Mikhail Rodzianko

Mikhail Vladimirovich Rodzianko was for six years President of the Russian State Duma and its best-known face. A landowner, former Guards officer and convinced constitutional monarchist, he warned Nicholas II throughout the war that government by men who lacked the country’s confidence, and Rasputin’s influence, were leading the monarchy to ruin. When the Petrograd garrison mutinied in March 1917, he took the chair of the Provisional Committee of the Duma, and his night-time conversation by telegraph with the commander of the Northern Front sealed the Tsar’s abdication. He wanted to save the dynasty and instead helped to bring it to an end. Within days the revolution pushed him aside, and he spent the rest of his life with the defeated Whites and in exile.

Landowner and officer

He was born on 21 February 1859 (9 February by the Julian calendar) on the Popasnoye estate in Yekaterinoslav Governorate, in what is now Ukraine, into a wealthy noble family. His father was a general. He graduated from the elite Corps of Pages in St Petersburg and served in the Chevalier Guard Regiment, from which he transferred to the reserve in 1882. He then devoted himself to his estate and to local government: he was marshal of the nobility of Novomoskovsk district and in 1901–1906 chairman of the Yekaterinoslav provincial zemstvo board. He was among the richest landowners in the province, and by virtue of his court offices he held the title of chamberlain. He married Princess Anna Golitsyna.

Octobrist and President of the Duma

During the 1905 Revolution, provoked largely by the defeats in the war with Japan, the Tsar promised civil liberties and a parliament in the October Manifesto. Rodzianko then helped to found the Octobrist party, moderate liberals who wanted to work with the monarchy within the new system. From 1907 he sat in the Third Duma, and in March 1911, after the resignation of the party leader Alexander Guchkov, he became its President. In November 1912 he was elected President of the Fourth Duma.

He was a man of massive build with a booming voice who set great store by the dignity of his office. At the service in Kazan Cathedral marking the tercentenary of the Romanovs in 1913 he ejected Grigori Rasputin from the places reserved for deputies. He regarded him as a sectarian and a charlatan who was bringing the throne into disrepute. As early as 1912 he had presented the Tsar with material about him, only to be told that it was a family matter. From then on Empress Alexandra Feodorovna regarded him as an enemy. In foreign policy Rodzianko favoured a hard line towards Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russian ambitions regarding the Black Sea Straits.

The war

The outbreak of war in 1914 found him taking a cure in Bad Nauheim in Germany. On his return he backed the government unreservedly, and at a one-day session of the Duma in August 1914 the deputies voted the war credits. He soon saw, however, what the war looked like behind the lines. By his own account, in the first months of the war he found thousands of wounded soldiers lying untended in the rain and mud at a railway station in Warsaw. When in the spring of 1915 it emerged that the army was short of shells, he persuaded the Tsar to set up a Special Council for army supply with deputies and industrialists taking part, and called for the removal of the war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov. The dismissal of Sukhomlinov and several other ministers in the summer of 1915 was the Duma’s first victory.

Rodzianko opposed the Tsar’s assumption of the supreme command, believing that the monarch should not bear personal responsibility for defeats. He supported the formation of the Progressive Bloc, which united most of the Duma behind the demand for a “government of public confidence”. As President of the chamber he was the intermediary between the Duma and the monarch and gave the Tsar regular reports, which grew ever more alarming. In November 1916 he opened the session at which the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov asked whether the government’s policy was “stupidity or treason”. Opposition leaders were by then already discussing a palace coup that would hand the throne to the heir under the regency of the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. Rodzianko, however, was no conspirator. He believed the Tsar could still be persuaded. Nicholas received him for the last time on 23 February 1917 (10 February by the Julian calendar) and, according to Rodzianko, was exceptionally cold towards him.

The February Revolution

When strikes broke out in Petrograd in March 1917, on 11 March Rodzianko telegraphed the Tsar that anarchy reigned in the capital and begged him to appoint at once a government enjoying the country’s confidence. According to courtiers, Nicholas II brushed the telegram aside, remarking that “fat Rodzianko” was writing him nonsense again, and prorogued the Duma. The next day the garrison went over to the insurgents. The deputies, unwilling to defy the decree openly, met as a “private conference” and set up the Provisional Committee of the Duma, with Rodzianko as its chairman. To the last he hesitated over whether to take power. That evening, together with the prime minister, Golitsyn, he urged Grand Duke Michael to assume the regency, and during the night of 12–13 March, when the government had ceased to function, the committee announced that it was taking power into its own hands.

Over the following days Rodzianko tried to master the situation from the position of lawful authority. He called on the soldiers to return to barracks and obey their officers and refused to negotiate with their representatives, which prompted the Petrograd Soviet to issue its famous Order No. 1. He also assured the chief of staff to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General Mikhail Alekseyev, that the new government would be formed by the Duma leaders and not by the soviets. Alekseyev trusted him, and this was one of the reasons why he halted the expedition of troops from the front against the capital.

The decisive exchange came during the night of 14–15 March. At about half past three in the morning the commander of the Northern Front, General Nikolai Ruzsky, who in Pskov had wrung from the Tsar his consent to a government responsible to the Duma, contacted Rodzianko by telegraph. He was told that the concession had come too late and that “hatred of the dynasty has reached its utmost limits”. The only way out, Rodzianko said, was abdication in favour of the Tsar’s son under Michael’s regency. Alekseyev sent the transcript of this conversation to the front commanders in the morning, and their replies persuaded Nicholas to renounce the throne. Rodzianko himself wanted to go to Pskov, but the Soviet would not let him leave the capital. Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin went instead.

When it emerged that the Tsar had abdicated in favour of his brother, Rodzianko asked General Headquarters to hold back the publication of the manifesto. On the morning of 16 March, together with most members of the Duma Committee and the new government, he advised Michael to decline. The Grand Duke asked him privately whether the Duma could guarantee his safety. Rodzianko replied that he could not give that guarantee, and Michael made his acceptance of power conditional on the will of the Constituent Assembly.

On the margins of the revolution

Rodzianko did not join the Provisional Government, which was headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. The Duma, which he tried to keep alive through “private conferences” of deputies, quickly lost its significance, and to the soviets and the soldiers its President was the embodiment of the old propertied classes. In the summer of 1917 he was among the politicians who demanded the restoration of discipline in the army and “strong government”, and he sympathised with General Lavr Kornilov. In the autumn, when after the fall of Riga the Germans seemed to threaten the capital, he caused a storm with a press interview that the newspapers summed up in the words “God be with Petrograd”, in other words, let it go. The Bolsheviks used it as proof that the bourgeoisie was ready to hand the revolutionary capital over to the Germans. In October 1917 the Provisional Government formally dissolved the Duma.

The Whites and exile

After the Bolshevik seizure of power Rodzianko went to the Don, where Generals Alekseyev and Kornilov were forming the White Volunteer Army. In 1918, at almost sixty, he went with it on the First Kuban Campaign, the so-called Ice March. At the beginning of 1918 the Bolsheviks shot his son Georgy in Kiev. Rodzianko stayed with the Whites to the end, but no longer had any influence on policy. In 1920 he emigrated to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which took in tens of thousands of Russian refugees.

In exile he wrote his memoirs, “The Collapse of the Empire”, published in Berlin in the “Archive of the Russian Revolution”. To the monarchists he was one of the gravediggers of the monarchy. According to Russian biographers, shortly before his death he was beaten up in Belgrade by former officers of the White army. He died in poverty on 24 January 1924 in the village of Beodra in the Banat or, according to other sources, in nearby Vršac. He was buried in the New Cemetery in Belgrade.

Assessment

Rodzianko was not an outstanding politician. Contemporaries, his allies among them, stressed his vanity, his long-windedness and his conviction of his own importance. Nicholas II and his entourage saw him as a disloyal intriguer, and the left as the embodiment of landowning Russia. Historians such as Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes point out, however, that in 1915–1916 he was one of the few people who openly told the Tsar the truth about the state of the country, the army and the court.

In March 1917 it was his authority as President of the Duma that convinced the generals that abdication would save the army and allow the war to go on. That calculation proved wrong. Rodzianko wanted to replace the Tsar with a regency and a government of confidence, and instead opened the way to a revolution that neither he nor his Duma colleagues could control. Their failure delivered power into the hands of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks, and from it grew the Soviet state, one of the great powers of Europe in 1939.