RODZIANKO, MIKHAIL VLADIMIROVICH

(1859–1924), an anti-Bolshevik who led the conservative faction of the Octobrist Party in the pre-revolutionary legislative Duma and served as president of that body from 1911 to 1917, then emigrated in 1920 to Yugoslavia, where he completed a memoir, The Reign of Rasputin.

Devoutly Orthodox, conservative, nationalist, and loyal to the tsar, Mikhail Rodzianko also believed in the semiconstitutional system established in 1906 and strove to make it work. He never grasped that Nicholas II at heart rejected the new order. The Duma leader was therefore always puzzled when the tsar ignored Rodzianko's pleas to rid the court of Rasputin's pernicious influence and to form a competent ministry.

An archetype of the old order, he came from a prosperous landed family, received an elite education, served in the army, and then became a district marshal of nobility and zemstvo executive. Chosen for the State Council in 1906 and elected to the Third Duma in 1907, Rodzianko became Duma president in 1911. He actively promoted the war effort after 1914, and in 1916 warned the tsar that incompetent ministers were undermining the struggle against the Central Powers and endangering the survival of the monarchy itself.

During the Revolution of 1917, Rodzianko urged the tsar to appoint a government in which the people would have confidence and which he hoped to head. As the revolution deepened he reluctantly agreed to help persuade Nicholas to abdicate. Because of his political conservatism, he was not asked, however, to serve in the new Provisional Government.

As a believer in both the tsardom and constitutionalism, he could only watch in dismay as Russia sank into radical revolution and civil war. In emigration he found himself reviled by monarchists as having betrayed the tsar, and rejected by liberals as having failed to be reformist enough.

See also: duma; nicholas ii; octobrist party; revolution of 1905

bibliography

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. (1981). The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Hosking, Geoffrey. (1973). The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-14. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rodzianko, Mikhail V. (1973). The Reign of Rasputin: An Empire's Collapse. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

John M. Thompson