, isolated them further from their subjects, and convinced them they must maintain the course they were on at all costs. To do anything less would be to surrender to the enemies of Russia and God.

Life in the inner circle of the court over the winter of 1916-1917 was saturated in an omnipresent sense of defiant depression. One of the ways Rasputin kept his hooks in Alexandra had been telling her repeatedly that he received visions saying, and I’m quoting here, “If I die, or you desert me, you will lose your son and your crown within six months.” Now this is insanely manipulative, but clearly Alexandra believed it, and with everything that’s about to happen, you were never going to convince the empress Rasputin was wrong. Because, what happened? He died and less than two months later, she lost her crown. Now, was Rasputin’s death the reason the Romanov dynasty fell? Like, was he some sort of mystical linchpin holding it all together? Goodness no. His death was not the cause of anything. It was merely a preliminary effect of the real causes of the fall of the dynasty — social breakdown, economic breakdown, political breakdown — and besides, he was wrong about Alexei. The tsarevitch did not die within six months; he in fact lived for more than one whole year until he was mowed down by Red Army machine guns.

So to the extent that Rasputin’s death played a causal role in the Russian Revolution, it’s only that it drove the imperial couple into a state of fatally stubborn resentment. By New Year’s Eve 1916, Alexandra had clearly gone to a place where she would rather lose everything, including her life, than give an inch to the enemies of her family. She and her husband were the last things upholding the divine order of things, orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. No matter what, they could not surrender to the liberals and the Jews and the socialists, all of them atheists, heretical, greedy, corrupt, murderous scumbags. The task of the tsar and the tsarina was to bravely face this threat with uncompromising firmness. God was watching, and God was the audience to whom they now played. Everyone was telling them, if you change course, you’ll be able to save the crown. But for Nicholas, and especially Alexandra, they were far more worried about their souls.

Alexandra was ready to be strong and withstand anything, but her husband was going to need her help to hold the line. The tsar had come back to Tsarskoye Selo after Rasputin’s murder, but he was quite the shell of himself. He had never been the best ruler, nor the most able sovereign, but as we discussed back when he first ascended to the throne, Nicholas was a hardworking and engaged ruler. He was attentive to affairs of state, he was well briefed on what was happening out there in the world — or at least he was engaged with whatever his ministers allowed him to believe was happening out there in the world. Now, true, he was weak-willed, indecisive, and had a pension for drifting off into fantasy land, but he dutifully did his duty, and was regarded by those who came into contact with him as personally gracious and charming and attentive.

But that Nicholas was now gone. He was now detached, anxious, and distracted. He was not sleeping well. He couldn’t focus. He chain smoked cigarettes. People who saw him reported that he was gaunt, pale, his cheeks were sinking. His smile, which had always been tanged with a kind of forlorn sadness in his eyes now didn’t even have that. His lips made the motion of a smile, but the eyes were vacant. When he had meetings with ministers and aides and foreign diplomats, he just wasn’t all there. People would ask him questions that he should have known the answer to, but which he now struggled to answer. He was muddled and confused. In a word, the tsar was extremely depressed.

Now, one of the things the assassins of Rasputin had been hoping to accomplish was to end Alexandra’s period of influence over domestic affairs in Russia. They hope that maybe Alexandra might even be removed physically from the capitol, sent away to the Crimea, or forcibly locked up in a convent. That with the demonic puppet master gone, Nicholas would snap out of it and appoint the responsible government people had been trying to get him to a point since the dark days of the Great Retreat in 1915, and were now relentlessly hammering him to do ever since the reopening of the Duma in November 1916. But, like I said, Rasputin’s murder drove the couple to rely on each other more than ever. Alexandra’s influence was not waning, but positively waxing. It was clear Nicholas needed her support more than ever, and the couple actually had a secret passage built so that Alexandra could listen in on Nicholas’s meetings with various ministers and diplomats so she could weigh in and give him advice. Nicholas, for his part, welcomed Alexandra’s support and became incredibly angry when anybody suggested his wife was not the solution, but the problem, and in an admirable kind of way, Nicholas went all in on defending his wife from her many critics, detractors, and enemies. He was especially furious at all the insinuation that Alexandra was somehow some pro-German secret agent leading Russia to defeat on purpose. “The emperess is a foreigner,” Nicholas said. “She has no one to protect her but myself. I shall never abandon her under any circumstances. In any case, all the charges made against her are false. Wicked lies are told about her. But I shall know how to make her respected!”

From Nicholas’s perspective, the people telling him to get rid of his wife were doing so because they believed she was in league with the enemy, which he knew wasn’t true. And after Rasputin’s murder, it was clear these people were not content to simply slander his wife, but also to murder a man near and dear to her heart. So rather than moving towards a place where Nicholas is like, okay, Alexandra, maybe you should take a step back, he’s saying, no, I love you, and I trust you. You’re the only one I love and trust, because all these other people are liars and murderers and we cannot give in to them. So the brief little window that opened in early 1916, when Nicholas gave in to the opposition in the Duma, closed as quickly as it had opened. He replaced Prime Minister Stürmer with Alexander Trepov, and very nearly dismissed the controversial minister of the interior Protopopov, but those days, and they could be numbered in days, were over. In fact, in late December 1916, the tsar fired the oh so recently appointed Trepov, and on December 29th, 1916, elevated an aging loyalist of the empress named Nikolai Gallitzin to be prime minister of Russia. His previous job experience was being deputy chairman of a charity run by Alexandra.

Now Gallitzin himself knew he was not cut out for the job, and spent quite a bit of time trying to beg off the appointment. And he later said, “if someone else had used the language I use to describe myself, I should have been obliged to challenge him to a duel.” But when you’re an arch loyalist and believe in the divine authority of the autocrat of all Russia, when in the autocrat of all Russia appoints you prime minister, you kind of can’t say no.

Then, on January 3rd, 1917, the tsar dumped the minister of war and replaced him with a guy named Mikhail Belyaev. belief was recommended by Alexandra for all the reasons she always recommended ministers: unquestioning devotion, and loyalty. It didn’t matter that Belyaev was a paragon of upward failure, commanding the respect and confidence of no one, and who had spent his time in the military, shuffling papers around and not even doing that ver. So it was clear to everyone now that Nicholas and Alexandra were not changing course. On January 5th, 1917, the new Prime Minister Gallitzin reported as gently as he could to Nicholas that he had reports of people in Moscow openly discussing who the next tsar was going to be. Nicholas responded, “the empress and I know that all is in God’s hands, and his will be done.

Which, I mean, it’s very clear how much he’s resigning himself to his fate here, as if he’s just a helpless actor in some grand cosmic morality play doomed to whatever fate God deals out, as if he couldn’t just, like, appoint some better ministers and everything would be fine. But before I get too far down this intentionally courting martyrdom narrative, I should mention that, as we’re about to see, many people were trying to warn the tsar of the danger he faced. But Minister of the Interior Protopopov, who had Nicholas and Alexandra’s confidence, was working overtime to keep them in that bubble of placid ignorance, constantly telling them, oh, the situation’s not that bad, the people who are against you are very tiny minority, everybody else loves you, really, anything to keep them from doubting themselves. In fact, Protopopov decided a swell way to lock in the empress’s favor was to fill the divine boots left behind by Rasputin. He took to calling her every day at 10 o’clock in the morning, which was the time of day Rasputin used to call her, so Protopopov was quite literally filling that void in her schedule. He would also just casually mention that his advice was being guided by some kind of divine inspiration, or he would say, oh, last night, the spirit of Rasputin came to me in a dream and said, you know, blah-blah-blah or that when he came into Alexandra’s present, he could feel the spiritual glow of Christ. Just feeding her everything she wanted to hear, but not telling her anything she needed to hear.

Meanwhile, everyone else was trying to get the tsar to snap out of it. After most everyone in the family was caught celebrating the death of Rasputin and begging leniency for poor Grand Duke Dimitri, Nicholas and Alexandra cut them all off. They didn’t let them come around the palace anymore, and more than awere outright banished from Petrograd. A few of them could still get through though, and one of them was Grand Duke Alexander, simultaneously Nicholas’s cousin and brother-in-law and of the tsar’s boon companions going back their days as young men gallivanting around Europe together. Alexander was still welcome at the palace and tried to use what personal trust and confidence he had to convince Alexandra to step back for the good of both the dynasty and Russia.

Alexander arranged an audience with the empress, and told her, your interference with affairs of state is causing harm to Nikki’s prestige. I have been your faithful friend for 24 years, and, as a friend, I point out to you that all the classes of the population are opposed to your policies. Alexandra replied that Nicholas was a divinely appointed autocrat, and could not allow himself to sink to sharing power with anyone. The grand duke said, you are very much mistaken. Alex. Your husband ceased to be an autocrat on October 17, 1905. When the empress refused to hear any more about it, Alexander got angry, because this wasn’t just about Nicholas and Alexandra. It was about their selfish myopia putting the whole family and the whole empire in jeopardy. He said, for 30 months, I have never said a word to you about the disgraceful goings on in our government, better to say, your government. I realize that you are willing to perish, and that your husband feels the same way, but what about us? You have no right to drag your relatives with you down the precipice.

At this point, he was more or less kicked out of the palace and invited to never come back, and later he wrote:

“We are watching an unprecedented spectacle: revolution coming from above and not from below.”

Which is to say that at least in his mind, Nicholas and Alexandra were creating a revolution that did not have to happen, but which they seemed to be pursuing with as much single-minded purpose as the most obsessed SR terrorist.

With no one in the family able to get through, there was some hope maybe Russia’s wartime allies can help. The domestic political crisis in Russia was now at the level of being a matter of national security to both France and Britain. What would happen to the western front if Russia collapsed into chaos and could no longer continue the war? So leaders of the opposition in Russia, which now included practically everyone, would drop by the French embassy or the British embassy and say, look, we can’t get through to the tsar, but maybe as leaders of our wartime allies, you can lean on him to change course, to put the administration of Russia and its war effort on sound footing?

Now, this is a very delicate situation for a foreign diplomat, because, as a foreign diplomat, you are not supposed to comment on domestic politics. It is a great way to get your credentials revoked and get kicked out of the country. Your brief is foreign policy. But by the end of 1916, British Ambassador George Buchanan decided to stretch the limits of his mandate, because the domestic crisis in Russia was ultimately turning into a foreign policy crisis for Britain, France, and the other allies. In a meeting with the tsar on New Year’s Eve, Buchanan decided to broach this incredibly sensitive topic with Nicholas. Buchanan asked permission to speak frankly about the trouble surrounding the Russian government. When Nicholas said okay, Buchanan said, “Your majesty, if I may be permitted to say so, there is but one safe course open to you, namely to break down the barrier that separates you from your people, and to regain their confidence.” qby which Buchanan meant, appoint new ministers. Ministers that the Duma, as representatives of the people, had confidence in. Nicholas took resentful umbrage at this, and said, “Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain my confidence?” Which is a devastating indictment of Nicholas’s state of mind. He clearly believed that the problem was not that the tsar was failing his people, but that the people were failing their tsar.

But Buchanan pressed forward and said specifically, you’ve got to get rid of Protopopov, who, Buchanan said, if your majesty will forgive me for saying so, is bringing Russia to the verge of ruin. Nicholas said, I chose Protopopov from the ranks of the Duma in order to be agreeable to them and this is my reward. In Nicholas’s mind, he had already taken the path Buchanan recommended, appointed a minister with the Duma’s confidence, and all he had gotten in return was a doubling down on opposition, complaints, and disobedience.

Buchanan pressed on and continued to speak frankly about the information he was receiving — that the tsar had very few people he could count on in the event of a real political showdown. In the event of a revolution, Buchanan said, only a small portion of the army can be counted on to defend the dynasty. So Buchanan is appoint new ministers, it’s going to be a revolution. And when that revolution comes, nobody is going to rush to your defense.

But aware he was wildly out of bounds as a foreign diplomat, trying to steer domestic politics, Buchanan concluded by emphasizing that he was speaking on a personal level, as Nicholas’s concerned friend. “As an ambassador,” Buchanan said, “I am well aware I have no right to hold the language to which I have held to your majesty. And I have to take courage in both hands before speaking as I have. But if I were to see a friend walking through woods on a dark night along a path which I knew ended in a precipice, would it not be my duty, sire, to warn him of the danger? And is it not equally my duty to warn your majesty of the abyss, that lies ahead of you?” The tsar nodded assent to all this and thanked Buchanan for his concern, but that didn’t mean he would take the advice, or that he really appreciated Buchanan’s concern. Buchanan was later told by reliable informants that had he been a Russian subject, that conversation would have gotten him exiled to Siberia. His efforts were for naught, and the tsar did not change course.

About a week after Buchanan’s meeting, the tsar was treated to another blunt assessment of his position. This time It was a Russian subject. The chairman of the Duma, Mihail Rodzianko. Rodzianko was one of the founders of the Octobrists Party back in 1905, and he had been chairman of the Duma since 1911, and was now an inner circle leader of the progressive bloc opposition.

On January 7th, 1917, in his capacity as chairman of the Duma, he felt it was his duty to report to the tsar: “your majesty, I consider the state of the country to have become more critical and menacing than ever. The spirit of all the people is such that the gravest upheavals may be expected. All Russia is unanimous in claiming a change of government and the appointment of a responsible premier invested with the confidence of the There’s not a single honest or reliable man left in your entourage. All the best have been eliminated or resigned.” Rodzianko then addressed the most delicate matter of all: he said,”it is an open secret the empress issues orders without your knowledge and that the ministers report to her on matters of state. Indignation against and hatred of the empress are growing throughout the country. She is looked upon as Germany’s champion, and even the common people are speaking of it. Now this is exactly the kind of slander that sent Nicholas into a white hot fury, and he said, none of it is true. Rodzianko said, frankly, it doesn’t matter. It’s what everybody believes.”

According to Rodzianko, Nicholas then leaned back and put his head in his hands and said, “is it possible that for 22 years I have tried to act for the best, and that for 22 years it was all a mistake?”

Rodzianko allegedly plucked up all his courage and replied, “Yes, your majesty. For 22 years, you followed a wrong course.”

But like Buchanan before him, Rodzianko’s efforts were for naught. The tsar did not change course.

With Nicholas and Alexandra resisting all efforts to get them to change, talk of replacing them became widespread and unashamed. All through January 1917, rumors flew of a coup, a forced abdication of revolution. People spoke of it openly at all levels of society, in bread lines, in salons, in palace ballrooms. Opposition groups were all but openly planning what to do after Nicholas and Alexandra had been pushed out of power. These leaders were holding conferences, meetings, and congresses without police approval. Censorship was completely breaking down, as editors and publishers simply ceased submitting their work to the censor’s office. Seditious pamphlets, periodicals, and broadsheets circulated openly among the civilian population, as well as in the ranks of the army and navy. In the highest rungs of society, Rodzianko famously recorded a meeting he had with Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, Nicholas’s hugely influential aunt. Known as the grandest of the grand duchesses, Maria Pavlovna now presided over the wing of the Romanov family hostile to Nicholas and Alexandra. Particularly, she was hostile to Alexandra, who was seen to be leading the whole dynasty to ruin. Rodzianko was invited to a lunch where the grand duchess openly badmouthed the government incompetence, and laid into Alexandra and Protopopov. Rodzianko reported Maria Pavlovna said, Alexandra was driving the country to destruction, that she was the cause of the danger which threatened the emperor and the rest of the Imperial family, that such conditions could no longer be tolerated. That things must be changed. Something done. Removed. Destroyed.

Rodzianko got nervous and asked what she meant. The grand duchess said to him, the Duma must do something. She must be annihilated. Rodchenko said, who? And the grand duchess said, Alexandra.

Then Rodzianko allegedly said, your highness, allow me to treat this conversation as if it had never taken place. Because if you addressed me as the president of the Duma, my oath of allegiance compels me to wait at once on his imperial majesty, and report to him that the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna has declared to me that the empress must be annihilated.

But he did not report any of this. He only recorded it later, in his memoirs.

Rodzianko also took meetings with high ranking officers in the army, one of whom told him frankly, “the state of mind of the army is such that it will accept with joy the news of the coup d’etat. If you decide on this extreme measure, we will support you.” There was a growing consensus among many high ranking military officers that the single best way to improve military morale and win the war would be to announce that the tsar and his wife had abdicated and the whole empire was now under new leadership.

Lower down the social ladder, and further to the left, there was also lots of talk of forced abdication, and the sooner, the better. This was because, as you traveled further down the social ladder and further to the left into the ranks of the liberals, and the Kadets, and even radicals like Alexander Kerensky, that twofold goal of winning the war and preventing social revolution, were still the binary north star that guided their every move. Now, as we’ll talk more about next week, at the end of January, Kerensky was himself more than ready to turn to the streets if need be. But most of the other Duma leaders were not. Kerensky said, “everyone reacted determinately in the negative to the possibility of a popular outbreak, fearing, once provoked, a popular mass movement would turn in an extreme left direction, and this would create extraordinary difficulties for the conduct of the war.” He also said that, “even a transition to a constitutional regime provoked serious reservations, and the conviction that the new government would be unable to manage without harsh measures for the maintenance of law, and the prohibition of defeatist propaganda.” But though they feared what might happen if things got out of hand — they might lose the war and trigger a revolution — they also seemed to believe that both of those things were inevitable if Nicholas and Alexandra were allowed to remain in power. Kerensky said, “Opposition fears that things might get out of hand did not shake the general determination to finish the indecisiveness of court circles, and depose Nicholas.

But for all the talk of the coup, nothing actually seems to have gotten going. Everybody seems to have assumed somebody else was going to do it. Whatever plans any one of these groups was making never coalesced into a proper plot. They did not get the necessary guard units, or officers, or political leaders in place, to be at a certain place at a certain time, none of it was really shaping up. And indeed, by late January, the imperial couple were getting reports from Protopopov — not wholly inaccurate — that while there was a lot of griping out there, and a lot of wildly seditious fantasizing, nothing was actually coming together. Protopopov could report no evidence of an active plot that seriously threatened the couple’s power and authority. The only thing that did kind of worry Protopopov at the moment was the reconvening of the Duma, which had gone into recess over the holidays, and was set to restart their work on February 14th. But he assured Nicholas and Alexandra that he had the situation well in hand, and he had a plan to short circuit any attempt to turn the reopening of the Duma into ground zero for a revolution. Once that danger was past, the worst would probably be over. In hindsight, Protopopov was both right and wrong. As we’ll see next week, he did have a plan to prevent February 14th from marking the beginning of a rBut he was wrong that if he successfully prevented that, the worst would be over no one knew it, but the opportunity for a quick palace coup, forced abdication, the rabid replacement of the government without plunging into social revolution, was over. So please join me next week as we plunge headlong into the most famous February in Russian history.