"The road to civil war began in Petrograd, as the Russian capital had been renamed during the war as a sop to national sentiment ('Sankt Peterburg' had too German a ring to it). Nicholas II, a pious, puritanical man of limited intellectual capacity, came to regard ruling Russia as one long test of inner strength. He worked himself hard, as if determined to prove the veracity of his claim that he was 'the crowned worker'. 'I do the work of three men,' he had declared. 'Let everyone learn to do the work of at least two.' Unfortunately the two other jobs he relished doing - rather more, it would appear, than that of Tsar - were those of secretary and gardener. While conditions at the front deteriorated, he doggedly ploughed through routine correspondence, pausing only to sweep the snow from his own paths. His German-born wife, the Empress Alexandra, did not help, having embraced her own caricature version of Orthodoxy and autocracy. 'Ah my Love,' she wrote to him (in English, as in all their correspondence), 'when at last will you thump with your hand upon the table &C scream at [your ministers] when they act wrongly[?] - one does not fear you - &C one must. . . Oh, my Boy, make one tremble before you - to love you is not enough . . . Be Peter the G., [[w:Ivan_the_Terrible|John [Ivan] the Terrible]], Emp. Paul - crush them all under you - now don't you laugh, naughty one.' It was hopeless. To the last, Nicholas declined to 'bellow at the people left right && centre'."