The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

As Czar, Nicholas not only based state policy on the royal whim, but would hardly trust anyone but himself to carry it out. Delegating authority, he felt, undermined the autocratic principle. He was jealous of officials who were too successful in carrying out his own orders. He tried to run his sprawling twentieth-century empire, with its top-heavy bureaucracy, its chaotically expanding industry and its complex foreign relations, the way Peter the Great had run seventeenth-century Russia. Nicholas, refusing the help of a private secretary, regularly insisted on himself sealing the envelopes into which he sent out official documents; such work-habits had a good deal to do with the chronic bureaucratic anarchy or paralysis that was an important factor in the ultimate collapse of the Romanov dynasty.