' the turn of 1917 there was no one in Russia, or anywhere
Much of the blame for his downfall could rightly be placed at the door of his interfering and dominating German-born wife, Empress Alexandra. When Nicholas took over as Supreme Commander in 1915 and removed himself to the Stavka, his front-line headquarters over 400 miles away at Mogilev, he gave his wife control of the ministersleft behind in the capital Petrograd. Progressively over the next couple of years the government became her government, with ministers appointed only with the approval of her hated 'holy man', Grigory Rasputin. His hold over the empress stemmed from her belief that only his 'divine spirit' could protect the life of her haemophilic son Alexis. However, since the boy's disease was a secret kept from the world, it saved neither from the contempt of both society and the political establishment.
In consequence, the news in mid December 1916 that Rasputin had been murdered - not by political terrorists but by Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, both members of the imperial family - was cheered across the country. That was followed by wild talk of a palace coup led by the three Vladimirovich brothers, Grand Dukes Kirill, Boris and Andrei, which envisaged Alexandra being taken away and confined in some far-distant convent. Nothing came of it but it served to confirm opinion in the capital's salons that the days of 'that woman' were numbered.
But there was no intent to bring down the Romanov dynasty itself: the consensus was that Nicholas, forced from the throne, would be succeeded by his twelve-year-old son Alexis, in accordance with the law, and with Nicholas's younger brother Michael Alexandrovich as regent. Michael was a war hero, a cavalry commander holding Russia's two highest battlefield awards, and was known to be sympathetic to constitutional monarchy on the British lines; the army held him in high regard and he would also be a popular choice in the Duma where he was widely trusted and respected.
Of the several political conspiracies emerging the most serious was headed by one of the Duma's most influential party leaders, Alexander Guchkov, who feared that without change there was high risk of left- wing extremists taking to the streets and facing Russia with a second revolution.
His alternative was to be a bloodless palace coup - to capture the tsar's train while it was travelling between the capital and the army headquarters at Mogilev, and thus present the country next morning with a fait accompli. Guchkov was confident that popular support would then oblige the tsar to concede his throne.
A second and unrelated plot went to the heart of the Stavka itself where General Mikhail Alexeev, the chief of staff, supported it. One of the principals was Prince Lvov, the popular leader of the civic and volunteer organisations across Russia. Their intention was to arrest Alexandra on one of her regular visits to Stavka, and compel the tsar to remove her to Livadia; if he refused, as they knew he would, then he would be compelled to abdicate - with the same result as in the Guchkov plot: a boy emperor with his uncle Grand Duke Michael as regent. Although plans had not been finalised and there was much work to be done, the conspirators in both camps felt certain of success. For the Guchkov plotters, believing they would be ready to strike in March, what was clear was that removing this weak tsar and his dangerous wife was both a necessity and inevitable if tsarist Russia was to be saved from itself.
History, as is so often the case, had other ideas. The future of Russia was not to be determined by an elite few but by the clamour of a street mob that as yet had no idea that it might have any role at all.
It was a spontaneous uprising, with no master plan or even a decisive leader who could be identified afterwards. Unrest became disturbance, disturbance grew into rebellion, and then in turn into revolution. And yet all this was in large part confined to the capital, with the rest of the country unaffected, at least in the beginning, and with some regions unaware of events until they were all over.
The ostensible cause was fear of a bread shortage; although supplies were adequate the fear was self-fulfilling in that housewives hoarded, creating the shortage. But that was only one of many factors. There had been large-scale strikes, following a lockout of workers at the giant Putilov factories, with an estimated 158,000 men idle by late February.
Petrograd itself was a vast military camp, with 170,000 armed troops in barracks, many of them susceptible to agitators - among them
German agents actively fomenting resentment in the hope of bringing about a revolution that would remove Russia from the war.
Suddenly, on Saturday 25 February (10 March New Style), that threat of revolution turned into reality. It was not just that six people had died that day but that one of those killed was a police inspector who, intent upon seizing a protestor's red flag, was killed by a Cossack trooper as he rode into a crowd of demonstrators. The Cossacks were the traditional scourge of rioters and demonstrators - and if they were no longer reliable, no one was.
By the next day, Sunday, the number of dead had risen to 200. More ominously, a company of the elite Pavlovsk Guards had mutinied in their barracks, attacked their colonel, and cut off his hand. With that, it was revolution or the hangman's noose.
A desperate Mikhail Rodzyanko, leader of the Duma, telegraphed the tsar. 'The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is paralysed... General discontent is growing. There is wild shooting in the street. There must be a new government, under someone trusted by the country,' he urged, adding that 'any procrastination is tantamount to death
Reading that, Nicholas dismissed it as panic. 'Some more rubbish from that fat Rodzyanko.' However, he did decide to put together a loyal force and despatch it to the capital, with he himself returning to his home at Tsarskoe Selo, thirteen miles south of Petrograd. That should settle matters. The rebel soldiers were no more than an armed rabble. They would never stand against proper front-line troops.
That complacent view was easier held in Mogilev than in the streets of Petrograd. The rebels indeed were not front-line soldiers but depot reservists, many of them new recruits, the scrapings of the military barrel. Military discipline was a thin veneer that was easily stripped away, turning such troops into a uniformed mob. Nevertheless, they had guns and were as well armed as any soldiers being sent to face them. By noon on Sunday, only some twenty-four hours into the disorders, 25,000 troops had gone over to the side of the demonstrators; the bulk of the available forces, however, simply stayed in their barracks as the rebels and the mob took command of the streets.
The Arsenal on the Liteiny was captured, putting into the hands of the rebels thousands of rifles and pistols, and hundreds of machine guns. The headquarters of the Okhrana, across the Neva and opposite the Winter Palace, as well as a score of police stations, were overrun and set on fire. The prisons were opened and their inmates freed, criminals as well as political detainees. By the evening of that second day, only the very centre of the city, around the Winter Palace, could be said still to be in government control. Guchkov's plan to pre-empt any such uprising had been overtaken by events. As the tsar's brother Grand Duke Michael noted in his diary that night, it was 'the beginning of anarchy'.
At its home in Petrograd's Tauride Palace the Duma was in uproar. Just thirteen days after the start of its new session, deputies arrived to find that the Duma had been shut down again. Prince Golitsin, the third prime minister in the past year, had used a 'blank' decree from the tsar to prorogue the Duma, thinking it would defuse tension by silencing the more radical elements.