by Morton Mcinvale

Created on: July 12, 2009

Why Did Tsar Nicholas II Fall in 1917?

It might be fair to ask why Nicholas II did not fall before 1917. Nicholas II not only had history against him - his grandfather Alexander II had been assassinated, his great-great uncle Paul had been murdered, and the blood of coups and coup attempts flowed through Russia's past like the Volga. . . More importantly, Nicholas had the future against him. Time was ticking on the dynasty.

Nicholas and the Romanovs clung to power in one of the last of the absolute monarchies in Europe due, as much as anything, to tradition. The bond between Father Tsar and peasant and the Orthodox Church exercised a semi-mystical appeal that often transcended rationality. Industrialization and modernization had little time and less place for Orthodoxy,tradition, and Tsars.

Support of the Tsarist state had begun to crumble due to modernization with Czar Alexander II's emancipation of the peasants in 1861. Resenting the dynasty for real and fancied loss of "property" and power, or else finding itself lacking purpose, the landed nobility developed a culture of radicalism, imbibed from Western Europe. The propertied class that should have provided a base of support for the Tsar proved to be the Tsar's (and its own) deadliest foe. The individual and political decay of the landed aristocracy is best chronicled in the 19th century novelists, many of whom (Turgenev, Tolstoy) themselves epitomized it.

Emancipation not only failed to curb the demands for change within Russian society, it served to fan the flames of student radicalism. Expecting unrealistic change and unable to achieve it in the Tsarist state, students, liberal aristocrats, and idealistic zealots turned to terrorism. With the extension of railroads, growth of capital, spread of industrialism, the burgeoning growth of an industrial proletariat, and a rejection of Russia among students and the aristocratic and intellectual elite, Tsar Nicholas II may have been doomed even before he was coronated on May 26, 1896.

To counter these dynamics of modernism, the Tsarist state offered what it had for centuries: a mystical and militaristic Orthodoxy aimed at protection of the Church and expansion of the empire into the lands of Turkey (including establishing a protectorate for the South Slavs in the Balkans), tradition, and the status quo. When Nicholas II attempted to expand Russian authority in East Asia, his empire almost came tumbling down.

Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of

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