Section 1: Was Nicholas II Suited to Being an Autocratic Leader?

As you read through the following information try to decide which bits of evidence would support the view that Nicholas was simply not cut out to be the autocratic ruler that he tried to be.

By the time Nicholas came to the throne in 1894, for hundreds of years the Tsars had exercised total and almost God-like powers under The Fundamental Laws of the empire. There were no political parties allowed and the Tsar, if he chose to listen to them, had a Council of Ministers made up of the nobles. There was no parliament and no constitution.

Tsar Nicholas II. Picture from The Illustrated London News.

The influence of the Tsarina

In 1894 the Tsar entered an arranged marriage with Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a German princess. She came to be despised by the Russian people because of the way she meddled in government and later because of her devotion to the disreputable monk Rasputin. During the First World War she was widely regarded as a German spy and often referred to as "that German woman".

Alexandra was a domineering woman and Nicholas apparently an easy victim of this. She constantly urged him to play the part of the autocrat using phrases such as "The Russians love their whip" and " Russia is the Tsar, the Tsar is Russia."

Tsarina Alexandra. Picture from The Illustrated London News.

A good quote for your essay

Richard Pipes, a prominent historian of the Russian Revolution wrote, "Without her influence, Nicholas might have yielded to public pressure and agreed to play the role of a ceremonial monarch, which could have avoided the revolution."