Nicholas II (1868 - 1918) was the last emperor of Russia, ruling from 1894 until his abdication during the February Revolution of 1917. [1] His reign encompassed defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the revolution of 1905, and Russia's catastrophic participation in the First World War, and ended three centuries of Romanov rule. [2] He and his immediate family were shot by Bolshevik guards at Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918, and were later canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Early life and accession
Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov was born on 18 May 1868 (6 May Old Style) at Tsarskoye Selo, near St Petersburg, the eldest son of the future Alexander III. [1] He received a private education and military training but was given little practical preparation for government, and his father's sudden death in 1894 brought him to the throne at the age of twenty-six.
He married Princess Alix of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who took the name Alexandra Feodorovna. They had four daughters and a son, Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia, a condition kept from the public and which drew the imperial couple into dependence on the peasant mystic Grigori Rasputin. [2]
Reign and the 1905 revolution
Nicholas held firmly to the principle of autocracy and resisted proposals for representative government. His eastward expansionist policy contributed to war with Japan in 1904-05, which ended in humiliating defeat, including the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima. [3]
Domestic unrest culminated in Bloody Sunday in January 1905, when troops fired on an unarmed procession of workers marching to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar, killing and wounding large numbers. The revolution that followed forced Nicholas to issue the October Manifesto, granting civil liberties and creating an elected assembly, the Duma. [2] In practice he curtailed its powers and dissolved it repeatedly.
First World War and abdication
Russia entered the First World War in 1914 in support of Serbia. The army suffered enormous casualties and severe shortages of equipment, and in 1915 Nicholas took personal command at the front, a decision that tied him directly to subsequent defeats and left government in the capital largely to the empress and her circle. [1]
Food shortages, inflation and war weariness produced strikes and mutinies in Petrograd in February 1917. With the garrison refusing to suppress the demonstrations and his generals urging him to step aside, Nicholas abdicated on 15 March 1917, first in favour of his son and then of his brother Michael, who declined the throne. [3] The monarchy ended and a Provisional Government took power.
Captivity and execution
The imperial family was held under guard at Tsarskoye Selo, then moved to Tobolsk in Siberia and, after the Bolshevik seizure of power, to Yekaterinburg in the Urals. [1] With anti-Bolshevik forces advancing on the city, Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children and four attendants were shot and bayoneted in the cellar of the Ipatiev House during the night of 16-17 July 1918.
The remains were concealed and identified only after the collapse of the Soviet Union; most were reinterred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg in 1998. [4]
Legacy
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonised Nicholas and his family in 1981, and the Moscow Patriarchate glorified them as passion-bearers in 2000. [4] The Church on the Blood was built on the site of the executions in Yekaterinburg.
Historical assessment of Nicholas is broadly critical: he is generally judged to have been a devoted family man and a conscientious but inflexible ruler whose refusal to accept constitutional reform, and whose conduct of the war, contributed directly to the collapse of the Russian state and to the revolution that followed. [2]
