The fall of ancient dynasties still shake the ground on which we walk, making Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's The Last Tsar more relevant than one might think. The French Revolution spawned a critic, Edmund Burke, whose writings founded modern conservatism, as well as supporters such as Thomas Jefferson, who said of the bloody uprising, "Rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated." And such polarized debates continue. The fall of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II and his Romanov dynasty in early 1917 opened the door for a Bolshevik coup eight months later that gave the world its first Marxist-Leninist regime and an enthusiasm for communism that is with us still. The Bolsheviks modeled themselves on the earlier French revolutionaries.
Hasegawa has produced a credible, well-sourced, and readable retelling of a dramatic and consequential period in history. Its focus is on the impact of World War I on Russia, but it is also the story of a family: Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters, and their only son and heir, Aleksei, whose hemophilia drives a distraught tsarina to seek the counsel of Rasputin, a disreputable monk who claimed the power to heal her son.
The tsarina and the monk soon take it upon themselves to direct the affairs of a dynasty and government in extreme crisis, due to their malign influence on the tsar. Hasegawa's telling of this story ends in March 1917 with the abdication of Nicholas amid an uneasy power-sharing arrangement by a Provisional Government and a Petrograd Soviet. Hasegawa stops short of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the banishment of the Romanovs to Siberia, and the execution of the entire family and its servants in 1918.
Why stop this story in the middle of its denouement? By his own account, Hasegawa is partial to Marxism and deeply anti-American, which no doubt qualified him to join the American academy from his native Japan. Critical of the U.S. war in Vietnam, he later evolved to criticizing Washington for the Cold War and for its nuclear arms race with the USSR. The apogee of his career came with his award-winning 2005 book, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, which argued that the atomic bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not prompt Tokyo's surrender; rather it was prompted by a Soviet declaration of war that was issued in between the two bombings. The weight of recent scholarship argues otherwise.
What of this latest work? Despite the author's protests to the contrary, there is little new in this interpretation of Nicholas II's abdication. The author's chief claims are that Nicholas failed personally to take effective steps to protect his regime, better steward the war effort, or pacify an angry populace, thereby losing support among all strata of society, and that opposition to the tsar among leaders of the military, State Duma, and Provisional Government, and among other senior Romanovs, played a greater role in his abdication than protesting workers and soldiers. Yet these are not at all original observations, and Hasegawa himself cites other historians who have made these same points, in particular the late Harvard historian Richard Pipes. Hasegawa makes the further claim that the leaders of this evolving internal opposition to Nicholas's rule "acted independently, following their own respective interests and goals. The end of the monarchy was not a preordained, inevitable outcome but a contingent process." But is anything preordained?
So why did Hasegawa produce this latest book? Bookshelves groan under the weight of works on the Romanovs and the Russian Revolution, including a 1992 work with the same Last Tsar title by Russian archivist and author Edvard Radzinsky. A deeply researched and detailed account, it includes material on the Siberian exile and execution of the Romanovs and on subsequent investigations and revelations. A top Russia scholar called Radzinsky's work "one of the best books on the subject."
There appear to be three reasons for Hasegawa's account: (1) It readily builds on his two previous books on the same subject, so that this latest work is a bit of a rehash; (2) a critical pose toward the tsarist regime is a safer political bet for a Russia-Soviet specialist than dealing with the subsequent communist regime, which a leftist scholar cannot easily criticize nor easily defend; and (3) because of, well—Donald Trump.
Indeed, Hasegawa introduces our president-elect as a fit topic, linking him to other significant "cults" in history and comparing him to Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and Rasputin, which makes for an elegant transition back to Nicholas II. Trump Derangement Syndrome does indeed deprive its victims of self-awareness, an awareness that might otherwise have counseled against injecting partisan emotions about current American politics into a work of history about tsarist Russia, a work the author presumably wants his peers to take seriously and which will cost you $35.
Regarding the first point, Hasegawa's first book about the fall of the tsar, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (1981), disappointed the author, who admits that one of its main "interpretation[s] did not receive much credit either in the Soviet Union or in the West." He produced a revised edition, The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917 (2017), but this mitigates against the notion that there is much that is new in The Last Tsar. Yet, since 2017, he notes, "the world has been going through a new challenge: the rise of authoritarianism globally, which is challenging democracy, including our own in the United States." So Hasegawa produced a third history of the tsar's abdication because of the growing threat of Trump and other populist leaders.
As for the second point, the tsarist regime looks a lot better in retrospect, when one considers the Bolshevik coup and 70-odd years of communist rule that led to an epic disaster for Russia, her people, and the entire world. This would also explain why Hasegawa's account stops short of that coup, despite the fact that the coup ended the genuine February Revolution that brought about the tsar's abdication.
We can all agree that it is difficult to see hope for a tsarist regime in which, despite multiple, serious, and mounting domestic and war-related crises, the tsar retreats into himself, clinging to his faith in God and his pious subjects' faith in him. Yet a witness for the defense appeared decades ago, raising points that every historian of this period should address. To wit, Winston Churchill wrote of the tsar's last year, "Few episodes of the Great War are more impressive than the resuscitation, re-equipment, and renewed giant effort of Russia in 1916. It was the last glorious exertion of the Tsar and the Russian people for victory before both were to sink into the abyss of ruin and horror." After itemizing an impressive list of Russian military and civilian achievements, Churchill added, "It was, however, true that the new Russian armies, though more numerous and better supplied with munitions than ever before, suffered from one fatal deficiency with no Allied assistance could repair. The lack of educated men, men who at least could read and write, and of trained officers and sergeants, woefully diminished the effectiveness of her enormous masses."
Of course, it was these untrained, armed masses who, slowly infected with Bolshevik agitators and propaganda, turned on Russia's military and civilian leadership. Yet, says Churchill, "this defect, irremediable at the time, fatal in its results, in no way detracts from the merit or the marvel of the Russian achievement, which will forever stand as the supreme monument and memorial of the Empire founded by Peter the Great."
Hasegawa does not address these incongruent, yet significant, facts. Instead, his narrative remains closely tied to the person of the tsar, who remained largely isolated. Keep in mind, too, that if the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917 is to be blamed on his personal failings, whom are we to blame for the simultaneous collapse of the regimes of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Emperor Karl I of Habsburg (both of whom fled into exile in 1918), and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire?
It is somewhat odd how a history of the collapse of a Russian autocracy more than a century ago is supposed to warn us of the dangers of an American autocracy today. For when you throw in the fact that three other autocratic empires also perished as a result of World War I—German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman—autocracy looks like a very fragile and antiquated form of governance with no appeal in 21st-century America.
The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs
by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
Basic Books, 560 pp., $35
Kevin J. McNamara is an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and author of Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe (PublicAffairs). The opinions here are the author's own.