There have been so many television programmes - not to mention the countless books and forums and websites - in which professors sit in their university studies making pronouncements about the weakness of the 'ignorant' Tsar Nicholas II. On one such programme a 1 minute clip of film footage of the Tsar dancing with his daughters on the Imperial Yacht was used to demonstrate that he spent his life in the lap of luxury frittering away the hours in amusements. Interesting how an oft-repeated lie is taken as truth.
Imagine if you - and only you, one person - were faced with trying to sort out the the present situation in Afghanistan and the recent conflict in Iraq , together with all that happened in Serbia and Bosnia a couple of decades ago, and on top of that you were personally responsible for the well-being of 180 million people from different cultures in one of the largest empires on earth, and in the middle of a time of great change through industrialisation and the speed of advances in technology...oh and you also had a son, whom you loved very deeply, who was seriously ill and a wife who was badly treated by your own family, and that same family had, for the most part, decided not to support you...Well, that is a little of what the 'weak' and 'ignorant' Tsar Nicholas faced every day. It wasn't his choice. He would have liked to have lived a simple life on a Dacha somewhere, caring for his family and spending his time outdoors, but he had been saddled with this responsibility and with more moral courage than any of his contemporaries he tried to rise to that challenge.
In 1913, while King George V (who is never described as 'weak' or 'ignorant') shot over 1000 pheasants in one day for 'sport' or pored over his precious stamp that had cost him over £1000, and while Kaiser Wilhelm strutted around in his uniforms, laughing too loudly and playing at being a king, the weak Tsar, Nicholas, who frittered his life away in luxury, was spending all day and most of the night trying to resolve the crisis in the Balkans. He wrote to the Kings of Bulgaria and Serbia, offering to arbitrate between them and even when 'Foxy Ferdinand' of Bulgaria, refused to listen and sent his troops into a disastrous campaign, Nicholas had the foresight to realize that if the Bulgarians were humiliated by their defeat, it would lead to resentment and future carnage. Nicholas successfully persuaded his ally, Serbia, to relinquish some of their gains to Bulgaria. Meanwhile, he was faced with the problems of German interests in Persia (Iraq) and trying to maintain the balance of power to prevent the outbreak of war.
These are some of the most complex problems in modern history and even today they have not been resolved no matter how many government departments have tried to resolve them. Nicholas faced these problems alone and spent his time in his simple surroundings (so different from how they appeared to the outside world - see Marie of Roumania's description of how the glittering appearance of palaces changed the minute one stepped over the threshold into the simplicity of his surroundings) working from dawn till dusk trying to do the best for his people. Would any of those professors in their ivory university towers have been more capable of solving so many issues? Would they have been willing to sacrifice all that they really wanted in order to carry out their duty as Nicholas did?
A weak Tsar? Well, was Kaiser Wilhelm ever described as weak? No, he just liked to dream of power and loved his uniforms and strutting about, so he must have been strong. Was George V ever described as weak? No, he shot thousands of birds and so proved himself to be a real man! Franz Ferdinand, Franz Josef, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Ferdinand of Roumania....was any other ruler at the time described as 'weak'? No, only Nicholas, and I have yet to hear one single reason why he, the strongest of all of them, deserves the horrendous epithet of 'the weak Tsar.'
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