"It turns out that the era of Nicholas II made an enormous contribution to Russian history, and ascribing these achievements of an autocratic empire to anyone but the emperor is at the very least shameless.
For the entirety of his reign, the so-called "public opinion" waged an information and political war of extermination against the emperor. This narrow but influential slice of society flat out refused any other option for the country’s development save for revolution."
This article from our archives was first published on RI in July 2018
By Yegor Kholmogorov | Monday, March 15 2021
The author is one of the most prominent and popular Russian conservative publicists and historians. He has a weekly TV show on the conservative Russian Christian channel, Tsargrad TV. Anatoly Karlin wrote an article in Unz Review introducing Kholmogorov to English speakers:
In my opinion, Kholmogorov is simply the best modern Russian right-wing intellectual, period.
He is a realist on Soviet achievements, crimes, and lost opportunities, foregoing both Soviet nostalgia and the knee-jerk Sovietophobia.
He is a normal, traditional Orthodox Christian, in contrast to the mystical obscurantism of Duginism. He has time neither for college libertarianism nor hipster nationalism.
Instead of wasting his time on ideological rhetoric, he reads Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and writes reviews about it on his website. And about 224 other books.
The original title of this article was 'Nicholas II - the Tsar of Normalcy'
Translator's Foreword (Fluctuarius Argenteus)
As the perfect companion piece to his takedown of Stalin, here's Egor Kholmogorov's appraisal of Nicholas II, styled an "anti-Stalin," written during his recent trip to Crimea, which provoked another round of teeth-gnashing among Neo-Stalinists and Sovietophiles. It should also be no surprise that a recent poll shows that Nicholas II has overtaken Stalin as the most positively-regarded Russian historical figure of the 20th century.
AK's Foreword
If you appreciate these translations, please feel free to give Kholmogorov a tip here:
Translator's Foreword (Fluctuarius Argenteus)
As the perfect companion piece to his takedown of Stalin, here's Egor Kholmogorov's appraisal of Nicholas II, styled an "anti-Stalin," written during his recent trip to Crimea, which provoked another round of teeth-gnashing among Neo-Stalinists and Sovietophiles. It should also be no surprise that a recent poll shows that Nicholas II has overtaken Stalin as the most positively-regarded Russian historical figure of the 20th century.
AK's Foreword
If you appreciate these translations, please feel free to give Kholmogorov a tip here:
***
Nicholas II: The Tsar of Normalcy
Original: Николай II становится для нас анти-Сталиным (Nicholas II was the anti-Stalin)
"Here's where Nicholas II would go to visit his uncle. Yulia, get over here, grab a photo of him at this very place, I'll take a picture of you…", says a middle-aged man to his young daughter, two meters away from the spot where I am writing this article.
I found the above photo just three weeks ago, when all the social media feeds were overflowing with the Emperor's portraits on his birthday. I've never seen so many photos and such warm comments before.
The political "exchange rate" of Nicholas II in our historical memory is on the way up. Previously, monarchism used to be retrospective and slightly abstract: sure, we respect the Russian historical statehood in general, Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality and all that stuff, and, given that this particular Tsar turned out to be the last one and died as a martyr, we'll respect him as well while taking note of his multiple foibles.
But these days I sense more and more of a markedly personal sympathy for the Emperor and his family among the people, going hand in hand with a more level-headed appraisal of his reign, gradually freed from Communist and Liberal propaganda clichés.
It turns out that the era of Nicholas II made an enormous contribution to Russian history, and ascribing these achievements of an autocratic Empire to anyone but the Emperor is at the very least shameless.
Nicholas II becomes something of a historical meme to us, a certain kind of an anti-Stalin. To properly understand this, however, we should first deal with Stalin himself.
The personality of the "Kremlin highlander"[1] embodies the idea of extreme measures taken during an extreme era of Russian history.
Paradoxically, Stalin is loved not so much for his achievements as for his methods: executions, incarcerations, deportations, a grotesquely wasteful use of human resources in both wartime and peacetime, the exchange of thousands and millions of human lives for percentage points of industrialization and kilometers of frontline advancement.
A huge number of people believe that "over here, it can't be done otherwise." Or, even more masochistically, "with us, it can't be done otherwise."
To prove this thesis, they cite the achievements of Stalinist Socialism, such as industrialization and the construction of the military-industrial complex. The USSR crushed Nazi Germany while Tsarism lost World War I, to say nothing of the Russo-Japanese war (which was also won by Stalin). We turned into a superpower and went to space.
"Was it the Tsar who launched Gagarin into space?" asks a commentator to a radio show where I gave a talk. No matter that the price for this Great Leap Forward were millions of Russian lives lost to the Civil War, three waves of famine, dekulakization, repression and crushing World War II defeats – after all, "with us, it can't be done otherwise."
It is probably a bit more complex than that.
With the Tsar in charge, Russia had no need to become a superpower; she was one. Our country lost this status due to revolutionary disintegration.
And yes, it was the Tsar who sent Gagarin to space. Russian rocket artillery was first used in the 1870s during the conquest of Central Asia. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published his papers on rocketry during the reign of Nicholas II. Sergey Korolev's mentor Friedrich Zander published his first studies on interplanetary travel in 1908. "Kondratyuk's loop," the optimal trajectory of a flight to the Moon – where the Soviets didn't manage to send a man, unlike the US – was calculated in 1916 by Alexander Shargei, a student of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic founded under Nicholas II. Most founding fathers of the Russian space program studied in polytechnic colleges founded by the Tsar.
The Tsar didn't lose World War I at all. When he was overthrown by a coalition of mutineers and conspirators, Russian forces had a firm foothold in the territory of two out of three the enemy powers on its frontlines. Even the Provisional Government didn't lose World War I. Despite creeping revolutionary degeneration, the Russian army held the frontlines waiting for the inevitable Entente victory that would have given Russia its rightful place among the victors.
It was the Bolsheviks who lost World War I. They disbanded the army and signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty that enabled the occupation of all of Western Russia and pushed our borders back to the 16th century. Ascribing the Bolsheviks' defeat to the Tsar is as smart as it is cynical.
"Here's where Nicholas II would go to visit his uncle. Yulia, get over here, grab a photo of him at this very place, I'll take a picture of you…", says a middle-aged man to his young daughter, two meters away from the spot where I am writing this article.
Nicholas II in Kharaks, Crimea.
I found the above photo just three weeks ago, when all the social media feeds were overflowing with the Emperor's portraits on his birthday. I've never seen so many photos and such warm comments before.
The political "exchange rate" of Nicholas II in our historical memory is on the way up. Previously, monarchism used to be retrospective and slightly abstract: sure, we respect the Russian historical statehood in general, Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality and all that stuff, and, given that this particular Tsar turned out to be the last one and died as a martyr, we'll respect him as well while taking note of his multiple foibles.
Nicholas II & family, 1914. Colorized by Olga.
But these days I sense more and more of a markedly personal sympathy for the Emperor and his family among the people, going hand in hand with a more level-headed appraisal of his reign, gradually freed from Communist and Liberal propaganda clichés.
It turns out that the era of Nicholas II made an enormous contribution to Russian history, and ascribing these achievements of an autocratic Empire to anyone but the Emperor is at the very least shameless.
Nicholas II becomes something of a historical meme to us, a certain kind of an anti-Stalin. To properly understand this, however, we should first deal with Stalin himself.
The personality of the "Kremlin highlander"[1] embodies the idea of extreme measures taken during an extreme era of Russian history.
Paradoxically, Stalin is loved not so much for his achievements as for his methods: executions, incarcerations, deportations, a grotesquely wasteful use of human resources in both wartime and peacetime, the exchange of thousands and millions of human lives for percentage points of industrialization and kilometers of frontline advancement.
A huge number of people believe that "over here, it can't be done otherwise." Or, even more masochistically, "with us, it can't be done otherwise."
To prove this thesis, they cite the achievements of Stalinist Socialism, such as industrialization and the construction of the military-industrial complex. The USSR crushed Nazi Germany while Tsarism lost World War I, to say nothing of the Russo-Japanese war (which was also won by Stalin). We turned into a superpower and went to space.
"Was it the Tsar who launched Gagarin into space?" asks a commentator to a radio show where I gave a talk. No matter that the price for this Great Leap Forward were millions of Russian lives lost to the Civil War, three waves of famine, dekulakization, repression and crushing World War II defeats – after all, "with us, it can't be done otherwise."
It is probably a bit more complex than that.
With the Tsar in charge, Russia had no need to become a superpower; she was one. Our country lost this status due to revolutionary disintegration.
And yes, it was the Tsar who sent Gagarin to space. Russian rocket artillery was first used in the 1870s during the conquest of Central Asia. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published his papers on rocketry during the reign of Nicholas II. Sergey Korolev's mentor Friedrich Zander published his first studies on interplanetary travel in 1908. "Kondratyuk's loop," the optimal trajectory of a flight to the Moon – where the Soviets didn't manage to send a man, unlike the US – was calculated in 1916 by Alexander Shargei, a student of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic founded under Nicholas II. Most founding fathers of the Russian space program studied in polytechnic colleges founded by the Tsar.
The Tsar didn't lose World War I at all. When he was overthrown by a coalition of mutineers and conspirators, Russian forces had a firm foothold in the territory of two out of three the enemy powers on its frontlines. Even the Provisional Government didn't lose World War I. Despite creeping revolutionary degeneration, the Russian army held the frontlines waiting for the inevitable Entente victory that would have given Russia its rightful place among the victors.
It was the Bolsheviks who lost World War I. They disbanded the army and signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty that enabled the occupation of all of Western Russia and pushed our borders back to the 16th century. Ascribing the Bolsheviks' defeat to the Tsar is as smart as it is cynical.
Nicholas II & family in Crimea. Colored by Kralj Aleksandar.
At no point in World War I was there even a remote prospect of Moscow or St. Petersburg getting captured. Before the Bolsheviks came, no one could imagine the Germans taking Kiev and advancing into the Crimea; to the contrary, Sevastopol was to be the staging ground for an invasion of Constantinople in 1917. Even the greatest debacle of the war, General Samsonov's campaign in East Prussia, wasn't in the same league as the Kiev encirclement, brought about by the unparalleled strategic genius of Comrade Stalin himself.
While one can debate over who was the true Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army in 1915-17, the Tsar or General Alexeyev, there is no doubt about the following. The Tsar understood that appointing the son of a cantonist to such a position would have been impossible in a deeply stratified Russian society, hence his decision to become a figurehead and let Alexeyev's military talents flourish. The general repaid for this with a base ungratefulness, only to realize very soon that without a Tsar, the post of Commander-in-Chief would pass to a Subaltern Krylenko or a Comrade Trotsky.
Ditto for the Russo-Japanese war. It was a conflict of three Great Powers (Russia vs. Japan, instigated by Britain). Russia fought at a remote theater of war, considered to be of tertiary importance, and narrowly avoided a catastrophe thanks to the Trans-Siberian Railroad built by Alexander III and Nicholas II. It is a huge question how things would have turned out without the revolutionary backstab, given the huge Japanese casualties.
In 1945, Stalin was reaping the consequences of America's crushing victory over Japan and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war in the Far East was a requisition of war trophies from an already defeated empire. If the Red Army had faced any true Japanese resistance, those who had defeated Hitler would have also trounced Hirohito, but we would have paid thousands upon thousands of lives for this geopolitical victory.
There is no doubt that shrewdly finding new allies and piggybacking on their achievements was a major effort of Stalinist diplomacy (generously paid for with Russian blood on the Eastern Front), but "winning the war" with Japan had nothing to do with it.
The Russian industrialization had been going on since the early 1890s (otherwise where did the working class that the Bolsheviks courted come from?), and Russia was one of the fastest growing economies on the planet.
Stalinist industrialization only appeared spectacular in the context of the devastation wrought upon Russia by Bolshevik dictatorship and Civil War. While Tsarist industrialization operated by increasing the capital intensity of industry and accumulating labor-saving machinery, Stalinist "know-how" consisted of dropping the price of another industrial factor, that of labor, to near zero.
Please go to Russia Insider to read the entire essay.
While one can debate over who was the true Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army in 1915-17, the Tsar or General Alexeyev, there is no doubt about the following. The Tsar understood that appointing the son of a cantonist to such a position would have been impossible in a deeply stratified Russian society, hence his decision to become a figurehead and let Alexeyev's military talents flourish. The general repaid for this with a base ungratefulness, only to realize very soon that without a Tsar, the post of Commander-in-Chief would pass to a Subaltern Krylenko or a Comrade Trotsky.
Ditto for the Russo-Japanese war. It was a conflict of three Great Powers (Russia vs. Japan, instigated by Britain). Russia fought at a remote theater of war, considered to be of tertiary importance, and narrowly avoided a catastrophe thanks to the Trans-Siberian Railroad built by Alexander III and Nicholas II. It is a huge question how things would have turned out without the revolutionary backstab, given the huge Japanese casualties.
In 1945, Stalin was reaping the consequences of America's crushing victory over Japan and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war in the Far East was a requisition of war trophies from an already defeated empire. If the Red Army had faced any true Japanese resistance, those who had defeated Hitler would have also trounced Hirohito, but we would have paid thousands upon thousands of lives for this geopolitical victory.
There is no doubt that shrewdly finding new allies and piggybacking on their achievements was a major effort of Stalinist diplomacy (generously paid for with Russian blood on the Eastern Front), but "winning the war" with Japan had nothing to do with it.
The Russian industrialization had been going on since the early 1890s (otherwise where did the working class that the Bolsheviks courted come from?), and Russia was one of the fastest growing economies on the planet.
Stalinist industrialization only appeared spectacular in the context of the devastation wrought upon Russia by Bolshevik dictatorship and Civil War. While Tsarist industrialization operated by increasing the capital intensity of industry and accumulating labor-saving machinery, Stalinist "know-how" consisted of dropping the price of another industrial factor, that of labor, to near zero.
Please go to Russia Insider to read the entire essay.
________
More on Tsar Nicholas II, monarchy, Russia and how oligarchs destroy civilization. America today, is probably the most powerful oligarchy in history hiding behind the facade of democracy and voting. The more power oligarchs acquire the greater the need for falsification of almost every aspect in society to mask their irrational and destructive power. One of many targets for obliteration by oligarchs in any civilization are artists. Then of course the family is targeted next for annihilation. That's what unchecked oligarchical power does. Oligarchy destroys everything. It destroys art, beauty, music, the youth, the destruction of water and food, the destruction of science and the worst of all, the purposeful destruction of sex and sexuality.
More:
More on Tsar Nicholas II, monarchy, Russia and how oligarchs destroy civilization. America today, is probably the most powerful oligarchy in history hiding behind the facade of democracy and voting. The more power oligarchs acquire the greater the need for falsification of almost every aspect in society to mask their irrational and destructive power. One of many targets for obliteration by oligarchs in any civilization are artists. Then of course the family is targeted next for annihilation. That's what unchecked oligarchical power does. Oligarchy destroys everything. It destroys art, beauty, music, the youth, the destruction of water and food, the destruction of science and the worst of all, the purposeful destruction of sex and sexuality.
More:
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