Nicholas II of Russia

Nicholas II was the last emperor of Russia, reigning from 1894 until he was forced to abdicate in March 1917. Devoted to the idea of autocracy, he led the Russian Empire through defeat by Japan, the revolution of 1905 and the First World War, while resisting the political changes that might have saved his throne. In July 1918 he was shot by the Bolsheviks with his wife, his five children and four members of their household.

Nicholas was born on 18 May 1868 (6 May in the Julian calendar then used in Russia) at Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg, the eldest son of the future Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark. He became heir in 1881, when his grandfather Alexander II was killed by revolutionaries' bombs and his father took the throne. His tutor in politics was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the procurator of the Holy Synod and the most influential conservative in Russia, who taught him that parliamentary government was a lie and that Russia could be held together only by an autocratic tsar and the Orthodox Church.

He served in guards regiments and in 1890 and 1891 made a long journey east, during which a Japanese policeman attacked him with a sword at Ōtsu, leaving a scar on his head. On the way home he inaugurated the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railway at Vladivostok. He was charming, modest and devoted to his family, but shy, indecisive and badly prepared to govern.

Alexander III died unexpectedly in November 1894, aged 49, and Nicholas, then 26, became emperor. Within weeks he married Princess Alix of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who took the name Alexandra Feodorovna. The marriage was a love match. In early 1895 he told representatives of the zemstvos, the elected local councils, that hopes of a say in government were "senseless dreams" and that he would uphold autocracy as firmly as his father. At the coronation festivities in Moscow in May 1896, a crush on Khodynka field killed well over a thousand people, and Nicholas attended a ball at the French embassy the same evening, an act many Russians never forgot.

Under the finance minister Sergei Witte, Russia industrialised rapidly in the 1890s, financed by foreign loans and heavy taxation of the peasantry. Nicholas also called the first Hague Peace Conference of 1899. At the same time the government pursued policies of Russification against Finns, Poles, Ukrainians and others, and maintained discriminatory laws against Jews. In 1903 dozens of Jews were murdered in the Kishinev pogrom, and Nicholas showed open sympathy for the extreme right-wing groups whose members took part in such violence.

Russian expansion in Manchuria and Korea led to war with Japan, which attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in February 1904. The war was a series of disasters for Russia: Port Arthur fell, the army was defeated at Mukden, and the Baltic Fleet, sent halfway round the world, was destroyed at Tsushima in May 1905. Witte negotiated a peace at Portsmouth in the United States that handed Russia's lease on Port Arthur and the southern half of Sakhalin to the Empire of Japan.

Meanwhile revolution had broken out at home. On 22 January 1905, known as Bloody Sunday, troops fired on a peaceful procession of workers led by the priest Georgy Gapon who were bringing a petition to the Winter Palace, and well over a hundred were killed. Strikes, peasant risings, mutinies and national revolts followed, culminating in a general strike in October. Nicholas reluctantly issued the October Manifesto, which promised civil liberties and an elected parliament, the Duma. In the weeks that followed, pogroms in hundreds of towns killed thousands of Jews, and the army crushed the remaining revolts with mass arrests and executions.

Nicholas never accepted that the October Manifesto had limited his powers. The Fundamental Laws of 1906 kept him in control of the army, foreign policy and the ministers, and he dissolved the first two Dumas when they proved too radical. In June 1907 his prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, changed the electoral law to favour landowners. Stolypin combined harsh repression, including field courts-martial that sent more than a thousand suspected revolutionaries to the gallows, with a land reform intended to create a class of prosperous independent peasants. He was assassinated in Kiev in 1911.

The imperial couple's only son, Alexei, born in 1904 after four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, suffered from haemophilia, which was kept secret from the public. Alexandra came to believe that the Siberian peasant and holy man Grigori Rasputin could stop the boy's bleeding, and Rasputin's presence at court, and rumours about his influence and private life, did great damage to the monarchy's reputation.

After Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Nicholas ordered general mobilisation on 30 July 1914, despite last-minute telegrams from his cousin Wilhelm II, and Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August. In the First World War Russia suffered a heavy defeat at Tannenberg in August 1914 and in 1915 lost Poland and much of the western borderlands in the Great Retreat. In September 1915 Nicholas took personal command of the army at headquarters in Mogilev, against the advice of nearly all his ministers. This tied the throne directly to military failure and left Alexandra, guided by Rasputin, with great influence over appointments in the capital, now renamed Petrograd. Ministers changed in rapid succession. In December 1916 a group of aristocrats murdered Rasputin, but the crisis deepened.

In March 1917 (February in the old calendar), bread queues and strikes in Petrograd turned into a revolution when the garrison joined the crowds. Advised by his generals and Duma leaders that only his abdication could keep the army fighting, Nicholas abdicated on 15 March at Pskov, for himself and for Alexei, in favour of his brother Michael, who declined the crown. The Russian Revolution had ended three centuries of Romanov rule.

The Provisional Government held the family under arrest at Tsarskoye Selo and in August moved them to Tobolsk in Siberia. After Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power, they were transferred in spring 1918 to Yekaterinburg in the Urals and held in the Ipatiev House. As anti-Bolshevik forces approached the city, on the night of 16 to 17 July 1918 a firing squad shot and bayoneted Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children, their doctor and three servants in the cellar. The order came from the Ural regional Soviet, and historians still debate how directly Lenin and the central leadership authorised it. The bodies were burned, doused with acid and buried in the forest.

In Soviet times Nicholas was remembered as "Bloody Nicholas", a tyrant responsible for Khodynka, Bloody Sunday and the slaughter of the war. Most historians today see him as a well-meaning, dutiful but limited man who clung to an outdated idea of his own power and repeatedly missed chances to share it with Russia's educated classes. Remains found near Yekaterinburg were identified by DNA testing and buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg in 1998, and in 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonised the family as passion-bearers. His reign is a central chapter of the History of Russia.