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.
Probably not, but his peasantry wouldn't know that, and they were the ones carrying the petition.
Also doesn't change how most of his worst decisions genuinely were provoked either by listening to bad council or by refusing to listen to good council.