Nicholas II

I

Introduction

Nicholas II (1868-1918), Emperor (tsar) of Russia (1894-1917); the last of the Romanov dynasty to rule Russia, he was deposed by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

II

Early Life and Reign

The eldest son of Tsar Alexander III, Nicholas was born at Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) on May 18 (May 6, according to the Old Style, or Julian, calendar then in use in Russia), 1868. Educated at home, he was married in 1894 to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, a German princess whose mother was the daughter of Queen Victoria. Alix took the name Alexandra when she converted to Russian Orthodoxy. In the same year his father died unexpectedly, and Nicholas assumed the throne, poorly prepared for its demands. Believing firmly in his duty to preserve the absolute power of the Russian monarchy, he opposed democratic concessions, but had little talent for leadership himself. He tended to rely for advice on his wife, to whom he was devoted. Alexandra in turn was anxious to cement her position by producing a male heir; she gave birth to four daughters before a son, Alexei, was born in 1904. Prior to his birth the empress had patronized a stream of spiritualists and non-traditional healers in her search for a son. Alexei’s haemophilia led the royal couple to rely even more on mystics to control his bleeding; eventually, Grigory Rasputin, a Siberian monk who was presented at court in 1905, became a dangerous fixture of the family circle.

III

The Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905

Nicholas presided over a period of rapid industrialization that brought economic and social development not often matched by the political imagination to guide it. He was well served in the 1890s and early 1900s by Sergey Witte, minister of finance (1892-1903), who encouraged foreign investment in Russia and oversaw the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway (completed in 1904). Russia’s industries and cities grew in size and sophistication; liberal, populist, and socialist ideas found favour with workers and a rising middle class. Nicholas’s interest in Russian expansion in East Asia was however one of the causes of the disastrous Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which in turn helped touch off the Russian Revolution of 1905.

On January 22, 1905, some 200,000 workers gathered outside the Winter Palace, residence of the tsar in St Petersburg. They intended to appeal directly to the tsar for better pay and conditions. The tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir, commander of the Imperial Guard, gave the order to fire on the crowd, over a hundred of whom were killed and several hundred injured. The Bloody Sunday massacre undermined faith in the tsar and set off a wave of protest throughout Russia. Workers organized councils (“soviets”) and the middle classes agitated for parliamentary democracy. Peasants seized gentry lands and burned down manor houses. Nicholas issued his October Manifesto on October 30 (October 18, Old Style), 1905, giving reluctant assent to constitutional monarchy; a legislative assembly, the Duma, was first called in May 1906. Momentarily, educated Russians backed the regime; worker and peasant agitation was seen off with force. Nicholas attempted to regain the initiative, dissolving the first two Dumas and revising electoral law until half of parliament was elected by two per cent of Russia’s population. Under the influence of his prime minister Pyotr Stolypin (in office 1906-1911), reforms to encourage the growth of a prosperous property-owning peasantry by allowing them to claim ownership of their land and leave the communes were set in motion but their results were inconclusive. Worker disquiet increased in the two years prior to World War I with St Petersburg paralysed by a general strike in July 1914, on the eve of the outbreak of war.

IV

World War I

An advocate of international cooperation, Nicholas sponsored the Hague Conferences, which created the Permanent Court of Arbitration and formulated rules for the humane conduct of war, but failed to check Europe's growing arms race. Despite the friendly personal relations between Nicholas and his cousin, William II of Germany, their two countries were on opposite sides when World War I began. The general strike in the capital collapsed, and the first weeks of the war saw a superficial resurgence in patriotic support for the monarchy. Yet Russia’s defeats, and the shortages and suffering caused by the war, were blamed on Nicholas, especially after he went to the war front and assumed personal command of the army in 1915. He left his wife in the capital under the influence of Rasputin; the monk’s advice appeared to dictate government policy, prompting one parliamentarian to ask if this was “stupidity or treason?” Rasputin’s murder by arch-conservatives in December 1916 symbolized the degree of Nicholas’s isolation from even his traditional supporters.