Nicholas II and his son Alexei inspecting troops near Mogilev.
On March 15 in the Gregorian Calendar, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne.
Nicholas was returning to Petrograd by train from the Eastern Front. However, the train’s operators “in contact with the Duma Committee” in Petrograd “deliberately exaggerated the threat [of rebels at the train station] in order to keep Nicholas away” from the capitol under the control of the Petrograd Soviet, where he had lost almost all favor with his subjects. (Steinberg & Khrustalev 58). A General and two political leaders met Nicholas at Pskov, where Nicholas ordered the imperial train to reroute to, and encouraged him to abandon the throne at the station. Ultimately, the dissent of generals and military leaders pushed Nicholas to accept that he had been politically defeated.
Nicholas abdicated that night, naming his brother Grand Duke Michael as the next Tsar instead of his son Alexei, whom he deemed too sick. However, Michael decided not to accept the position. In his own statement of abdication on March 16, the Grand Duke wrote,
“. . . I have firmly resolved to assume supreme power only if that should be the will of our great people who will be required by popular vote, through their representatives in the Constitutional Assembly, to create a form of government and new fundamental laws for the Russian State. Therefore, in appealing to God’s blessing, I ask all citizens of the Russian Empire to obey the Provisional Government” (105).
He officially waited for the Duma to pass a resolution favoring him as Tsar, but they never allowed for a vote. Nicholas was infuriated, but he had already abdicated, and there was nothing he could do.
It is only a poetic coincidence that Nicholas abdicated on the Ides of March, or March 15. In 44 BCE, numerous conspirators in Rome assassinated Julius Caesar on March 15 in the midst of Rome’s political crises of the era, through which Rome mutated from a republic to an empire. The Roman historian Plutarch noted that a seer warned Caesar that he would be killed by this date. William Shakespeare made famous the Ides in his own dramatization when a soothsayer shouts to Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March!” to which Caesar responds, “He is a dreamer; let us leave him” (Shakespeare 1.2.100-110). But there is another connection between Caesar and Nicholas.
The word Tsar comes from the word Caesar, which eventually came to mean Emperor. Ivan IV (the Terrible one) was the first Russian Tsar, claiming the title in 1547. An earlier Ivan (Ivan III and presumably not as terrible) had married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos. The Tsar, then, was a political-religious emperor of Roman-style prestige, with the demise of that prestige already embedded in the title’s narrative as early as Plutarch and sealed in popularity by Shakespeare. By claiming the title Tsar, Ivan IV created a lineage connecting Rome, Byzantium, Orthodox Christianity, Muscovy (Moscow), and Imperial Russia, a lineage that Nicholas II inherited.
But Nicholas was not assassinated on March 15. He merely stepped down from the throne, for what might have been a peaceful transition of government from autocrat to soviet, from empire to republic.
Following abdication, the Romanovs planned to flee to England, but were instead arrested and eventually assassinated, in their entirety, by communists in July of 1918. When Lenin learned about the assassinations, he had been drafting healthcare plans for the new regime. According to historian Wendy Slater, “Lenin showed no obvious reaction to the news. . . The answer, of course, is that Lenin had not wanted Nicholas’s death to happen in this manner. If the Tsar had to die in order for the Revolution to assume legitimacy as Russia’s new government, then his death ought to have been a public execution, following a public trial” (Slater 152-153). For the Bolsheviks, it would have been better politically to let all Russians determine the Tsar’s fate.
For Russia in 1917, March was a volatile turning point, but not a stopping point. The Revolution spun forward, taking monarchs and peasants and dissenters with it. March 15 was significant for the Revolution because a monarch willingly conceded defeat. At the time, there was no conspiracy to depose him, and the assassins would come later. Power, then, was seized quite fluidly by the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, putting the burden of order entirely on the temporary leadership established by force in the capital.
Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar.
Slater, Wendy. The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II. Routledge, 2007.
Steinberg, Mark, Vladimir M. Khrustalev. The Fall of the Romanovs. Yale University Press, 1995.
Nicholas II was crowned Tsar at the age of twenty-six in 1894, following the sudden death of Tsar Alexander III. Nicholas inherited a relatively stable regime that he was determined to sustain without change. He grew up believing he had been born simply to preserve the institution of God-granted Russian royalty, to maintain the status quo. Alexander, thinking he would live longer, had not trained Nicholas in diplomacy or politics. Living like a king was all Nicholas knew how to do.
Keene Short 