"WE have considered it right and proper to give up the Throne"

March 15, 2017 11:18 AM

100 years ago today Russian tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The emperor, last Romanov ruler, beset by military catastrophes and social unrest, stepped down. He tried to offer the throne to his son, who was too fragile, then his brother, who demurred, paving the way for a provisional government. Within a year Russia would experience revolution and civil war, the Soviet state would be born, and Nicholas and his family all killed.

The abdication statement: the Russian document itself and one English language translation.

Some contemporary reactions from Russia and
from abroad.

Coverage from the Manchester Guardian and the Observer.

One great photograph.

posted by doctornemo (30 comments total)

And now DNA tested remains of Nicholas II and the other members of his immediate family are on display in Falvey Memorial Library, Villanova University through September 1, open to the public:

Blood & Soul: The Russian Revolutions of 1917 (video tour of the exhibit). Commemorating the 100th Anniversaries of the 1917 Russian revolutions and the enthronement of St. Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow. Video Release: February 17, 2017. Curated by: F. John J. Perich
posted by mfoight at 11:31 AM on March 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

So my "oh god I have to do something other than work on my dissertation, at least for a few hours" go-to right now is the new Zelda game. It's a genuinely beautiful piece of software, but the plot is very sketchy and badly written. And one really distinctive part of the bad writing is that literally everyone you talk to wants to talk about the Big Plot Event that happened 100 years before the start of the game. And so it sort of takes me out of the immersive experience each time I get into a conversation, cause I'm like "come on, what society is so completely obsessed with something that happened an entire century ago that that's the only thing they ever talk about?"

And midway through expressing this sentiment to my partner, right after saying "what society is so completely obsessed with the thing that happened 100 years ago that they can't talk about anything else?" I remembered some of the Trotskyist meetings I've gone to.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:46 AM on March 15, 2017 [16 favorites]

I never understood why rulers think they can abdicate and won't be killed to protect against their trying to resume power.
posted by corb at 11:56 AM on March 15, 2017 [4 favorites]

Hah! I can understand why dictators think they can abdicate and survive — it's good for the world revolution if other dictators think that they can abdicate and survive — but abdicating and getting to stay in the country seems... a step too far.

Gene Sharp's From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation has an aside about when resistance forces should negotiate with autocrats, and what topics of negotiation should be considered acceptable. Sharp's position is that the only time it makes sense to participate in negotiations with autocrats is when you're negotiating their terms of surrender, with the offer of an airplane trip out of the country as the bargaining chip used to help ensure an orderly transfer of power.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:06 PM on March 15, 2017 [6 favorites]

*sigh*

OK, fine.

I'll do it.

Being a (somewhat distant) relation of the Romanovs I'll take the throne if nobody else wants it.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:31 PM on March 15, 2017 [10 favorites]

Being a somewhat distant relation of the Bolsheviks, I promise not to kill you... immediately.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:34 PM on March 15, 2017 [14 favorites]

I never understood why rulers think they can abdicate and won't be killed to protect against their trying to resume power.

Watch out, Ratzinger!
posted by tclark at 12:36 PM on March 15, 2017 [6 favorites]

No problem. We can be buddies. My connection to the Romanovs is through Alexander Herzen. I can play both sides against the Menshevik middle.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:37 PM on March 15, 2017 [5 favorites]

I never understood why rulers think they can abdicate and won't be killed to protect against their trying to resume power.

Kaiser Wilhelm did it, although people did want to extradite and try him.
posted by thelonius at 12:39 PM on March 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not arguing in favor of autocracy, but murdering the whole family was less than cool.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:42 PM on March 15, 2017 [6 favorites]

I understand (not condone, just understand) why Nicholas and his son were killed: they would have provided too much of a rallying point for a counter-revolution. I can even see why Alexandra was killed: like Marie Antoinette, she was a remote figure, always perceived as a hated foreigner who ordered around a weak ruler. But I've never really understood why the four daughters were also slaughtered --- was it just a case of 'they're royal, so they die'? Because with the Romanov inheritance laws, there was no way any of them were ever going to sit on the Russian throne (pre- or post-revolution) unless several dozen more-distant but crucially male members of the family all stepped down.
posted by easily confused at 12:59 PM on March 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

I never understood why rulers think they can abdicate and won't be killed to protect against their trying to resume power.

I, too, remember the execution of Edward VIII.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:00 PM on March 15, 2017 [11 favorites]

Because with the Romanov inheritance laws, there was no way any of them were ever going to sit on the Russian throne (pre- or post-revolution) unless several dozen more-distant but crucially male members of the family all stepped down.

Bolsheviks were perhaps not fully versed on the lines of royal succession, and they tended to kill the folks who were.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:04 PM on March 15, 2017 [8 favorites]

Worsley's series on the Romanovs is on Netflix, FYI
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 1:08 PM on March 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

Nicholas and Alexandra is a 1971 British biographical film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and written by James Goldman, based on Robert K. Massie's book of the same name, which partly tells the story of the last ruling Russian monarch, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and his wife, Tsarina Alexandra.
posted by robbyrobs at 1:17 PM on March 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

Because with the Romanov inheritance laws, there was no way any of them were ever going to sit on the Russian throne (pre- or post-revolution) unless several dozen more-distant but crucially male members of the family all stepped down.

The historical reality of monarchies is that inheritance laws matter right up until somebody would like to offer their own puppet, in which case ehhhhh maybe not so important! Besides, "The rightful ruling family got killed off by awful people" seems like as plausible a scenario as any for bending the rules to "restore" The Good Old Days.
posted by Tomorrowful at 1:28 PM on March 15, 2017 [4 favorites]

I, too, remember the execution of Edward VIII.

There's a few key differences:
-Edward gave up the throne in order to make a marriage, and not in the face of an uprising or revolution, where he might become the rallying point for a counter-revolution;
-Edward had no children, so the line of succession cleanly passes to his brother and brother's family;
-the British system of governance was fairly substantial at that point; a change in monarch is not as destabilizing to their system (where Parliament held most power) as Tsar Nicholas stepping down with no successor and a provisional government taking over. Edward could abdicate and there was a system in place to manage that transition; Nicholas stepped down and a new system tried to take over. The face of the old system is a larger threat when you are building something new.

Even with that, note that Edward left England for Australia the day after he abdicated and spent the majority of his life in France.
posted by nubs at 1:35 PM on March 15, 2017 [9 favorites]

Because with the Romanov inheritance laws, there was no way any of them were ever going to sit on the Russian throne (pre- or post-revolution) unless several dozen more-distant but crucially male members of the family all stepped down.

The inability of women to inherit the throne (even over male relatives) was not really traditional and was not that old, though. That restriction was only put in place in 1797 after Catherine the Great, so 120 years before Nicholas abdicated.
posted by dilettante at 2:43 PM on March 15, 2017 [6 favorites]

I understand that the king of England regretted not granting the Romanovs asylum, although he had had his reasons; he didn't want to bring Russia's troubles home. Still, imagine if you didn't let your flighty right-wing cousins come stay and they ended up getting murdered along with their whole family.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:44 PM on March 15, 2017 [8 favorites]

Tsar Nicholas II is live tweeting as all this goes down. I don't think this will end well.
posted by pashdown at 3:41 PM on March 15, 2017 [5 favorites]

It's funny how the timing of this coincides for me. I was just thinking the other day about my grandmother, who was part of the Mennoite exodus that happened after the Russian revolution; she and her family left in 1920 when my grandmother was twenty years old and came to Canada where she eventually met my grandfather - another person who was part of that exodus, though he wound up in a displaced persons camp in Germany for a year - and started a family. (Family lore has it that my grandfather's family, tipped off by some sympathetic neighbors, buried a safe with all the family wealth out in the fields before their farm was searched and valuables confiscated and that the safe was never recovered; it's out there somewhere...)

At her funeral (she lived to 103), we sat around ("we" being the children, grandchildren, and nieces/nephews & cousins of various degrees) and chatted about her life and the things she had seen and experienced and we lamented the fact that it had been so hard to get her and my grandfather and the other members of the family to discuss the details of how they left Russia and came to Canada; we all felt it was an important part of family history but one that we knew very little about. Anyways, we all shared what we knew, and along the way each of us had learned little details and stories. One of them was about the fact that at their last stop before they left Russia (likely in Riga), they were held for a time by the border agents and one of the cousins said that his father (so this would be my great-uncle) had always said that they only reason they got out is that one of the border guards had grown up near them and had a crush on my grandmother. And that made me think about how that tenuous connection - a guard having a crush on my grandmother almost a hundred years ago - is the reason why I'm here and have a family of my own and how these big historical events (the Russian revolution) in the end, have all kinds of personal consequences that are worth remembering.

It also makes me wonder about the various costs and losses and sacrifices that might have been made along the journey and if the reason that it was never really talked about was that there were some decisions made that you just don't talk about afterwards because they were what you did to get out and survive
posted by nubs at 3:45 PM on March 15, 2017 [18 favorites]

Even with that, note that Edward left England for Australia the day after he abdicated and spent the majority of his life in France.

Did they ever tell him how much he missed by?
posted by Etrigan at 4:37 PM on March 15, 2017 [11 favorites]

The inability of women to inherit the throne...was only put in place in 1797 after Catherine the Great

It's bizarre that queens were banned immediately after getting a great one and a golden age.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:45 PM on March 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

The inability of women to inherit the throne...was only put in place in 1797 after Catherine the Great

It's bizarre that queens were banned immediately after getting a great one and a golden age.

They didn't want all the rest of the women thinking they were great.
posted by Etrigan at 4:59 PM on March 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow: "It's bizarre that queens were banned immediately after getting a great one and a golden age."

Eh. Catherine was definitely in the top rank of Russian rulers, and it was a great time to be a noble, but things were worsening for the serfs. There were more than 50 peasant rebellions under her rule. Pugachev's Rebellion was quite serious, indeed.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:46 PM on March 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's bizarre that queens were banned immediately after getting a great one and a golden age.

Eh. Catherine (like Alexandra, coincidentally) was a German and took the throne after her husband died, and her son, who was eventually responsible for the new succession law, did not have a great relationship with her.
posted by dilettante at 6:29 PM on March 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

Eh: A MetaFilter Symposium on Catherine the Great. Cloth, $159.
posted by No-sword at 6:46 PM on March 15, 2017 [12 favorites]

My Russian ancestry is closer to the Rurikovich than to the Romanov dynasty. The Russian relatives in my direct line got the Hell out well before the Revolution. I can't say I feel sorry for the Czar, but the murder of the whole family was brutal and wrong.
Every time I read about the Romanovs I am grateful to my Great- Great Grandfather for just getting the Hell out. Smart man. I wouldn't be here if he hadn't.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 7:10 PM on March 15, 2017 [3 favorites]

imagine if you didn't let your flighty right-wing cousins come stay and they ended up getting murdered along with their whole family.

Plenty of people's cousins have, regardless of ideology, been worked, taxed, beaten, conscripted, or starved to death under the complicity of those like the ones in question. There's a line forming to find my sympathy, and the individuals you're describing may kindly find their place at the very end.
posted by 7segment at 11:33 PM on March 15, 2017

Did they ever tell him how much he missed by?

He realised when he asked to see a potoroo and was presented with a beef stew.
posted by iffthen at 6:38 AM on March 16, 2017