IV.

World War I

An advocate of international cooperation, Nicholas sponsored the Hague Conferences, which created the Permanent Court of Arbitration and formulated rules for the humane conduct of war, but failed to check Europe's growing arms race. Despite the friendly personal relations between Nicholas and his cousin, William II of Germany, their two countries were on opposite sides when World War I began. The general strike in the capital collapsed, and the first weeks of the war saw a superficial resurgence in patriotic support for the monarchy. Yet Russia’s defeats, and the shortages and suffering caused by the war, were blamed on Nicholas, especially after he went to the war front and assumed personal command of the army in 1915. He left his wife in the capital under the influence of Rasputin; the monk’s advice appeared to dictate government policy, prompting one parliamentarian to ask if this was “stupidity or treason?” Rasputin’s murder by arch-conservatives in December 1916 symbolized the degree of Nicholas’s isolation from even his traditional supporters.