Welcome to Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.

The throne was in danger.

The church was in danger.

The very state of Russia itself, no revolutionary or foreign missionary had done what Rasputin

had done.

The Imperial family was stained, a vestige of the dark ages had risen up and taken the

czar of Russia into his hands.

That was the message that thundered out into the Russian parliament, the Duma, on March

8th of 1912.

The speaker, Alexander Gukhov, was a politician who had been working to reform the Russian

government since the Revolution of 1905.

Now he was taking direct aim at the czar, and Nicholas took it personally.

After all, this speech was an open defiance of his power, and in a time when the press

and the church and even the supporters of the empire had gone against the crown, this

was a new low.

The government that Nicholas had tried to control was now openly questioning his god-given

authority.

They were undermining him in the very halls of government itself.

It stung all the more because it was the final exclamation point on a process that Nicholas

had begun himself when he met with the president of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko.

A few months before, Nicholas had met with Rodzianko in the wake of the secret police attacking

the press.

...