According to Mike's Duncan Revolutions the tzar left ambiguous orders about not letting them get to the palace and fucked off. The petitioners didn't stop and the guards opened fire.
Sounds about right for Tsar Nicky. What a fucking imbecile.
What was fucked up is that they weren't even protesting, they were bringing a petition to the tsar because they thought he was a good guy and had been led astray by bad council, which in fairness, kinda true, I actually don't even remember if this fuck up was his doing, but yeah he was also pretty prone to making decisions to take charge of things he was wildly unqualified to take charge of mostly because he was obsessed with not looking unmanly.
WWI broke out entirely because his staff managed to convince him that not throwing a firebrand into the Balkans when the Austrians technically hadn't actually gone to war yet and were being diplomatically beaten into just letting the whole thing go would have meant he had no balls.
I actually don’t even remember if this fuck up was his doing,
If memory serves, he just completely ignored it to go on vacation to the countryside. Which is pretty much the story of his reign.
I mean hey, ya do what you're good at, and in Nicky's case what he was good at was being a doting father and husband, and not much else.
