‘Nicholas the Bloody’¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: ‘Nicholas the Bloody’
This chapter dismantles the revisionist portrayal of Tsar Nicholas II as a humane figure, restoring his contemporary epithet by documenting his direct complicity in state-orchestrated terror. The core argument is that the Tsar was not a passive monarch ignorant of atrocities but an active patron of the Black Hundreds, the reactionary gangs that carried out pogroms against Jews, socialists, and intellectuals. The evidence is drawn from Nicholas’s own correspondence and the testimony of historians and participants. In 1905, he wrote approvingly to his mother of the brutal suppression of Baltic peasants, commending Captain Richter for hanging “chief agitators” as a “fine fellow.” After the October Manifesto, up to 4,000 people were murdered and 10,000 injured in pogroms within a single month. The chapter cites the murder of Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bauman, whose funeral became a mass demonstration of 100,000 mourners, and the Odessa pogrom, where 800 Jews were killed, 5,000 wounded, and over 100,000 left homeless.
The chapter establishes the institutional link between the Tsar and the pogromists. Nicholas wore the Union of the Russian People’s badge, wished its leaders “total success,” and instructed the Ministry of the Interior to finance its newspapers and channel arms to it. His anti-Semitism is documented through his rejection of Stolypin’s proposal to relax restrictions on Jews in the Pale of Settlement, citing an “inner voice” against it. General Trepov personally edited pogrom-inciting leaflets, subsidised by the Minister of the Interior with 70,000 roubles. The chapter draws on Trotsky’s 1905 to depict the lumpen-proletariat unleashed by the state, and on Piatnitsky’s memoirs to show how soldiers shielded pogromists from armed workers’ self-defence groups. Kerensky’s memoirs confirm that Nicholas invariably pardoned Black Hundred members while rejecting appeals from revolutionaries.
The chapter’s polemical thrust is against any apologetic historiography that whitewashes the Tsar. It also argues against reformist illusions in legal remedies, counterposing Lenin’s position: not appeals to the police or judiciary, but workers’ self-defence organised through a united front of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Bundists, and nationalist groups. The fighting squads, linked to the Soviets, were not terrorist conspiracies but mass-based defensive formations that occasionally succeeded—as in Kharkov, where barricades demoralised troops, and Chita, where political prisoners were freed. The chapter concludes that these skirmishes prepared the ground for the inevitable showdown between the working class and the autocracy.