As a general rule, if you are reading about Russian history and you come across the words ‘rare blood condition’ and ‘Rasputin,’ more times than ‘Putilov’ or ‘Smolny,’ you are reading bad, derivative pop history. At the risk of sounding like a dick, I’d say if you don’t even know why the words ‘Putilov’ and ‘Smolny’ are relevant to the Russian Revolution, then you have never read anything half-decent on the subject.

Speaking of which, here are some sources:

https://1919review.wordpress.com/2021/12/30/my-sources-battle-for-red-october/

‘History’ of this kind always portrays Tsar Nicholas II as a nice bloke who was dealt a bad hand by history.

The other day a great example of this popped up, as these things often do, on Facebook. A page with 1.7 million views titled Being Liberal shared a post from Rebel History. It was one of those ‘on this day x years ago’ posts, and it was on Tsar Nicholas.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=339908414838003&id=100064565418966

It struck all the usual notes. The Tsar, it informed us,  was beleagured on all sides by military disasters, angry ‘lower classes’ and terrorism.

Here are some relevant facts which the post did not mention and which these kinds of things never mention.

First, Nicholas was a massive anti-Semite. He sponsored the infamous pogroms which killed thousands of Jews and drove millions more into emigration. You know all those impoverished Jewish people on the Lower East Side of New York in the early 20th Century? They had fled there from the Russian Empire because Nicholas and his family had Nazi-style laws against the Jews, and every so often egged on mobs to burn their houses, rape, torture and kill them.

I was about to write that ‘other groups were persecuted too.’ But that doesn’t cover it even half way. A majority of the population of the Russian Empire was non-Russian, and were legally disciminated against as a result.

A page called Being Liberal shared the post in question. This page has almost hourly posts about the war in Ukraine. Did the admins of Being Liberal think that sharing a post lamenting the fall of the Tsar would be some kind of gesture of support to Ukrainians? It was the Tsars who suppressed the Ukrainian language and enforced ‘Russification’ policies.

Tsarism witnessed the genocide against the Circassians among numerous other sanguinary massacres. In 1916 Tsar Nicholas responded to a rebellion in Central Asia with a campaign of repression that killed 88,000 people.

Every Russian, meanwhile, was assigned a ‘social estate’ which circumscribed their rights and duties. The position of women was dire beyond description, especially in the rural areas.

That page, again, is titled ‘Being Liberal.’

The post did acknowledge that ‘the Czar’s government’ suppressed the 1905 revolution with violence.

That needs some elaboration, though. Workers living in severe overcrowding and hunger organised a union (which was against the law). They marched peacefully with a humble petition to the Tsar. The Tsar’s soldiers gunned them down, killing around a thousand on that day. The Tsar went on to kill around 15,000 over the course of crushing the 1905 revolution.

It took that near-miss revolution to convince Nicholas to allow the Russian people to have a parliament. By the way, the new parliament was rigged in the Tsar’s favour and had a restricted franchise.

To clarify, before 1905, no parliament, and Nice Bloke Nick killed all those workers on Bloody Sunday 1905 because he preferred it that way.

One mistake pop history makes is to focus on individual personalities and to engage in fruitless debate over the moral responsibility of individual famous people. But around Tsar Nicholas this goes even deeper, because he had a terrible personality and he definitely had personal moral responsibility for the evils of his regime. He was stubborn and narrow-minded even for an absolute monarch.

‘By all accounts’ the post tells us, ‘Nicholas was happy to give up power and live a peaceful life in exile with his family.’

‘By all accounts’! Not by mine.

To get the Tsar to abdicate, it took five days of street fighting. It took thousands of deaths on the part of unarmed workers battling police and soldiers. It took a military mutiny and the burning of Petersburg’s police stations.

At the time, Nicholas II was dreaded and loathed across the world as a bloody dictator. Liberals celebrated his downfall, not just socialists. But liberals today, at least some of them, have had their knowledge of that history dulled. A part of it is that anti-communism makes for odd political bedfellows. This has taken the form of bad pop history. That is, decades of people hearing and repeating clichés about Rasputin and rare blood conditions.