Russia's Last Czar, Nicholas II

Ascension to the Throne

When telling the tragic story of the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, the temptation is to start at the dramatic end — the July 1918 massacre of him, his entire family, his household help and personal physician, by which the triumphant Communist movement introduced its rule.

But more instructive about the monarch was his reaction to the news in November 1894 that his father, Alexander III, had died and that he, Nicholas, would be the new Emperor of All Russia.

As told by Simon Sebag Montefiori in his book The Romanovs, the 26-year-old Nicholai Aleksandrovich Romanov broke down in tears and ran to his sister.

“What is going to happen to me, to [my family] and to Russia?” he cried on her shoulder. “I never wanted to be the czar!”

Nicholas’ despair was understandable: the job with which he was about to be entrusted was colossal. He was assuming it while Europe was haunted, as Karl Marx had put it, with the “specter” of Communism, and by the end of the 19th century no country was a more inviting target for a revolution than feudal Russia.

To successfully rule this oversized empire required an astute and strong leader who was closely attuned to the needs and feelings of his 160-odd million subjects. Nicholas II, by contrast, was one of history’s most dismal examples of the wrong man, at the wrong time, and in the wrong place. His reign seemed to be almost predetermined to end in a momentous tragedy.

It didn’t start that way.

In 1894, when Nicholas ascended the throne, the Romanovs were one of the world’s most successful noble families.

They had ruled Russia for more than 280 years, and most of their subjects — as the czar’s German-born wife, Alexandra, wrote to British Queen Victoria — practically worshipped them “as divine beings.”

Russia was recognized as one of the world’s great powers, and its empire spanned the continent from the Baltic Sea in Europe to the Bering Sea in Asia — one sixth of the global land mass.

And the Romanovs’ personal wealth was almost unimaginable: for example, Alexandra’s wedding wardrobe included a tiara with 475 big diamonds set in platinum and earrings that were so heavy they had to be held by wires wrapped around her ears. It took eight assistants to help her wear her diamond- and gold-studded dress and its 15 foot-long train.

What the last Romanov did not have was an understanding and respect for the dirt-poor and frequently hungry peasants who eked out a meager living, and it was part of Nicholas’ misfortune that his abysmal insensitivity and weakness were revealed on the very day after his coronation.

To celebrate the occasion, the royal household prepared 400,000 packages each with candy, gingerbreads, a sausage, a mug and a bread roll, and set them, together with barrels of beer and mead, on hundreds of stands in a large field in Moscow. But when more than 700,000 peasants showed up, the gifts ran out, and a riot ensued in which an estimated 3,000 people were trampled to death, and thousands more were injured.

Informed about the disaster later in the morning, Nicholas thought he should perhaps skip the evening’s grand ball at the French embassy in favor of visiting those injured at the riots in local hospitals. Instead, Nicholas’ uncle persuaded him to attend the ball. Nicholas and Alexandra called on the victims the next day, but Russians always remembered that the new czar and his wife had danced until 2 a.m. while tens of thousands of their subjects were either dead, mourning, or injured in hospitals.

Early Years as Czar

After his coronation, the royal couple took long vacation trips and, as Montefiori reports, did “essentially nothing” for almost ten years. He signed mostly unimportant documents and personally kept a meticulous order in his office, where he sat all by himself, with no secretary.

Although a classical absentee landlord — Nicholas left the job of day-to-day governing to his strong-willed wife and his frequently incompetent ministers. The young monarch was a total autocrat. As he once put it, Russia was “a landed estate whose proprietor is the czar, the administrator is the nobility, and the workers are the peasantry.” In his 1897 census report, he described himself as the “master of the Russian land.”

And he made mistake upon mistake when dealing with his subjects.

When in the early 1900s anti-Semitic pogroms killed thousands of Jews, he openly sympathized with the mobs and made poor Jewish jokes at formal dinners.

In 1905, he showed the same poor judgment by refusing to meet peaceful demonstrators who came to ask for more rights for the Duma, the powerless Russian parliament. The guards stopped the 120,000 petitioners outside the czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, but they later killed or wounded several hundred of them in what came to be known as “Black Sunday.”

The “Black Sunday” incident added to the czar’s reputation as “Bloody Nicholas,” and triggered nationwide strikes and protests. Nicholas finally responded with vague promises of liberal reform, which he never carried out.

War and Imperialism

When dealing with other nations, Nicholas showed his predecessors’ penchant for extending the already oversized empire — but unlike the more successful Romanovs, he had unrealistic confidence in the strength of his regime and his military.

In 1900, he took advantage of the Boxer Rebellion — an anti-foreign uprising in China — to send 170,000 troops to occupy the Chinese province of Manchuria, and later broke his agreement to pull the troops out. This infuriated Japan, which had the same designs on the rich territory, but Nicholas paid no heed.

As he told his defense minister, he intended to also annex Korea and Persia (today’s Iran) and take control of the international waterways of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. As for the possible threat of a war with Japan, Nicholas was unconcerned. He said “Yes, absolutely!” when the minister shrugged off the Japanese army as “a huge joke,” and with his wife left for eight weeks to attend a wedding in Germany.

In February 1904 — less than four months later — Japan launched a surprise attack that destroyed a Russian fleet and threatened to seize Port Arthur, Russia’s only warm-water port. In the war that followed, the Japanese army decisively won every battle and Nicholas was lucky when President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 negotiated a peace treaty in which Russia had to give up only a half of an Asian island.

While dreaming about conquests in the Far East, Nicholas overlooked critical developments at home. One of them was the March 1898 founding in Minsk of a Communist party headed by Vladimir Lenin, a charismatic revolutionary whose first and foremost goal was the overthrow of the czarist regime.

Another potentially more promising change was the increasingly urgent demands by the leaders of the Duma for real democratic reforms. This was probably Nicholas’ last chance to save the monarchy and preserve the throne for his son, but he summarily dismissed all proposals. “I’ll never agree to a representative form of government,” he told his interior minister, “because I consider it harmful to the people that God has entrusted me to lead.”

Nicholas also showed a puzzling disregard for a major uproar in his own court over the growing influence of a mystical faith healer named Grigori Rasputin. Brought into Nicholas’ household because of his alleged ability to treat the hemophilia of the czar’s only son, the monk had a profound influence on the royal couple and earned the hatred of several nobles in the czar’s retinue. They eventually assassinated Rasputin, but not before his presence in the palace significantly added to the loss of confidence in Nicholas’ judgement, and the opposition to his rule.

What sealed Nicholas’ fate was his ill-considered decision to enter the First World War, for which his poorly armed army and unstable home front clearly were not ready. Following several military setbacks, the czar disregarded a warning that the Russian army was “unreliable,” and in August 1915 took personal command of his demoralized and increasingly rebellious troops.

It was another major blunder. With 15 million men at the front or POW camps instead of farming, prices of food skyrocketed, millions of hungry Russians rioted or went on strike, and the entire military units were deserting en masse. By early 1917, Russia was on the brink of utter collapse, and Nicholas was blamed for it.

Last of the Romanovs

In March, the powerless czar had no choice but to give in to the demands of the Duma and the Communists. He abdicated the throne on behalf of himself and his son, and the whole family was arrested. After the control over the country shifted from a provisional government to Lenin’s radicals (the Bolsheviks), the royal couple, their son and four daughters, and the ex-czar’s personal physician and three servants, were moved to a house in Yekaterinburg, a town beyond the Urals.

There during the night of July 17, 1918, with Lenin’s approval, all eleven prisoners were executed with savage brutality. They were killed by bullets, bayonets, and blows by rifle butts; drenched with acid and gasoline; and burned in a deep pit.

The reason for the massacre was most authoritatively explained by Leon Trotsky, a former Bolshevik leader and one of the founders of the Soviet Union. In his 1935 book, Diary in Exile, he described the slaughter as:

“not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the czar’s family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin… This, Lenin sensed well.”

Trotsky, who made the mistake of antagonizing Josef Stalin, his rival for the leadership of the Soviet Union, provided another evidence that Communists stop at nothing. In August, 1940, while hiding in Mexico, he was on Stalin’s order killed by an ice axe-wielding assassin, who split his skull in half.