Trotsky in his history of the Russian Revolution analyzes the Czar the last of the Romanov dynasty. He was a good looking sportsman, a man without emotions, "'without insides" (said the monk Grigori Rasputin), a mediocre nobody spending his time in paddling in a canoe and noting down in his diary that he had tea on the terrace. Probably he was quite stupid, too. All the while his army was destroyed by the Japanese in Tsushima, and later by the Germans. Russia's defeat in WWI produced millions of embittered soldiers who had been brutally flogged "to elevate their fighting spirits" and had witnessed the incompetence of the noble officer caste and were more than ready for a change. They started to doubt the divinity of the Czar and that the Jews had killed the Son of God. The Jews they knew personally had fought courageously and seemed good leaders.
Trotsky describes the vacillating Kadets during the revolution and how the extremist, terrorist left - the Bolsheviks - seized the power. This minuscule political illegal organization was the most virile, daring and decided element in the whole Russian universe. The Czar was unaware of their existence, he did not fight them, he was pleasantly occupied in open air sports, attending the Orthodox Church ceremonies and drinking his tea in the terrace. Soon after the Russian nobility found itself driving taxis in Paris. "Europe had a debt to history, and had to pay it".
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