Please read my statement again, perhaps without vitriol this time:

>but most of the important, nation-wide decisions were obviously affected by how (dismally) Nicky ran things.

Observe the word most. Just as I was saying the tsars definitively were responsible for most (note the word carefully again) of the momentous decisions later, it should be painfully obvious that they weren't responsible for 100% of all actions forever after. This is ridiculously obvious in any non-insanely polarized debate, which unfortunately isn't always the case of HN.