El zar olvidado

Miguel Romanov, brother of Nicholas II, had in his hands the possibility of saving the dynasty of the tsars, after his brother abdicated in him. On the night of February 1917 when a popular uprising took to the streets of Petrograd, Miguel had to seek refuge in the house of a friend of his. There he would remain while the autocracy in Russia imploded. The Duma was forming a provisional government, the Soviet was being organized, and the tsar was trying to get by train from the Russian headquarters in World War I to the palace where he lived with his family. That train journey of more than forty hours, which kept the new government in suspense, was his downfall. The power vacuum meant that the capital, and all of Russia, were lost forever to a new totalitarian regime. Miguel temporarily relinquished power on the condition that free elections be held and that the Russians, for the first time in their history, vote for the type of state they wanted, monarchy or republic, in a Constituent Assembly. But the Soviet was not going to allow it. Michael Romanov could have changed the history of Russia, It would have prevented the useless blood loss of the First World War. The civil War. The terrible regimes of Lenin or Stalin. The harbinger of the Russian tragedy, until today.