The man known to history as Tsar Nicholas
II of Russia was born Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov on the 18th of May 1868
at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial retreat outside St Petersburg,
the capital of the Russian Empire. His father, Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich,
was the second son of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. The younger Alexander was given an ordinary
education and prepared for a life of military service when his elder brother, Tsarevich
Nicholas, died in 1865 at the age of twenty-one. Following the death of Nicholas, Alexander
became heir to the Russian throne and married his late brother’s fiancée. Upon his father’s death in 1881, Alexander
assumed the throne as Tsar Alexander III. Although most of his ancestors were German,
the bulky bearded Alexander resembled a Russian peasant and his legendary reputation for strength
was reflected in his tendency to bend a fork with his bare hands for entertainment during
state dinners. Nicholas II’s mother Maria Fyodorovna was
born Princess Dagmar of Denmark in 1847, five years before her father became King Christian
IX of Denmark. In 1863, Dagmar’s sister Princess Alexandra
married Prince Albert Edward, the future Edward VII of the United Kingdom. In September 1864, when she was not yet seventeen,
Dagmar was engaged to Tsarevich Nicholas of Russia, but after his death the following
year it was decided that she would marry his younger brother, Tsarevich Alexander, converting
to Russian Orthodox Christianity and taking the name of Maria Fyodorovna. The couple would have six children, of whom
the future Nicholas II was the eldest. A second son named Alexander died before his
first birthday, but the remaining children, two sons named George and Michael, and two
daughters named Xenia and Olga, all survived into adulthood. The Romanov family had ruled Russia since
1613, when the nobleman Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov was elected Tsar at the end of a fifteen-year
period of anarchy and Polish occupation known as The Time of Troubles. Nicholas II’s life and reign proved as troublesome
as the events three centuries earlier that placed his ancestor on the Russian throne. At his birth, the Russian Empire was the world’s
largest country, stretching from Poland in the west to the Pacific coast in the east,
bordering the Arctic Ocean in the north with its southern frontiers in Central Asia. This vast country owed its origins to the
Grand Principality of Moscow, a modest medieval state ruled by princes of the Rurikid dynasty,
descendants of the Viking chieftain Rurik who ruled the lands collectively known as
the Rus’ from the city of Kiev in the 9th century. After the Mongol conquest, Moscow became the
most powerful of the Russian principalities over the course of the 14th century by a combination
of military force, extortion, and fidelity to the Mongol or Tatar khan. During the following century the Muscovites
claimed the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453,
claiming the title of Tsar, derived from Caesar, before expelling the Tatars, subjugating the
wealthy merchant republic of Novgorod to the northwest, and beginning its expansion eastwards
towards Siberia. At the beginning of the 18th century, after
a century of turmoil, Tsar Peter the Great founded the city of St Petersburg and defeated
Sweden in the Great Northern War, proclaiming the Russian Empire in 1721. At the end of the century, Ukraine and Crimea
and parts of Poland were brought under Russian imperial rule by Catherine the Great. After repelling Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion
of 1812, Russia became one of the dominant powers on the European continent, and in 1814
Tsar Alexander I entered Paris in triumph at the head of a coalition army that forced
Napoleon to abdicate. Both Catherine and Alexander were inspired
by liberal ideas of the European Enlightenment, but they found it difficult to reform a system
of authoritarian rule which they relied on to maintain the integrity of their state with
its wide-open frontiers. In the decades after the Napoleonic Wars Russia
retained its reputation as the continent’s strongest military power, but despite their
resplendent uniforms on parade, the Russian army was defeated in the Crimean War, which
exposed the weaknesses in the Russian administrative and economic system. After Nicholas’s grandfather Tsar Alexander
II came to the throne in 1855, he embarked on a reform programme to modernise the Russian
Empire and maintain its great power status on the international stage while dealing with
the increasing political consciousness of the urban classes and the rise of nationalism
in a multi-ethnic empire where fewer than half of the population was Russian. In 1861 Alexander abolished serfdom and gave
peasants free economic rights, but the newly-emancipated serfs were obliged to pay redemption dues
to the government for forty-nine years to compensate their former owners. In 1864 trial by jury was introduced, and
elected local councils known as zemstva were established for rural areas and later cities
and towns. In order to address the deficiencies in military
organisation in the Crimea, in 1874 universal conscription was introduced and corporal punishment
was banned in the army. Nicholas spent his childhood with an affectionate
and overprotective mother, and a warm-hearted but intimidating father, a combination that
may have contributed to his immaturity as a young adult. Like other European families, Nicholas’s
parents provided the general framework for his education and upbringing, but he spent
most of the childhood supervised by governesses and governors. Between seven and ten years old, Nicholas
received lessons from his governess, Alexandra Ollongren. Aged ten, his upbringing was entrusted to
the military governor General Grigory Danilovich, who invited specialist tutors to teach the
young grand duke Russian, French, English, German, mathematics, geography, chemistry,
and history, which was Nicholas’s favourite subject. Nicholas had a close relationship with his
tutor Charles Heath, an Englishman who taught at the Alexander Lyceum, the prestigious school
for the aristocratic elite in Tsarskoe Selo. Under Heath’s influence, Nicholas adopted
the reserved manner of an English gentleman, an attitude that would contribute to his reputation
as a weak and indecisive ruler. In March 1881, when Nicholas was thirteen
years old, his grandfather Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by the socialist revolutionary
organisation the People’s Will while returning to the Winter Palace from a military inspection. Having survived six previous assassination
attempts during his reign, the mortally wounded Alexander had his legs blown off by a bomb
and was carried to the Winter Palace where he died a couple of hours later. His grandson Nicholas was among those gathered
at his bedside. While Russian tsars had often been violently
removed from power by ambitious family members in palace coups, this was the first time a
Russian monarch had been killed by revolutionaries who aimed to overthrow the monarchy. While he honoured his late father’s memory
by building the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood at the site of the assassination, Tsar
Alexander III reversed many of his predecessor’s liberal reforms and cracked down on left-wing
revolutionary terrorist groups. In May 1887, after an attempt on the Tsar’s
life on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II’s killing was uncovered, the revolutionary
terrorist Alexander Ulyanov was one of five members of the People’s Will executed for
his part in the plot. Alexander’s death led his younger brother
Vladimir to take a greater interest in revolutionary politics. After his grandfather’s death and the accession
of his father Alexander III, Nicholas assumed the title of Tsarevich and became heir to
the throne. He continued to live under the supervision
of General Danilovich until the age of seventeen, when he began his political education at the
hands of some of the leading statesmen of the empire. The greatest influence on the teenage Nicholas
was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the conservative law professor who served as the secular head
of the Orthodox Church. Pobedonostsev believed that Russia’s communitarian
political traditions were unsuited to representative democracy and regarded the peasantry, who
were largely isolated from western liberal and socialist ideas in the cities, as the
basis of Russian monarchism. Nicholas was also taught economics by Nikolai
Bunge, the liberal Minister of Finance from 1881 to 1886. Though the Russian economy developed rapidly
during the reign of Alexander III and Bunge was comfortable in the world of wealthy bankers
and industrialists, Nicholas’s understanding of economic theory remained poor throughout
his life, and he would rely on the advice of ministers on economic issues. In October 1888, while Nicholas and the imperial
family were returning from the Crimea, the imperial train derailed at Borki in Ukraine. The roof of the dining car collapsed, but
Tsar Alexander used his legendary strength to hold it up, allowing the children to escape
unharmed. At the age of nineteen Nicholas was commissioned
into the Preobrazhensky Guards, the senior regiment of the imperial army. As with elite regiments in other European
countries, the Preobrazhensky’s officers received little military training but Nicholas
was able to enjoy the society of the wealthy young aristocrats who served as Guards officers. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
it was common for young European aristocrats and royals to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe
to deepen their knowledge of art and culture and to see the monumental remnants of Greek
and Roman antiquity for themselves. Tsar Alexander turned his attention eastwards
towards Asia, and in October 1890, Nicholas was sent on an eastern Grand Tour accompanied
by Prince Esper Ukhtomsky, an authority on Asian culture, and after brief stops in Austria
and Greece, where he picked up his cousin Prince George of Greece, Nicholas visited
the more exotic destinations of Egypt, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Dutch East Indies
(modern Indonesia), the Kingdom of Siam (now Thailand), and parts of China and Japan, before
returning home to St Petersburg across Siberia. In May 1891, while Nicholas was in Otsu in
Japan, he was the target of an assassination attempt by a local policeman. Though he received a sabre wound to the face,
Prince George saved his life by intercepting the second blow. Nicholas cut short the rest of his trip and
returned to St Petersburg overland in August. He had been a member of the State Council
and Committee of Ministers since his twenty-first birthday in 1889, and in 1893 he was appointed
to chair a special committee on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1890, Nicholas began an affair with the
seventeen-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska, a Polish ballerina of the imperial ballet. Though the affair was actively encouraged
by his parents, as heir to the Russian throne he was expected to marry a European princess. In 1884, Nicholas was present at his uncle
Grand Duke Sergei’s wedding to Princess Elisabeth of Hesse, one of the many German
princely states that supplied brides for European royal houses. It was there that Nicholas met Elisabeth’s
twelve-year-old sister Princess Alix, who was Queen Victoria of England’s favourite
grandchild and lover of all things English. By the early 1890s Nicholas was determined
to marry the beautiful Princess Alix, and he proposed to her in April 1894 while attending
the wedding of her brother Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse in the German city of Coburg. The highly-religious Alix initially rejected
the proposal as she was unwilling to give up her Lutheran faith in favour of Russian
Orthodoxy, but a few days later she changed her mind and would soon become a zealous convert. Despite his seemingly robust constitution,
Tsar Alexander III’s health began to fail in 1894 and by late summer he was diagnosed
with kidney disease attributed to the impact of the Borki train disaster six years earlier. In the autumn the Tsar went to the Livadia
Palace in Crimea to recuperate, and by mid-October Tsarevich Nicholas was deputising for his
father. On the 22nd of October Princess Alix arrived
to receive her prospective father-in-law’s blessing, and on the 1st of November 1894
Tsar Alexander III died at the age of forty-nine, leaving his twenty-six-year-old son as Nicholas
II, Tsar of Russia. On the 26th of November, less than a month
of the late tsar’s death, court mourning was lifted for the wedding of Nicholas and
his bride, who had converted to Orthodoxy and taken the name Alexandra Fyodorovna. Although she took a great interest in Russian
religion and culture, the intelligent and serious empress was ill-at-ease in St Petersburg
society and resented the court precedence enjoyed by her mother-in-law, Dowager Empress
Maria Fyodorovna. Nevertheless, Nicholas and Alexandra had a
happy marriage and the imperial couple would have four daughters and one son between 1895
and 1904. During Nicholas’ reign, the imperial family’s
main residence was the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Though the palace had a neoclassical exterior
yellow walls and white columns, its interiors were decorated in a Victorian Gothic style
to suit Alexandra’s tastes. The family spent summers at Peterhof, around
twenty miles to the west, and made occasional visits to imperial hunting lodges in Poland
and the Livadia Palace in Crimea. Nicholas and his family enjoyed excursions
to the Finnish coast on the imperial yacht, the Standart, which was also used on occasion
for state visits to European countries. For the first decade of Nicholas’ reign,
the imperial family hosted grand balls in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg during
the winter, but after 1903 the imperial family was increasingly isolated from St Petersburg
society. Aside from occasional holidays and international
trips, Nicholas kept a strict routine, starting the day at 8 o’clock with a swim before
having breakfast and a walk in the extensive Alexander Park. From 9.30 he attended to court business for
an hour, before receiving reports from his ministers between 10.30 and lunch at 1.00. After a forty-five minute lunch Nicholas would
receive ambassadors and foreign guests in the afternoon before tea with the family at
5 o’clock. Between 6 and 8 in the evening there were
more ministerial reports. Dinner began at 8.00, after which Nicholas
would join Alexandra and the children in the Empress’s boudoir. After 10 Nicholas returned to his study and
sometimes worked late into the night. After becoming Tsar on his father’s death,
Nicholas admitted that he was unprepared to take the throne. The young Tsar was indecisive and lacked confidence,
and it was often said that the most powerful individual in Russia was the last person who
had spoken to the Tsar. Empress Alexandra frequently attempted to
strengthen her husband’s resolution by reminding him that he was the Tsar and was appointed
by God. Nicholas’ imperial majesty would have to
appear in its full glory before the people at his coronation in May 1896. Although St Petersburg had been the capital
since 1712, the coronation ceremony of the Tsars continued to be held in the former capital
of Moscow. On the 26th of May 1896, Nicholas was crowned
in a solemn three-hour ceremony held in the Dormition Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin. Four days later, on the 30th of May, a large
public celebration was to be held at the Khodynka field on the outskirts of the city, with Nicholas
and Alexandra set to arrive at noon. By 6 in the morning, over half a million people
had already arrived, and when rumours spread that there were not enough complimentary souvenirs
for everyone, those at the back pushed forwards, leading to a stampede which killed over a
thousand people and injured thousands more. By the time the imperial family arrived in
the afternoon, the field had been cleaned up. That evening, Nicholas and Alexandra attended
a grand ball organised by the French Embassy to celebrate the Franco-Russian alliance of
1894. While the imperial couple did not wish to
attend the ball and visited the wounded in hospitals the following day, the image of
the Tsar dancing on the day of a great tragedy made a bad first impression. Nicholas began his reign with few close friends
whom he could bring into government, and instead relied on advice from ministers inherited
from his father. He continued to be guided by Pobedonostsev’s
conservativism, and for the first six years of his reign he did not deviate very far from
his father’s policies. Nicholas’ desire to please everyone around
him and his unwillingness to confront those who disagreed with him resulted in incoherent
and contradictory policymaking. Rather than decide policy collectively through
the Committee of Ministers, the Tsar preferred to make decisions by meeting ministers individually. The Tsar’s main interests were in foreign,
defence, and security policy, and outside these areas ministers exercised considerable
power in their own departments. Later in his reign Nicholas suspected that
powerful and effective ministers were usurping his powers as Tsar and he played his ministers
off against each other to assert his own authority, undermining the effectiveness of his government. Like many of his predecessors, Nicholas was
suspicious of the bureaucrats who served him and believed that as Tsar he had a direct
connection to the people. The Tsar considered himself a father to his
subjects and was known to deal with petitions personally, no matter how trivial. Among Nicholas’ ministers, the most influential
during the early part of his reign was Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, who had spent twenty
years working in the railway industry before being appointed Director of Railway Affairs
by Minister of Finance Ivan Vyshnegradsky in 1889. Vyshnegradsky launched a programme of industrial
development funded by foreign loans and increasing taxes on peasants and protected by high tariffs
which increased the prices of imported industrial products. These policies were adopted and expanded by
Witte upon his arrival at the Ministry of Finance in 1892 and became known as the Witte
System. The Finance Minister believed that rapid industrialisation
and economic modernisation was essential if Russia was to avoid becoming economically
exploited by the world’s industrial powers, a fate that seemed inevitable for the Ottoman
Empire in the Middle East and the Qing Empire in China. Witte recognised that the peasants and urban
poor would suffer in the process, but argued that only by developing Russian industry using
a combination of state revenues and foreign capital and technology could Russia be able
to compete with Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Witte’s advocacy of the industrial economy
was unpopular among the Russian landed aristocracy, who were sceptical of capitalism and favoured
the development of the agricultural economy. When Witte proposed adopting the gold standard
in 1896 in order to attract foreign investment, he faced considerable opposition among his
fellow ministers as it would increase the cost of borrowing, and it was only the forceful
intervention of the Tsar on behalf of Witte that allowed the Finance Minister to have
his way. With his background in the rail industry,
Witte took a special interest in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway intended to
link Moscow to the port of Vladivostok in the Far East. In May 1891, while returning home from his
Asian tour, Nicholas attended the ceremonies marking the start of construction on the railway
in Vladivostok, and after becoming Tsar he maintained his interest in the Far East, believing
that Russia was in a perfect position to exploit economic advantages from the weak Chinese
Empire. In 1895, Japan defeated China in an eight-month
war, and at the Treaty of Shimonoseki Japan secured possession of the Liaodong peninsula
in southern Manchuria, including the strategic naval base of Port Arthur. Since the Japanese presence in Manchuria undermined
Russia’s own imperial ambitions in the Celestial Empire, Russia organised an international
coalition with France and Germany to force Japan to hand their gains back to China. Under Witte’s influence, Russia was given
the right to build a section of the Trans-Siberian Railway through northern Manchuria, reducing
the length of the route. In March 1898, after Germany seized the Chinese
port of Qingdao, Nicholas ensured that Russia secured a lease on Port Arthur and the Liaodong
peninsula, while the British were given the port of Weihaiwei. In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion broke out in
northern China in opposition to foreign influence in the empire. The Chinese imperial government sympathised
with the Boxers and did little to suppress the rebellion, while the international community
sought and received help from home. Russia was among the eight nations which joined
together to suppress the Boxers, but Russian forces remained in Manchuria to protect the
railway and assert Russian economic control over the province. Although Witte’s policies led to rapid economic
growth, the industrialisation process was accompanied by the movement of peasants from
the countryside to work in factories in urban centres. The cities were unable to provide the necessary
housing and social infrastructure to cope with the demand and living and working conditions
were poor. In the meantime, the increase in literacy
among factory workers encouraged the creation of trade unions to defend the rights of workers. In many of these unions, radical revolutionary
ideas circulated calling for the overthrow of the Tsar and his regime. This industrialization led to not only strikes
in the cities but also peasant riots in the countryside prompted by Witte’s high taxes
and tariffs, which lead to several famines over the course of the 1890s. Witte recognised the condition of the peasantry
but was unwilling to ease the tax burden, and instead proposed radical land reform. Witte suggested abolishing the peasant commune,
the centuries-old system under which a village and the land around it was owned collectively
by the peasant community, and giving peasants full property rights to their land. The political stability of the Russian Empire
was threatened not only by workers and peasants, but also by the intellectual classes. As in many autocratic regimes, the most radical
group were university students, and in 1899 Nicholas faced student riots across the country. Although some leading instigators were expelled
and conscripted to the army as a punishment, Nicholas recognised that some of the students’
complaints were justified, and the Ministry of Education took steps to abolish the hated
classical curriculum and to give students greater choice in the courses they studied. While Nicholas hoped that the Russian education
system could inspire a sense of patriotism and support for the state, university professors
and even officials in the Ministry of Education sympathised with liberal and radical ideas
and resisted any decrees to impose conservative sentiments upon students. By 1900, there were three distinct political
groups forming the political opposition to Nicholas II. The Socialist Revolutionary Party formed in
1901 and led by Viktor Chernov was the successor to the People’s Will and the agrarian socialist
movements founded in the 1860s. The SRs believed that peasants and workers
should join together in leading the socialist revolution to overthrow the Tsar and were
popular in both urban and rural areas. The SRs promoted revolutionary terror and
were responsible for assassinating the hard-line Minister of Internal Affairs Vyacheslav von
Plehve in 1904. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, owed
their allegiance to the Marxist tradition and believed that the urban workers would
serve as the vanguard of any socialist revolution. In 1903, the Social Democratic Party split
into two factions, the extreme Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin,
while the more moderate Mensheviks were led by Julius Martov. The third strand of opposition to the Tsar
were the Liberals, who supported civil rights and constitutional government, where political
power is shared by the monarch and a democratic assembly representing the people. The Liberals, primarily influential in the
zemstva around the country, drew their support from middle class and upper-class individuals,
though they hoped to expand their support to the working classes. The political instability in Russia at the
beginning of the 20th century prompted Interior Minister von Plehve to remark in 1903, “What
this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.” Plehve’s comment was in reference to Minister
of War General Alexei Kuropatkin, who warned that Russia’s Far Eastern adventures were
undermining its defences in Europe. In February 1904, Russia and Japan went to
war over control of Manchuria and Korea. Though Nicholas had hoped to avoid war, he
believed that the Russian military would easily crush the Japanese. Contrary to the expectations of the Tsar and
the international community, the Japanese inflicted a series of heavy defeats on the
Russians. In April 1904, the flagship of the Russian
Pacific Fleet struck a mine near Port Arthur, killing Admiral Stepan Makarov, the Russian
navy’s most talented naval officer. In early September 1904, Kuropatkin’s army
was defeated by a Japanese army half its size at the Battle of Liaoyang, forcing him to
abandon the city. Kuropatkin expected reinforcements from European
Russia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, but parts of the railroad were not yet complete. In the meantime, the Japanese laid siege to
Port Arthur and took the port in February 1905, destroying the Russian Pacific Fleet
in the process. Later that month, the Japanese army defeated
Kuropatkin at Mukden (now known as Shenyang) and forced the Russians to retreat into northern
Manchuria. The key battle of the war took place at sea
at the end of May 1905, when Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky’s 2nd Pacific Squadron, which
had sailed round the world on an eight-month voyage from the Baltic Sea, was annihilated
by Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō at the Straits of Tsushima. After mediation from President Theodore Roosevelt
of the United States, the Russo-Japanese War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth
in September, recognising Japanese claims over Korea and resulting in Russia’s evacuation
of Manchuria. In line with Plehve’s expectations, Russian
setbacks in the Russo-Japanese War had made revolution more likely, and on the 28th of
July 1904, while on his way to meet the Tsar, Plehve was killed by a bomb thrown by a Socialist
Revolutionary terrorist. Nicholas had appointed Plehve Minister of
Internal Affairs in 1902 following the assassination of his predecessor Dmitri Sipyagin, hoping
that the hardline Plehve would act as a counterweight to Witte, who was beginning to lose the Tsar’s
confidence over the political instability caused by his economic reforms. Like many Russian conservatives, Plehve believed
that the workers and peasants were more loyal to the state and presided over a policy of
repression against the political parties and the radical urban intelligentsia. Plehve was a notorious anti-Semite and considered
to be responsible for the pogrom in the Moldovan capital of Kishinev in April 1903, during
which an anti-Semitic mob killed almost fifty Jews. Though Nicholas condemned the killings and
removed the local governor, he did little to stem the pogroms between 1903 and 1906,
during which over two thousand Jews were killed, the bloodiest of which claimed the lives of
four hundred Jews in the Ukrainian port of Odessa in 1905. Following Plehve’s assassination, Nicholas
appointed the liberal Prince Pyotr Svyatopolk-Mirsky as his successor, seemingly in response to
his mother’s pleas not to appoint another hardliner to the ministry. Svyatopolk-Mirsky proposed a programme of
reforms including religious toleration, civil rights, and greater influence on central government
by elected representatives from across the country. While the Minister of Internal Affairs believed
that the reforms were necessary to avoid revolution, Grand Duke Sergei led the conservatives in
attempting to block the reform programme. Not long after Nicholas rejected the Interior
Minister’s central policy of representative government in December 1904, Svyatopolk-Mirsky
resigned from office. On Sunday the 22nd of January 1905, tens of
thousands of unarmed protestors marched on the Winter Palace under the leadership of
Father Gapon, a priest and trade union leader in St Petersburg. Among Gapon’s demands for political reform
were for the Tsar to hold a constituent assembly to deliver a constitutional government in
Russia. The protestors were carrying religious icons
and singing patriotic songs, including the imperial anthem God Save the Tsar, appealing
to the Tsar as their protector. Nicholas was away at Tsarskoe Selo at the
time and while there was no question of him accepting Gapon’s demands, the decision
to police the event using infantry soldiers resulted in the deaths of several hundred
protestors as the outnumbered soldiers blocking the paths to Palace Square opened fire at
the columns of demonstrators advancing against them. While Nicholas expressed regret at the fatalities,
the events of Bloody Sunday undermined the Tsar’s claims to be the protector of his
subjects. On the 17th of February 1905, Grand Duke Sergei
was assassinated by Socialist Revolutionary terrorists in the Kremlin. Nicholas responded by offering to establish
an advisory representative body, but he refused to consider relinquishing his powers as absolute
monarch. The Tsar believed that constitutional government
would make Russia more vulnerable to revolution and anarchy, while also considering it his
duty to preserve the authority he was given by God. As a hereditary monarch, Nicholas also considered
it his duty to God and Russia to produce a son and heir. Between 1895 and 1901 Nicholas and Alexandra
had four daughters in succession, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. According to the Imperial Succession Law of
1797, women could not inherit the throne unless all male claimants were extinguished. As a result, Nicholas’ younger brother George
remained the heir to the throne until his death in 1899, upon which their youngest brother
Michael became the new heir. When Nicholas fell gravely ill in the autumn
of 1900, there was some discussion about changing the Laws of Succession so that Grand Duchess
Olga could succeed him, but the Tsar’s recovery averted succession talk. On the 12th of August 1904, Nicholas and Alexandra
were granted their wish of a son whom they named Alexei after the 17th century Tsar Alexei
Mikhailovich, a pious and gentle ruler who laid the foundations for his son Peter the
Great’s modernisation of the country by pursuing a programme of moderate reform. Nicholas and Alexandra were naturally delighted
to have a boy, but their happiness was tempered when it emerged that Alexei suffered from
haemophilia, a disease inherited from Alexandra’s grandmother Queen Victoria which impaired
the ability of blood to clot, meaning that cuts and bruises could potentially prove fatal. Alexandra’s concern about her son’s condition
caused her own health to collapse, leading her to turn more to her faith. Rather than solving a problem, Tsarevich Alexei
was another addition to his parents’ list of anxieties. The defeats on land and sea during the Russo-Japanese
War highlighted the weakness of the Russian state and its military commanders and contributed
to a decline in the Tsar’s prestige. While news of Mukden and Tsushima made their
way to St Petersburg, strikes and disturbances continued throughout the country, reaching
a peak at the beginning of October with strikes in Moscow and St Petersburg. When the railwaymen went on strike, it paralysed
political and economic activity and prevented officials from travelling between St Petersburg
and Moscow. After Sergei Witte advised the Tsar to make
concessions to end the unrest, on the 30th of October, Nicholas issued a manifesto drawn
up by Witte promising an elected assembly with legislative powers and to create a Council
of Ministers, whose Chairman would effectively have the powers of a prime minister. A week later, Witte was made prime minister,
but despite his promises of restoring peace, the unrest continued, and a Soviet of Workers’
Deputies dominated by Leon Trotsky was established in St Petersburg, while in December the Bolsheviks
led an uprising in Moscow. Trotsky would later describe the events in
1905 as a dress rehearsal for the revolution which would overthrow the Tsar twelve years
later. For the time being, Nicholas remained in power
as the revolution was brought under control by Pyotr Durnovo, the Minister of Internal
Affairs, who reasserted government control over the transport and communications network
and arrested members of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. By the end of 1905, many liberals rallied
to the government after being horrified at the radicalism of the masses. Most liberals formed the Constitutional Democratic
Party, nicknamed Kadets, hoping to use the legislative assembly to carry out further
reforms, while a conservative minority who were satisfied by the concessions granted
by the October Manifesto joined the Octobrist Party. The new constitution was published in the
spring of the following year as the Fundamental Law of April 1906. As promised, the law created the State Duma,
an elected assembly which served as the lower house of a bicameral legislature. The upper house was the reformed State Council,
whose members were appointed by the Tsar and the nobility. Nicholas continued to assert his “supreme
authority” and reserved for himself powers to dissolve the two parliamentary bodies or
to place provinces under a state of emergency. When Tsar Nicholas II opened the Duma at the
Tauride Palace in St Petersburg on the 27th of April 1906, he was a month shy of his thirty-eighth
birthday, and had been on the Russian throne for more than a decade. During this period the Russian economy continued
to industrialise, but the revolutionary organisations which had been driven underground by his father
had re-emerged. Nicholas managed to gain control of Port Arthur
and southern Manchuria, only to lose it shortly thereafter with a humiliating defeat to Japan. Despite the imperial majesty on display at
the Tauride Palace, Nicholas had barely survived the Revolution of 1905 and was forced into
taking the first steps to creating a constitutional government which he was fundamentally opposed
to. The new constitutional experiment began poorly,
and the Tsar resented sharing executive power with Witte. While peasant disturbances continued in the
countryside, the previously decisive Witte could not make up his mind how to respond,
leaving it up to Durnovo to pacify the country through military force. Nicholas kept Witte in office long enough
to secure a foreign loan allowing Russia to remain on the gold standard before dismissing
him in May, replacing him with the ineffectual Ivan Goremykin. Although the electoral law for the Duma had
been weighted towards the peasantry, the traditional supporters of the monarchy, when the State
Duma opened its first session in April 1906, it was dominated by the liberal Kadets and
the socialist Trudoviks. The mainstream socialist parties, the Socialist
Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, had decided to boycott the First Duma elections. Even so, the body’s demands for parliamentary
government and land reform were too radical for the Tsar, who dissolved the body in July. Elections for the Second Duma in January 1907
returned a legislature even further to the left after the SDs and SRs agreed to participate. The Second Duma was soon dissolved, and the
electoral laws changed to ensure a more conservative legislature. While Nicholas was struggling to adapt to
life as a constitutional monarch, the imperial court welcomed the presence of Grigory Rasputin,
a Siberian peasant and religious mystic. Rasputin was introduced to the imperial couple
in late 1905 by Princess Anastasia of Montenegro, who would later marry the Tsar’s uncle Grand
Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. Over the coming years, Rasputin gained considerable
influence over Nicholas and Alexandra for his ability to stop Tsarevich Alexei’s bleeding. Despite his condition and regular warnings
from his parents, Alexei was an active child and would occasionally hurt himself. On more than one occasion when the Tsarevich
appeared to be dying, Rasputin’s intervention, whether by touching the child or through his
prayers, would seemingly cure the young boy almost instantly. The imperial couple regarded Rasputin’s
presence as a sign of the people’s support for the monarchy, though his political influence
was often exaggerated by political opponents who supported the separation of the state
and the Orthodox Church. Rasputin’s presence at court damaged the
prestige of the Tsar and his family and was deemed an embarrassment by educated society,
but Nicholas and Alexandra resisted calls from Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin to expel
Rasputin from St Petersburg. Stolypin had succeeded Durnovo as Minister
of Internal Affairs in the spring of 1906 before becoming Prime Minister in July. Before being promoted to ministerial level
he had served as the governor of Saratov province in southern Russia, and at the age of forty-four,
he was much younger than the Tsar’s previous ministers. Stolypin continued to crack down on peasant
disturbances, and among his opponents the hangman’s noose was nicknamed “Stolypin’s
necktie” while the trains carrying peasants into Siberia were known as “Stolypin’s
carriages.” Although a conservative nobleman, Stolypin
and Agriculture Minister Alexander Krivoshein proposed a land reform programme to weaken
peasant communes and encouraged the development of family smallholdings. He also attempted to stimulate the economic
development of Siberia by offering to give each peasant 40 acres of land to cultivate
alongside other financial inducements. He was a talented orator who made powerful
speeches in the Duma, and he established a close working relationship with Alexander
Guchkov, whose Octobrist Party was the largest in the Third Duma. This alliance began to fail in 1909 and 1910,
when Stolypin’s proposals to strengthen the zemstvo and increase social protections
for factory workers were opposed by the landowners and industrialists who dominated the Duma. In the meantime, Stolypin and Guchkov’s
efforts to increase legislative control over the army damaged his relationship with the
Tsar. Stolypin’s plans to expand the zemstvo system
to Ukraine and Belarus narrowly passed the Duma but were defeated in the State Council
in March 1911. Stolypin responded by threatening to resign
unless the Tsar were to use his emergency powers to suspend the legislature and adopt
the Western Zemstvo Bill by decree. Nicholas agreed to these conditions and retained
Stolypin, but the Prime Minister’s demands infuriated both the Tsar and the legislature. On the 14th of September 1911, while attending
a performance at the Kiev Opera with the Tsar and his eldest daughters, Stolypin was shot
by a leftist revolutionary assassin and died four days later on the 18th. The assassin was hanged a week after Stolypin’s
death, but Nicholas gave orders to drop the investigation, prompting rumours that the
assassination had been planned by supporters of the Tsar. Stolypin was succeeded by Finance Minister
Vladimir Kovkovtsov, but the new Prime Minister lacked the presence of his predecessor and
was a weak leader. Having remained at the head of the Finance
Ministry, Kovkovtsov’s desire to control spending led to clashes with General Vladimir
Sukhomlinov, the Minister of War, and Alexander Krivoshein at Agriculture. Sukhomlinov had been appointed by the Tsar
in 1909 to resist Stolypin’s efforts to give the Duma greater control over the armed
forces and demanded increased investment in the army and navy. Krivoshein was responsible for enacting Stolypin’s
land reforms and provided cheap credit through the Peasant Land Bank to allow peasants to
buy their own land from nobles. He encouraged the development of schools,
and by 1914 around sixty per cent of Russian children received a primary education. In February 1914, Krivoshein managed to outmanoeuvre
Kovkovstov by persuading the Tsar to appoint his friend Peter Bark as Finance Minister
and the powerless Goremykin as Prime Minister, allowing the Minister of Agriculture to become
the dominant figure in the government. In the meantime, in 1913 Nicholas had asserted
his control over security policy by appointing Nikolai Maklakov as Minister of Internal Affairs. With the Tsar’s support, Maklakov cracked
down on the revolutionary press and unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the Duma’s powers. In 1914, St Petersburg was hit with a series
of strikes, but the rest of the country remained calm. Widespread demonstrations of popular support
in 1913 during the celebrations of 300 years of Romanov rule convinced Nicholas that he
continued to enjoy considerable support across the country. After its inauspicious start, the constitutional
experiment was bringing an element of stability despite Stolypin’s assassination, and there
was a chance that with a strong prime minister such as Krivoshein to carry out his agenda
and manage parliamentary politics, Nicholas could be a constitutional monarch like his
cousin King George V in Britain. However, after Nicholas limited the electorate
in 1907, most of the Russian population remained without political representation and the workers
and many peasants were ready to rise up against the Tsar at any sign of weakness in the imperial
regime. The Tsar had been saved by the Russian army
in 1905 and 1906, and after the humiliation of defeat to Japan, Nicholas desperately sought
to stay out of war. Although Russia and Britain had been close
to war over their competing interests in Asia, Russia’s defeat in 1905 dispelled British
fears of the Russian threat and led to the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. Together with the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale
of 1904 and the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894, this created the Triple Entente of Britain,
France, and Russia. The rival European bloc was the Triple Alliance
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, though the latter’s fidelity to the alliance was
suspect, as it had its own territorial claims to parts of the Austrian empire. Following the appointment of Sergei Sazonov
as Foreign Minister in 1909, the Tsar pursued a three-pronged policy to remain committed
to the Triple Entente, improve relations with Germany, and to promote unity among the Balkan
states in southeast Europe against further Austrian encroachment in old Ottoman territory
after Austria’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908. Rather than confronting Austria, the Balkan
alliance went to war with the Ottoman Empire over Macedonia and Albania in 1912, before
fighting each other for the spoils in 1913. While Russian nationalists advocated a Pan-Slavic
Union with the Balkan states, Nicholas was more concerned about German ambitions in the
Ottoman Empire. The Russian Empire’s Black Sea trade, including
its substantial grain exports, passed through the Straits of Constantinople, by modern-day
Istanbul. In 1913 a German general Liman von Sanders
was appointed commander of the Constantinople garrison. Over the previous century the Ottomans had
routinely employed foreign experts as civil and military administrators, but the Russians
feared direct German control of the Straits. Elsewhere in Europe, a naval arms race between
Britain and Germany increased the risk of war between the continent’s most powerful
states. After the humiliation of the Russo-Japanese
War, General Sukhomlinov embarked on a modernisation programme which included the centralisation
of military administration within the Ministry of War, an increase in the size of the field
army to over 1.4 million men, introducing machine gun crews at the regimental level,
and attaching an aviation detachment to each army corps. On the 28th of June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
the heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian
Serb student. The Austrian government in Vienna believed
that the Serbian government was behind the assassination, and four weeks later, on the
23rd of July, the Austrians issued an ultimatum to Serbia deliberately intended to provoke
war. Foreign Minister Sazonov predicted that the
conflict would develop into a continental war. Russia would be duty-bound to support Serbia
and Germany would join the war against Russia, in turn resulting in hostilities between Germany
and France. Since the Anglo-French entente was not a formal
alliance, it was unclear whether Britain would join the war against Germany, but even with
Britain remaining on the sidelines, the war would engulf the continent. Nicholas remained optimistic and hoped to
come to an agreement with his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, but on the 30th of
July Nicholas was urged by his ministers to order the mobilisation of the Russian army,
and on the 1st of August Germany declared war on Russia. On the 3rd of August Germany declared war
on France, and after the Germans crossed into Belgium the following day, the British government
answered a Belgian appeal for assistance and went to war with Germany on the 5th. The First World War was greeted in Russia
with a rare demonstration of national unity, inspiring confidence in the Tsar that his
armies would achieve victory, following the example of Russia’s victory over Napoleon
a century earlier. Most European military planners expected the
war to be short, but the German army was the best in Europe, and Germany and Austria enjoyed
the strategic advantage of the central position, enabling them to move their armies quickly
between different fronts. Among the three Entente powers Britain and
its empire had the greatest potential, but it would take time for those resources to
be deployed, leaving Russia and France to do most of the fighting on land. In order to avoid a two-front war, the Germans
hoped to launch a lightning strike to capture Paris and defeat France while the Russian
army was still mobilising, before turning its attention back east. The Russians took advantage of this by sending
two armies into Eastern Prussia ten days earlier than the Germans expected, albeit without
being perfectly equipped. Despite initial Russian successes, in late
August and early September the German Eighth Army under General Paul von Hindenburg and
his chief of staff Erich von Ludendorff defeated the Russian Second and First armies in quick
succession at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Setting aside these disastrous defeats, the
Russians managed to hold the Germans at bay in Poland while a Russian offensive against
the Austrians captured Galicia in Western Ukraine. By the spring of 1915 the Russian army was
facing a shortage of munitions, and after a series of German offensives in Poland, by
September the Russians were forced to abandon Poland and Lithuania. The defeats in Poland led to the crisis in
the military leadership as Supreme Commander Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, with the
support of the Duma, blamed War Minister Sukhomlinov for the logistical failures. After being imprisoned in the notorious Peter
and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, the Minister of War was dismissed from office in June and
replaced by General Alexei Polivanov, and in September the Tsar dismissed his uncle
Grand Duke Nicholas and assumed the supreme command himself. By doing so, the Tsar was partly placing a
check on the Duma leaders who supported the Grand Duke, but the latter had also proven
an incompetent military leader who lost his nerve with his armies in full retreat. Without any meaningful military training himself,
Nicholas did not expect to take over control of strategic or operational decision-making,
which he left in the hands of his chief of staff, Mikhail Alexeev. The Tsar hoped that his presence at the front
would improve coordination between military and civil authorities, and serve to improve
morale among the peasant soldiers that made up the ranks of the Russian army. While there were many advantages to the Tsar
taking over command of the Russian army, his presence at General Headquarters in Mogilev
in modern-day Belarus kept him at a distance from the political situation in the capital
city, which had been renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the war to sound less German. On the 7th of September 1915, a majority of
the Duma’s deputies formed a Progressive Bloc demanding political reforms and a government
which enjoyed “public confidence.” In other words, they demanded one favourable
to the Progressive Bloc. The Bloc’s initiatives were supported by
the Union of Towns and the Zemstvo Union, which were formed at the beginning of the
war to coordinate local authorities’ support for the war effort. Many of the Tsar’s ministers also lobbied
for Goremykin’s dismissal as prime minister, believing that victory could only be achieved
by maintaining political unity and working in conjunction with the industrialists and
civil society leaders that led the Progressive Bloc. Unwilling to work with Goremykin and horrified
by the Tsar’s decision to assume the supreme command without consultation, the Council
of Ministers effectively went on strike, infuriating Nicholas in turn. While the ministers were afraid that as supreme
commander, the Tsar would be associated with military setbacks suffered by the army, shortly
after Nicholas’ arrival the military situation improved as Kiev was successfully defended,
and the munitions crisis was overcome by effective coordination between the Ministry of War and
Russian industry. In the summer of 1916 General Alexei Brusilov
led a major offensive into Galicia which broke the Austrian lines and captured hundreds of
thousands of Austrian and German prisoners. The Russian successes forced Germany to redeploy
troops from the Western Front, weakening its assault on the French fortress of Verdun and
its defence of the River Somme after the British launched an offensive in July. While the army had enjoyed its best year in
1916, an economic crisis at home threatened the continuation of the war effort. A shortage of food and fuel created high inflation,
and the railway network was ill-equipped to bring food surpluses from the agricultural
south to the cities in the north and west while at the same time moving troops to the
frontline. While aware of these problems, the economically-illiterate
Nicholas was incapable of solving them, while his ministers were increasingly sidelined. After the ‘ministerial strike’ in late
summer of 1915, the Tsar replaced most of his ministers with individuals who were regarded
as reliable supporters of the imperial regime. With her husband away at headquarters, the
Empress Alexandra assumed a greater role in the empire’s domestic affairs. In January 1916 Goremykin was succeeded by
Boris Sturmer, a close confidant of Alexandra. When the Tsar sought to dismiss his Interior
Minister Alexander Protopopov in November 1916 under pressure from the Duma, the Empress
urged him not to give in. Alexandra’s German origins fuelled rumours
that she was acting against Russia’s interests, even though the Empress was critical of Wilhelm
II and regretted the fact that her brother Ernst Ludwig was fighting in German uniform. Alexandra was rumoured to be under the influence
of Rasputin, whom she asked for advice on ministerial appointments. The boastful Rasputin exaggerated his influence
and claimed to enjoy the favours of many court ladies, and his presence at court continued
to damage the imperial family’s prestige at a time when it could ill afford it. Nicholas’s relatives were increasingly concerned
about Rasputin, and on the 30th of December a group including Prince Felix Yusupov, who
was married to the Tsar’s niece, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Nicholas’s cousin,
shot and killed Rasputin at the Yusupov Palace in St Petersburg. With the country seemingly on the verge of
revolution and unable to find a solution to the economic crisis, the Kadet leader Pavel
Milyukov stood up in the Duma in November and asked rhetorically whether the government’s
failures were caused by incompetence or treason. Once again, Nicholas was asked to appoint
a government that enjoyed the confidence of the Duma, a call echoed by aristocrats and
members of the imperial family. While he privately recognised the danger of
the riots and strikes in Petrograd at the beginning of 1917, Nicholas remained optimistic
about the military situation and believed that a planned spring offensive would bring
victory and improve morale at home. On the 7th of March the Tsar left Tsarskoe
Selo for Headquarters, and the following day, disturbances began as the men of the factories
joined an International Women’s Day demonstration demanding bread. By the 11th almost all of the capital city
was on strike, though initial attempts to control the rioting by troops loyal to the
imperial regime were successful. However, on the 12th, the Petersburg garrison
mutinied and prompted Nicholas to return to the capital. Striking railwaymen blocked the imperial train
and the Tsar was forced to divert to Pskov, where he arrived on the 14th. On the 12th of March twelve Duma deputies
formed a Provisional Government to take control of the capital, and on the same day the Petrograd
Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was formed. On the evening of the 14th, General Ruzsky,
commander of the northern front headquartered in Pskov, presented Nicholas with a message
from President of the Duma Mikhail Rodzianko urging Nicholas to grant parliamentary government
if he wished to retain his crown. The Tsar initially refused, but when he changed
his mind the following day it was too late, and Rodzianko urged the Tsar to abdicate to
prevent further bloodshed. The other generals, assured by the Duma leaders
that they were in control, joined in the chorus and urged Nicholas to abdicate. On the 15th of March Nicholas agreed to abdicate
in favour of his son, but after several hours worrying about the potential fate of Alexei
during a time of war and political instability, decided that he should instead be succeeded
by his brother Grand Duke Michael, who would serve as a constitutional monarch. On the 16th of March, under pressure from
the Provisional Government’s leaders, Michael decided not to assume the throne until a constituent
assembly was convened to determine whether to retain the monarchy. After returning to Mogilev, Nicholas issued
a final address to the army on the 21st of March urging the men to continue fighting
and to submit to the authority of the Provisional Government. Later that day, Nicholas was arrested and
taken back to Tsarskoe Selo, where he remained under house arrest for the next five months. Though subject to humiliation by their guards,
Nicholas and Alexandra felt a sense of relief that the heavy burdens of government were
taken away from them. There was an expectation that the former imperial
couple would go into exile in Britain, and Pavel Milyukov, now Foreign Minister in the
Provisional Government, submitted a request for asylum to the British government on behalf
of Nicholas and Alexandra. The British prime minister David Lloyd George
was inclined to agree, but the Tsar’s cousin King George V feared that granting asylum
to the former Russian autocrat would damage his standing among British socialists and
place his own throne at risk. Even had such an offer been extended, Nicholas
and Alexandra would have been reluctant to abandon Russia out of a sense of duty despite
their calamities. In August 1917, the Provisional Government
sent Nicholas and his family to the city of Tobolsk in Siberia, where they lived in the
former Governor’s residence. The provincial city remained well-disposed
towards the fallen Tsar, and Nicholas and the children socialised in secret with the
more sympathetic guards. The fate of the Romanovs was destined to get
worse after November 1917, when the Bolsheviks under Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government. Since Imperial Russia used the Julian Calendar
which was twelve days behind the Gregorian Calendar used most of the world, the event
is known to history as the October Revolution. The Provisional Government had been unable
to assert its political power was in the hands of the Petrograd Soviet, while the failure
of a summer offensive in July strengthened support for the radical Bolsheviks who demanded
an end to the war. In January 1918, the Bolsheviks consolidated
their hold on power by closing down the Constituent Assembly, where they were outnumbered by the
Socialist Revolutionaries. Keen to secure his power in Russia, in March
Lenin reluctantly approved the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and
its allies, surrendering control of Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine. The Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Constituent
Assembly and their capitulation to Germany created the conditions for civil war. In the spring of 1918, the Czech Legion, who
were making their way east along the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to join the allies on the
Western Front, staged an uprising against Bolshevik rule. The Bolshevik leadership had not decided what
to do with the former Tsar, but Lenin’s second-in-command Leon Trotsky hoped to bring
Nicholas to Moscow for a show trial before executing him. In April 1918 the Bolshevik revolutionary
Vasily Yakovlev acted on instructions from the central government to bring Nicholas and
Alexandra to Moscow, but on the way they were intercepted by a detachment of Bolsheviks
from the Ural Soviet, who took control of the convoy and took them to their base in
Ekaterinburg. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Grand Duchess Maria
arrived on the 30th of April and were imprisoned in the house of Nikolai Ipatiev, a military
engineer. The Tsarevich had been ill and had initially
been left behind with three of his sisters, but by the 23rd of May the rest of the family
arrived along with their doctor, Evgeny Botkin, and three servants. As the Czech Legion advanced on Ekaterinburg,
at the beginning of July the central leadership in Moscow decided that the Romanovs should
be executed in Ekaterinburg. On the 4th of July, the deputy head of the
Ekaterinburg secret police Yakov Yurovsky was appointed commandant of the Ipatiev House. In the early hours of the 17th of July, the
family and their attendants were brought into the basement. After the twelve men of the firing squad entered
the room, Yurovsky announced that the Ural Soviet had decided to execute the whole family. A stunned Nicholas asked, “What?” before
Yurovsky repeated his orders and the firing began. Three men in the firing squad claimed that
they had fired the fatal shot that accounted for the former Tsar, but regardless of who
was responsible, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, was dead at the age of fifty, along
with his wife, his five children, and four loyal attendants. Yurovsky ordered his men to hide the bodies
at a location where they could not be found by the counter-revolutionary White armies
who were days away from Ekaterinburg. The Soviet government claimed in public that
only Nicholas had been executed, and even when it became increasingly clear that the
whole family had been eliminated, there were rumours that Tsarevich Alexei or one of his
sisters may have survived and escaped. The memory of the dead Tsar served as a rallying-point
for the monarchists and counterrevolutionaries who opposed the Bolsheviks, but by 1921 Lenin’s
forces had won the Civil War and his Soviet regime would remain in power until 1991. From their exile in London, Paris, New York,
White emigrés continued to hope for a collapse of Soviet communism and the return of the
Russian monarchy. In 1981, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad
canonised Nicholas II and his family, and in 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia
also agreed to confer sainthood on them. In the meantime, the remains of Nicholas,
Alexandra, and three of their daughters were discovered in a ditch near the Ipatiev House
in the late 1970s, and after DNA identification in 1998 they were buried in a special chapel
in the St Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg. In 2007 further remains were discovered at
a nearby site and later identified as those of Tsarevich Alexei and either Grand Duchess
Maria or Anastasia. In 2015 the Russian Orthodox Church ordered
the exhumation of the five sets of remains in the chapel for further testing. While renewed investigations confirmed the
identification of the remains in 2020, as of 2024 they have not yet been reburied in
the chapel. The legacy of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia continues
to be debated among historians of Russia, and it is closely related to the question
of whether it was possible to avoid the horrors of Communist rule in Russia in the 20th century. Nicholas had been exposed to revolutionary
violence in his early teens with the assassination of his grandfather Tsar Alexander II, and
the political instability would only increase during his own reign. After the unexpected death of his father Alexander
III in 1894, Nicholas came to the throne unprepared for government. Despite being a well-educated and intelligent
man, Nicholas was indecisive and unsocial and initially found it difficult to stand
up to his ministers. As Tsar, Nicholas was able to make his mark
in foreign policy, but defeat in the Russo-Japanese War dented his prestige and fuelled domestic
opposition to his rule. When peasant uprisings and strikes broke out
in response to heavy taxation and poor working conditions, Nicholas wavered between granting
concessions and suppressing unrest by force. Although personally a kind and gentle man,
his unwillingness to surrender the powers which he considered to be given to him by
God and his belief that the Russian political system was unsuited to representative democracy
meant that he only agreed to establish an elected legislative assembly in October 1905
in order to keep his throne. After doing so, he could only work with the
Duma when the electoral laws were amended to exclude the majority of the population. Despite all the difficulties he faced, Nicholas
ultimately relied on the army to crack down on disturbances, and it was only the First
World War which created the conditions for Nicholas to give up his throne in March 1917. Though a prisoner after his abdication, Nicholas
felt a sense of liberation after being relieved of the burdens of government, but any hopes
of a comfortable retirement were extinguished by the Bolshevik Revolution, leading to a
brutal end at the Ipatiev House. What do you think of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia? Was he a weak and incompetent ruler and a
brutal autocrat who was responsible for cracking down on political opposition and encouraging
anti-Semitic pogroms, or did he not go far enough in using force to maintain political
stability in the empire? Please let us know in the comment section
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
