• Shalakushka
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    111 year ago

    That’s not quite what I meant, but I understand how it could be taken that way. I’m just kind of sour because they had ridiculous strongman after ridiculous strongman in the Tsars, had a genuine worker’s revolt, and then squandered it on ridiculous strongman after ridiculous strongman, then that government folded only to be replaced by a ridiculous strongman. The Russian people deserve way better than that, but it sort of seems like they don’t feel like better is possible. I can sympathize, Americans are similar that way, and I think Americans will elect empty suit after empty suit, because American culture is superficial in the same way that Russian culture is fatalistic about power and corruption.

      • PugJesus
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        1 year ago

        News flash that nobody knows: Nicholas II was not a strong man. He didnt even want the job, and his cousin Kaiser William had to teach him how to Czar.

        Okay, so everyone who is reading this but isn’t up on their early 20th century history knows - Nicholas II did not particularly want to be Tsar. But he considered it his duty and divine position to be an ‘unshakeable autocrat’ anyway who opposed democratic reforms at every turn. Nicholas had to have one of his close relatives threaten to shoot himself in the head with a revolver in front of Nicholas before Nicholas allowed the protesters their demands for a very defanged parliament in 1905.

        Also, it was not a genuine worker’s revolt. WWI happened because the German and Russian parliaments declared war while Nich and William were trying to find ways to avoid it.

        This is also hogwash. The February Revolution was a genuine worker’s revolt characterized by spontaneous mass strikes, riots, and refusal of orders by war-weary soldiers at the front once they heard of the unrest. WW1 was a tangled mess, but neither Kaiser Wilhelm nor Nicholas searched in earnest for solutions, because they thought the other parties would back down, or that it would be a short war. Neither, of course, was true. But they were genuinely friendly in their correspondence on account of the royal families of Europe being one somewhat inbred family tree, so some historical revisionists like to assume that they’re innocent.

        Germany could not compete against the sheer number of bodies that Russia could send to the front, so they exiled Lenin to Russia to destabilize it with the intention of assassinating him afterwards and taking over.

        Another inaccuracy. Germany didn’t have trouble with the ‘sheer number of bodies’ that Russia could send to the front. The Eastern Front in WW1 they were actually considerably successful in. It was simply a desire to refocus all of their forces, and Austro-Hungary’s, to other fronts by ending the war with Russia sooner. Lenin did not arrive in Russia until the February Revolution had already occurred.

        It did not go as planned, as Nicholas was glad to abdicate, thinking that one of the Eurpean royal family would allow he and his to retire in a countryside villa somewhere. That also did not go as planned.

        It was not a lack of offers from other royal families that condemned him, it was the fact that the workers soviets’ hated his fucking guts and would have killed him if the Provisional Government tried to ferry him out.