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Lenin on Nicholas II

Dear friends!

Today I decided to look at what Lenin wrote about Nicholas II, primarily after the February Revolution, when Nicholas II was already in exile, and after he had already been executed. Here's what I came up with.

Before the Execution

Vol. 54, p. 370. Report to the International Socialist Bureau, "Elections to the Fourth Duma." Krakow, November 11, 1912.

"The Third Duma was dominated by the Octobrist Party—a party of reactionary nobles and big capitalists subservient to tsarism. But even these 'slaves' could not satisfy Nicholas II's clique—that black gang that organized pogroms and assassination attempts on opposition deputies.

The government, which rigged the elections to get the Octobrists into the Third Duma, is now rigging the elections to send more “loyal” parties – the “nationalists” and the “extreme right” – into the Fourth Duma.

The pressure was overwhelming. Priests were ordered to participate en masse in the elections and elect right-wingers; arrests of opposition candidates, fines on the press, the closure of newspapers, the removal of suspects from electoral lists—all of this was carried out with such cynicism that even the right-wingers and even the nobility protested.

Vol. 48, p. 401. Letter from A.M. Kollontai. March 17, 1917.

"Just now I read the telegram from the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency dated March 17 with the program of the new government and the news of Bonar Law's announcement that the Tsar had not yet abdicated and that his whereabouts were unknown.

Yesterday it seemed as if the Tuchkov-Milyukov government had already won and had already entered into an agreement with the dynasty. Today, the situation is such that there is no dynasty; the Tsar has fled, clearly preparing a counterrevolution!..

Vol. 34. P. 34. On Constitutional Illusions. August 8, 1917

"A Constituent Assembly in modern Russia will give a majority to peasants more leftist than the Socialist Revolutionaries. The bourgeoisie knows this. Knowing this, it cannot help but fight most decisively against the imminent convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Waging an imperialist war in the spirit of the secret treaties concluded by Nicholas II, defending landownership or land redemption—all this is impossible or incredibly difficult under a Constituent Assembly."

Vol. 34. P. 56. Lessons of the Revolution (February – B.P.). September 6, 1917

"The people want peace." And the revolutionary government of free Russia once again waged a war of conquest, based on the very same secret treaties that former Tsar Nicholas II concluded with English and French capitalists in the interests of Russian capitalists plundering foreign nations."

Vol. 34. P. 128. From a publicist's diary. September 13, 1917

"Didn't the Tsar wield power after December 1905? And didn't circumstances force him to exercise his power so cautiously that he convened two Dumas before seizing full power, i.e., before carrying out a coup d'état?"

Vol. 34. P. 143. On Violations of Democratic Principles in Mass Organizations. September 16, 1917.

"We must adopt a resolution branding as a forgery, a forgery worthy of Nicholas II, such practices as the Council of Soldiers' Deputies (soldiers have 1 in 500, workers 1 in 1,000) or the Bureau of Trade Unions (small unions have 1 in a dozen members, large unions 1 in a – b members). If we silently tolerate this forgery, then what kind of democrats are we? What's wrong with Nicholas II, who also "provided" unequal representation for peasants and landowners? By tolerating such things, we are prostituting democracy. We must adopt a resolution demanding equal suffrage…"

Vol. 34. P. 196. The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It. September 14, 1917

"We continue to wage an imperialist war, in the interests of the capitalists, in alliance with the imperialists, in accordance with the secret treaties concluded by the Tsar with the capitalists of England and elsewhere, promising in these treaties to the Russian capitalists the plunder of foreign lands, Constantinople, Lvov, Armenia, etc."

Vol. 34. P. 249. On the heroes of the forgery and the mistakes of the Bolsheviks. October 5, 1917

"Nicholas II robbed democracy of large sums, so to speak: he convened representative institutions, but gave the landowners hundreds of times greater representation than the peasants."

Vol. 34. P. 261. From the diary of a publicist. September 24, 1917

"We are weak now," the Tsar said to his feudal landowners in August 1905. "Our power is wavering. The tide of workers' and peasants' revolution is rising. We must deceive the 'middle peasants,' smear them with slander..."

Vol. 37. Pp. 85-86. Speech to the Moscow Soviet. March 13, 1918

"Now we no longer have such a strong front. Rebuilding it is too difficult, it is proceeding too slowly, because we have never had to deal with such an enemy. It was one thing to fight the idiot Romanov or the braggart Kerensky, but here we are dealing with an enemy who has organized all his forces and the entire economic life of the country (referring to Germany – B.P.) to defend against revolution..."

The enemies we've had to deal with up until now—Romanov, Kerensky, and the Russian bourgeoisie—stupid, disorganized, uncultured, yesterday kissing Romanov's boot and now running around with secret treaties in their pockets—are they any match for that international bourgeoisie that has turned everything won by human labor into a weapon for suppressing the will of the working people and adapted its entire organization for the extermination of people?

Vol. 37. P. 359. On the Famine (Letter to the St. Petersburg Workers). May 22, 1918

"Romanov and Kerensky left the working class a legacy of a country utterly devastated by their predatory, criminal, and brutal war, a country plundered to the last drop by Russian and foreign imperialists."

Vol. 37. P. 474. Prophetic Words. June 29, 1918 (referring to F. Engels' words in a letter dated December 15, 1887, written in London: "For Prussia and Germany, no war except a world war is now possible." )

"...Crowns are lying around by the dozens..." Several crowns have already fallen, and of them, one is worth a dozen others: the crown of Nicholas Romanov, the Autocrat of All Russia."

Vol. 37. Index of Names. P. 668. "Nicholas II (Romanov) (1868-1918) – the last Russian Emperor, reigned from 1894 until the February bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1917. On July 17, 1918, he was executed in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) by order of the Ural Regional Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

As is well known, the death penalty was banned nationwide by the Bolsheviks at the time, but the Ural Soviet exercised arbitrary power. The Omsk Soviet also desired the same thing and even sent an armed detachment to Yekaterinburg for this purpose. Therefore, Lenin sent a special military detachment to Yekaterinburg to transport Nicholas II from Yekaterinburg to Moscow, to be tried by a revolutionary court for all his crimes against the people. At best, the court could only send the former tsar to prison. Executing the tsar, much less his family, was out of the question.

After the Execution

Vol. 38. P. 54. The Successes and Difficulties of Soviet Power. April 17, 1919

"The propertyless proletarian working at the machine and the peasant working at the plough could not attend university either under Tsar Nicholas or under Republican President Wilson."

Vol. 39. Pp. 183-184. How the Bourgeoisie Uses Renegades. September 20, 1919

"At the Second Congress of our Party, in 1903, when Bolshevism arose, the Party program was being drafted, and the minutes of the Congress record that the idea of including the abolition of the death penalty in the program evoked only derisive cries of 'and for Nicholas II?' Even the Mensheviks in 1903 did not dare put the proposal to abolish the death penalty for the Tsar to a vote. And in 1917, during the Kerensky regime, I wrote in Pravda that no revolutionary government could do without the death penalty, and that the whole question was only against which class the given government was directing the weapon of the death penalty.

Vol. 39. Pp. 174, 176. Speech at a non-party workers' and peasants' conference.

"Every worker, every Red Army soldier, every toiler must ponder why our Soviet government is accused of terror, why they say the Bolsheviks are dictators, that the Bolsheviks are cutthroats. On the other hand, every toiler must ask themselves why the power of Kerensky, Kaledin, and Kolchak fell so easily. You all know that during Kerensky's reign, all of Russia was covered by a network of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and alongside them, the bourgeoisie held all power in its hands. The bourgeoisie was supported by the Allies, who wanted Russia to continue the war, while the Russian bourgeoisie itself wanted to continue the war in order to gain control of the Dardanelles. This is why Kerensky's bourgeois government, supported by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, was unwilling and unable to publish the treaties concluded by Nicholas the Bloody's government with the Allies. In this way, the bourgeoisie, with the help of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, deceived the working masses into keeping them under its control...

The Workers' and Peasants' Government immediately rejected the deceitful policies of Kerensky's bourgeois government. The first act of the Council of People's Commissars was to publish the secret treaties concluded by Nicholas the Bloody's government with our former allies."

Vol. 40. Pp. 172-174. Report to the First All-Russian Congress of Working Cossacks. March 1, 1920.

"Now, after four years of war, when 10 million people have been killed and 20 million maimed, now that the imperialists are asking themselves: what was the war about?—such questions lead to some very interesting revelations. Recently, negotiations conducted in 1916 were published in France. Back in 1916, the Austrian monarch began peace negotiations with France, and France concealed them. Albert Thomas, who called himself a socialist and was then in the ministry, came to Russia at the time to promise Nicholas II Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and Galicia. Now all these revelations have come to light. They were published in a French newspaper. And now French workers are asking Albert Thomas: "You said you joined the ministry to defend the French fatherland and the interests of French workers, but in 1916, when the Austrian monarch proposed peace, you, Albert Thomas, concealed it, and because of this, millions of people died so that French capitalists could profit." These revelations are not over yet. We began them by publishing secret treaties, and the whole world saw why millions of lives perished, millions of victims. So that Nicholas II could obtain the Dardanelles and Galicia. All the imperialists knew this. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries knew it too, and if they didn't know it, they were complete idiots if they hadn't studied politics and diplomacy enough to know what is now being published in French newspapers. These revelations are now going deeper, and they will never end. Thanks to this, the workers and peasants of every country increasingly sense the truth and are beginning to understand the reasons for the imperialist war. And so, more and more, they are beginning to believe us, that we told the truth, and that the imperialists, leading them to defend the fatherland, told them lies…”

Note to these lines from Lenin: Nicholas Romanov dragged Russia into an unnecessary war – the First World War. As a result, in this war, Russia lost approximately 2 million killed, more than 3 million maimed, and 3.2 million captured. Vast territories were also lost in Poland (remember that Warsaw and its environs were then part of Russia), the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine. And all for the sake of the Dardanelles, promised to him as a tempting carrot. Ultimately, Nicholas Romanov himself, due to his own misguided policies, first lost his crown, and then his life. And not only his own, but also that of his wife and children.

Then, again, Lenin's lines:

"Churchill, who pursues the same policy as Nicholas Romanov, wants to fight and is fighting, paying no attention to parliament. He boasted that he would lead 14 states against Russia—this was in 1919—and that Petrograd would be captured in September, and Moscow in December."

Vol. 41. P. Letter to the English Workers. May 30, 1920

"Every educated person, anyone sincerely interested in politics, knew even before our revolution that the Tsar had secret treaties with the predatory governments of England, France, America, Italy, and Japan regarding the division of spoils, Constantinople, Galicia, Armenia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and so on."

Vol. 44, p. 162. The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of Political Education. October 19, 1921

"Now there are no open landowners. The Wrangels, Kolchaks, and Denikins have all gone to Nicholas Romanov, while others have taken refuge in safe places abroad."

The very last entries in Nicholas II's diary, made in Yekaterinburg in 1918:

June 25th. Monday. Our life hasn't changed at all under Yurovsky. He comes into the bedroom to check the seal on the box and peers in through the open window. We spent the entire morning until 4:00 a.m. checking and repairing the electric lighting. New Latvians are standing guard inside the house, but the same people remain outside – some soldiers, some workers! Rumor has it that some of the Avdeevites are already under arrest! The door to the shed with our luggage is sealed. If only this had been done a month ago! There was a thunderstorm last night, and it got even cooler.

June 28th. Thursday. Around 10:30 a.m. this morning, three workers approached the open window, lifted a heavy grate, and attached it to the outside of the frame – without warning from Yurovsky. We like this guy less and less! I started reading Volume VIII of Saltykov [-Shchedrin].

June 30, Saturday. Alexei took his first bath since Tobolsk; his knee is improving, but he can't straighten it completely. The weather is warm and pleasant. We have no news from outside.

(Diaries of Emperor Nicholas II. Moscow, 1991, p. 684)