I like the section of China Mieville's October dealing with the Tsar during the events of the February Revolution.
It's not without its flaws (work work isn't), but it's a good book and I'd easily recommend it on the subject.
As for bad leaders...hmm, I suppose the first and last sovereign of the Empire of China*, General Yuan Shikai deserves some honorable mention, even next to the comparative failures of the leaders of the Republic of China upon its defeat in the Civil War, or in the darkest days of the Pacific War before that, or the leaders of the People's Republic during the Great Leap Forward, or the KMT purges in Shanghai, etc.. While people have gotten more tolerant and perhaps come to see him as pathetic as much as anything, in his own era he was basically looked with the sort of scorn reserved for the aforementioned Adolf Hitler: the fragile republic that came with an enormous economic and human cost, seemingly the lone hope for the civic future for almost a half billion people, snuffed out because of one man's ego and self-aggrandizement. Any man could've been a military dictator--Sun was one too, and he wouldn't be the last--but it took a special kind of reactionary conservative to decide that the title of generalissimo wasn't enough, and what was good for him, and by extension the rest of the country, was a doomed effort to rewind the clock and bring back the delusion of a monarch mandated by heaven over a glorious empire from Burma to Mongolia.
You know it's bad when, during the martial law period, it's not Mao or Zhou Enlai that my mother's generation told the most memorable jokes about. It's the would-be Emperor Yuan. They're generally like this:
Yuan Shikai watched a basketball game. He was impressed by the players' talents, but asked a courtier, 'Why don't we just give each man their own ball and solve the problem?'
Of course, he has
some redeeming qualities (I suppose even Hitler backed the Autobahn), but they're all inevitably buried in his catastrophic failures, and how close he came to smothering the Chinese Republic in its cradle for the worst reasons possible. Its one thing both sides of the civil war could agree upon, in fact. Maybe if Yuan's meager accomplishments weren't so weakly meager (and often undermined by other things he did), he'd be given
some credit, but instead he's just another failed Emperor, except without the excuse of the dynastic emperors that they hardly had any other option.
*See what I did there?
