By Ken Haley
HISTORY
The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
Hachette, $34.99
Most historians find themselves in one of two diametrically opposed camps. According to one, individuals are mere pawns on the chessboard of a global game governed by events, economic tides, population growth or decline – or pure dumb luck. Marxists adhere to this school, convinced capitalism is doomed regardless of what individual leaders do or fail to do.
Followers of the second school – Niall Ferguson, for one – argue that, rather than being powerless to change history’s course, strong and dynamic leaders are its actual source.
Some of the more persuasive historians locate themselves on the spectrum somewhere between these poles. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, author of a new account of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II, rejects the argument that Russian imperialism was unsalvageable in the face of pressure from the modernising forces of democracy, including those who campaigned for full civic rights for workers and women.
Nicholas’s character was his fate, argues Hasegawa, and it was the fundamental absence of a higher purpose at its heart, allowing him to be dominated by his German-born wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, that led to the Tsar’s disastrous decisions.
Most influential of these was his action of September 1915 in naming himself commander-in-chief (amazing to learn he wasn’t until that point) over a thoroughly demoralised body of soldiers battered and bruised by a year of humiliating losses on the battlefield.
Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who were executed in 1918.Credit: Alamy/File
Hasegawa paints a convincing portrait of Nicholas as not only uninterested but way out of his depth as regards military affairs – the most innovative idea he adopted was to issue the troops postcards of himself in the company of Orthodox Church prelates, in effect trying to use obedience to God’s chosen sovereign as a talisman to ward off German bullets (a belief Westerners used to mock African tribesmen for entertaining).
Most famously of all, his uxorious dependence on Alexandra gave outsized influence to the mystical monk Rasputin, whom she adored because, after conventional medical science had been unable to improve her haemophiliac son’s condition – Queen Victoria, who carried the haemophilia B gene, was Alexandra’s grandmother – she looked to him as the only hope of saving little Alexei’s life. Even mad monks are occasionally right. It was Rasputin who warned Nicholas II not to declare war on his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, or else he would lose his crowned head.
Before the war, Nicholas II had vacillated between tolerating and cracking down on those civilian groups that wanted to transform this descendant of autocratic Greats (Peter and Catherine) into a constitutional monarch, and who accordingly pushed for a parliamentary counterweight to one-man rule in the form of the Duma.
Hasegawa is at his most convincing when he points to Nicholas’s assumption of military command, swiftly followed by his dismissal of the Duma, as lighting the powder keg that led to two earth-shattering explosions in 1917; costing him not only his status and the war (so far as Russians were still concerned with that) but, in 1918, his life and those of his hapless, scheming but ultimately pathetic family.
As for writing style, he is academically meticulous but never dry to the point of unreadability. Is this, as the blurb tells us, going to become the definitive account of the Tsar’s demise? I doubt it: Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs, with its range of anecdotes, is more compelling.
Yet Hasegawa cannot be faulted for insularity. Another work with claims to definitiveness, Keith Neilsen’s Britain and the Last Tsar (1996), argued unconvincingly that in 1914 Britain should have been less worked up about Germany than Russia’s long-term threat to its supreme ranking among the Great Powers.
Hasegawa’s special talent lies in illustrating the psychological truth of how one leader’s insecurity can end up costing the lives of millions of people who never met him.
The cult of personality didn’t begin with the Communists. And, as we can see every day of the week from Moscow to Washington and around the globe, it didn’t end with them. Hasegawa mounts a seductive argument – one that will half-persuade you if you’re already enrolled in the other, deterministic school – that individuals are the motor, driver and navigator of history all rolled into one.
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