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

The road is steep and narrow. You're a passenger in the car. Next to you are the people you love

most and all of your lives are in danger. The car is carining around the turns and one

slip and it could all be over. And the worst problem is, the driver is asleep at the wheel.

There is hope. You know how to drive and so do other people in the car. You try to wake the man

at the wheel and convince him to make the dangerous move of trading places with someone else. But even

awake, he's hardly any better. He tightens his grip and refuses to let go. With bloodshot eyes,

the driver screams not to touch him. Meanwhile, the car barrels forward toward destruction.

It's too dangerous to fight for the wheel. It's too dangerous to do nothing. Both action and

inaction seem to promise the same carnage. What should you do? This is the question that was

asked in the Moscow Gazette on September 17th of 1915. The journalist who wrote the story was a

member of the Duma, Russia's parliament. The passengers in the car were his fellow Russians.

And the mad chauffeur at the wheel was the one who claimed divine right to steer the nation forward

through the perils of war, Zarnicolis himself. And who could blame one furious statesman for

seeing things this way? Supplies, reinforcements, and hospitals for the army were planned so badly

that trains filled with dying men were parked on the tracks because there was no where for them

to unload their priceless cargo. What was Russia's experience of the war in 1915? It was death,

grief, blood, and failure. Steel coffins slowly turning men into corpses was not the legacy that Zarnicolis

imagined for the Romanov dynasty. But more and more Russians were coming to see it as his stamp on

the nation's history because it was the nation's present and who should be to blame if not for the

man in charge. And when it comes to anger at the Tsar, we're not just talking about peasants. The

members of the Duma saw it, they felt it and published their articles damning Nicholas and

...