Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, or Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (May 18, 1868 - July 17, 1918), was Russia's last dynastic ruler, reigning from 1894 to 1917. His commitment to maintaining autocratic rule would lead to the violent end of Tsarist Russia and the rise of the Soviet Union.
Nicholas's early years did not lend itself to the grooming of a competent monarch. Nicholas had been thrust into the role of Tsarevich by the brutal assassination of his grandfather, Alexander II, which he had the misfortune to witness. He also was surrounded by tutors who indoctrinated him into a profoundly reactionary ideology that saw Western ideas and liberalism as "evils" that would corrupt and poison his subjects. His reactionary father, Alexander III, saw him as too soft to be capable of governing and kept putting off Nicholas's tutelage, thinking he had plenty of time to teach his son how to rule.
Unfortunately, Alexander III suffered an early death in 1894 from kidney failure that may have resulted from trauma from a train wreck.note
As if all that wasn't enough, Nicholas married for love — and his choice of bride would prove to be a disaster. Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine was Queen Victoria's favourite grandchild, but she was also painfully shy, strong-willed, and disdainful of aristocratic society, preferring a quiet life in the country with her husband and children. Thus, the future Alexandra Feodorovna was utterly ill-suited to the life of a Russian Empress, who should move among society with grace and charm and host major events during the winter social season. Additionally, through no fault of her ownnote , she was a hemophilia carrier, and passed the debilitating condition to their only son Alexei with devastating consequences, especially in an Heir Club for Men environment. Combine this with her own firm belief in the principles of autocracy, her ineptness at governance in general, and the fact that Nicholas listened to her over any of his experienced advisers, and despite the undeniable and enduring love between them, their marriage was a recipe for tragedy.
Russia was thus left with an absolute ruler with no guidance in governance and a strong belief in his own God-given right to rule (a belief that was not unlike Louis XVI's own amidst The French Revolution). The official opening ceremony of Nicholas's reign served as a bad premonition for Nicholas's rule: In May of 1896, Nicholas held a public buffet at Khodynka Field. Unfortunately, the crowd panicked over a rumor that there wasn't enough food, leading to a general panic that killed over 1,000 people. Despite being genuinely upset, Nicholas chose to go to a celebration at the French embassy, believing that building allies aboard was a bigger priority than public mourning. This led to massive criticism from his subjects, some of whom called him "Nicholas the Bloody." Even in the earliest stretch of his reign, Nicholas proved to be a man who, while not devoid of compassion or empathy, was terrible at reading the room.
The Russo-Japanese War demonstrated how poorly Nicholas could assess a severe situation. When Nicholas was visiting Japan on a state visit as Tsarevich (Russian crown prince) in 1891, he was attacked by one of his Japanese police escorts, and may well have been killed if his cousin George hadn't intervened. The Japanese were horrified, with Emperor Meiji publicly expressing his sorrow, the general public sending Nicholas 10,000 telegrams wishing a full recovery, and one woman even slit her throat as an act of public contrition. Despite the Japanese peoples' remorse and sympathy, Nicholas came away from the incident loathing them. He considered them an inferior race despite having made tremendous strides in industry and military since the 1860s. He was sure that Russia could easily crush Japan, and that God Himself destined Russia to achieve victory. Ultimately, Russia suffered massive defeats at the hands of the Japanese navy. Even after Nicholas received a report about the destruction of the Russian navy at Tsushima, he continued playing a tennis match. Nicholas II was forced to make humiliating concessions at the Treaty of Portsmouth.
Russia's defeat and the Bloody Sunday massacre, where palace guards opened fire on a peaceful protest led by members of the Orthodox church note ,shattered the belief Russians held about the tsar being a divinely appointed ruler, and Russia was plunged into revolution. Despite continuing to loaf around, Nicholas II finally agreed to government reforms at the urging of Sergei Witte, one his most capable ministers, and his cousin threatening suicide if he didn't make some kind of concession. In the October Manifesto, Nicholas finally established a parliamentary system with civil and political rights guaranteed for every man and woman...
Only for Nicholas to then roll back many of his promises of reform, limiting the franchise so that noblemen would have more say in the newly established State Duma and ensuring that he could control when the Duma could meet and what legislation the Duma was allowed to pass. Nicholas II also didn't dismantle the Okhrana and continued persecuting political and revolutionary opponents. The repression campaign of Pyotr Stolypin, one of Russia's prime ministers, was so severe the nooses used in the executions were known as "Stolypin's neckties." Despite his excesses leading to the near collapse of his regime, Nicholas II continued to grasp at whatever autocratic power he could.
Nicholas didn't do his reputation any favors by bringing the mystic Grigori Rasputin into his inner circle. While Rasputin was notorious for his hedonism and womanizing note , his reputation as an evil sorcerer who manipulated the tsar and his family is very much a fabrication. Rasputin remained in the tsar's confidence because he was somehow able to treat Nicholas's son, Tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from debilitating hemophilia.note
For the Romanovs, Rasputin was a primarily benign presence who offered the family reassurances, and Alexandra, a genuinely loving mother who also suffered from severe social anxiety, would not part with anyone who could help her sickly son. Since Nicholas II could not divulge that his heir was sick with a blood disease and thus the reason for Rasputin's presence, both liberals and (ironically) monarchists treated Rasputin as their punching bag; the former because making Rasputin out to be a malignant monster made the tsar looked bad while monarchists thought Rasputin would be a good scapegoat for the tsar's bad decisions.
Despite the incompleteness of Nicholas's reforms and the negative press brought by Rasputin's presence, his later years showed some promise: Russia underwent breakneck industrialization and modernization following the Revolution of 1905, with its economy being one of the fastest growing in Europe. The country was a magnet for foreign investment, mainly from France. Despite Stolypin's repression, he also passed many reforms, including abolishing the redemption payments former serfs were required to pay, which allowed many of them to acquire their landholdings. Stolypin also oversaw the passage of some workers' rights legislation and the beginnings of a welfare state. Nicholas gradually came to the idea of a parliamentary government, even though he insisted he kept much of the power. Granted, Nicholas failed in eliminating all revolutionary opposition to his rule, as shown by Stolypin's assassination in 1911 by a radical anarchist. But the fact that he was greeted with tremendous acclaim by his subjects during the Romanov Tercentenary showed he had managed to rebuild a lot of his lost prestige. One French economist predicted Russia was on track to becoming the dominant military and economic power of Europe by the mid-20th century.
Things then quickly went south on June 28, 1914, when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in response, and since Serbia and Russia were allies, Nicholas declared war on Austria-Hungary in turn, triggering further declarations of war from a kudzu-like entanglement of preexisting alliances throughout Europe. World War I had begun, and Russia's role in it would become Nicholas's downfall. Also, considering Nicholas II disregarded Rasputin's advice not to go to war in 1914, it showed Nicholas was not under any "spell" cast by the monk.
Despite Russia's modernization in the previous few decades, it was still technologically and logistically ill-equipped to fight a massive war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Soldiers didn't get their supplies and the naval blockades of the Central Powers and the diversion of millions of peasants to fight in the war led to food and fuel shortages. The war administration suffered even more when Nicholas II, in defiance of his advisors and logic itself, took full command of the war, which would put the blame for the increasingly flailing war effort on his shoulders. Tsarina Alexandra took charge of the front and mismanaged the situation even more by hiring and firing ministers on a whim, making governance impossible. The fact that Rasputin had become her top advisor only further degraded the monarchy's reputation. Her incompetence and German heritage led hard-right politicians to denounce her as a German agent, and Nicholas' mother, Dowager Empress Maria, came close to deposing her son. Nicholas dismissed the growing public opposition as a fantasy, thinking no one would dare depose someone as divinely appointed as himself. Finally, far-right politicians and relatives of the tsar plotted Rasputin's death in a last-ditch effort to restore Nicholas's prestige, but only further debased the tsar's reputation.
Anger over the collapsing economy, food shortages, and the mismanaged war effort culminated in the February Revolution. Even when rioters were tearing down tsarist symbols, and the police and soldiers were joining, Nicholas disregarded the reports telling him this. He ordered the Duma to be disbanded and the rioters shot with live ammunition. Finally, government ministers established a government without the tsar. At point blank, the army told the tsar that they would no longer support him, and he had to resign to prevent Russia from falling into chaos.
With his power gone, Nicholas finally resigned from the throne in March 1917. He considered passing the throne to Alexei, but he was too young, inexperienced, and sickly to handle the responsibilities of ruling. He also tried to pass the throne to his younger brother, Grand Duke Michael, but he realized the country wouldn't accept him, so he deferred any coronation to a future popular mandate. But in a practical sense, three centuries of Romanov rule had ended.
The Provisional Government tried to exile Nicholas abroad, but his reputation had gotten so toxic that none of the allies would welcome him. King George V, the tsar's own cousin, didn't want to threaten his throne by holding Nicholas. Even if a foreign government would accept the former tsar, much of the transportation system had fallen under the control of the workers' soviets, who didn't want their former oppressors to escape trial. The government initially secluded Nicholas and his family in Alexander Palace. Still, as opposition to the government grew over its continuance of the war effort, the Provisional government sent the former royals to live in the Governor's Mansion in Tobolsk.
With the rise of the Bolsheviks in late 1917, the conditions of the tsar and his family grew worse, with them being taken from the relative comfort of the Governor's Mansion and placed under heavy isolation at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where their luxuries were non-existent and their contact with the outside world heavily scrutinized. When the Czechoslovak Legions approached Yekaterinburg during the Russian Civil War, an order that may or may not have been from Lenin was given to execute the tsar and his family.
Under the command of Yakov Yurovsky, Russian soldiers entered the royal family's home and shot them to death on July 17, 1918, along with many of the servants who had followed them into exile. Nicholas' body, and that of several of his family members, was dumped into a mineshaft. They were not discovered until 1979, nor were they exhumed until 1998. The Ipatiev House was demolished in 1977 on the orders of the Politburo, who felt the site was becoming a rallying place for monarchists, a task performed by then-local party boss Boris Yeltsin. In 1998, Nicholas and his family were buried correctly at the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral. In 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church recognized Nicholas and his family as passion-bearers.
Nicholas's legacy in history is controversial. Many people blamed the rise of communism and Russia's traumatic 20th century on his failure to reform the government appropriately. Soviet historiography, unsurprisingly, denounced him as a brutal tyrant who starved his people. Historians would also credit his refusal to dismantle the Okhrana with enabling the rise of the GPU then the KGB as successor organizations in the Soviet Union and, through them, the resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism and bellicism in The New Russia under former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. Others see the reforms of the later rule positively, at least compared to the terror of Soviet rule.
Many people have depicted him as a friendly, loving family man who was simply unfit for governance; however, this characterization ignores that Nicholas's nastiness did not extend "only" to opponents of his autocratic power. Nicholas also was virulently antisemitic and a staunch supporter of his father's brutal policies (thereby continuing to create an unending stream of Jewish nihilists, anarchists, and other violent opponents of tsarist rule, due to the grim, oppressive conditions) to the point of supporting pogroms and believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery written by his own secret police, was accurate. Consequently, historians credit Nicholas with exacerbating the rise of antisemitism across the rest of Europe, especially since modern antisemitism rose concurrently with modern nationalism during his rule and became an easy scapegoat for both right-wing nationalists like the Nazis and right-wing anti-nationalists like the Okhrana. Most of this exacerbation was due to the Protocols, which were written to blame the monarchy's failures on Jews before being spread around the world, while other big parts of it came from Nicholas II's antisemitism independent of the forgery.
Additionally, while Nicholas' love for Alexandra was genuine, he listened to her more than to his advisors, his mother, or anyone with enough experience or a better grasp of situations. She was both incredibly introverted and even more indoctrinated into the divine right to rule and they enabled each other's worst habits, letting them come off as Sickening Sweethearts even at their best and as a Destructive Romance that destroyed their whole family at worst.
While many Russians do not have a favorable view of Nicholas, most Russians felt his brutal murder with his wife and innocent children at the hands of the Bolsheviks was an atrocity; however, the longtime reluctance of the Russian Orthodox Church to offer him canonization because they blamed him for the rise of the anti-Christian Soviet Union speaks volumes about how even the most right-wing and pro-monarchist people in Russia couldn't overlook his incompetence as a leader. He eventually got canonized in 2000.
He was also the father of Anastasia, the youngest of his four daughters, who—despite having no special status and never being considered a possible heir (a position reserved for the younger Alexei)—gained posthumous notoriety solely because of the popular (and false) Western rumor that she had somehow survived the execution of her family.
Nicholas II in popular culture:
Film — Live-Action:
- Admiral, portrayed by Nikolai Burlyayev.
- Anastasia: Once Upon a Time, an Urban Fantasy film in which Anastasia escapes death via Time Travel. Portrayed by (an inexplicably clean-shaven) Brandon Routh.
- The King's Man: Played by Tom Hollander, who also plays his cousins King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II.
- Nicholas and Alexandra is a biopic about the tsar, spanning from the birth of Alexi Romanov in 1904 to the royal family's execution in 1918.
- Rasputin (2011). Played by Vladimir Mashkov.
- Sisi & I (2023). Played by Tom Lass.
Film — Animation:
- Anastasia: Nicholas is depicted as The Good King, and his overthrow results from a curse put on him by a heavily villainized Rasputin instead of the Bolshevik revolution. Voiced by Rick Jones.
Literature:
- Triumph of a Tsar, an Alternate History novel in which Red October doesn't happen, Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin both die much earlier than in real life, Tsarevich Alexei takes the throne and steers Russia in a much better direction, and Nicholas dies of a heart attack in 1920.
Live — Action TV:
- The Crown: Season 5 dramatizes the execution of Nicholas and his family at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Portrayed by Aleksey Dyakin.
- Edward the Seventh, portrayed by Michael Billington.
- Fall of Eagles, portrayed by Charles Kay.
- The Last Czars, docudrama. Portrayed by Robert Jack.
