Nicholas II of Russia

Nicholas II of Russia: The Last Autocrat's Fatal Certainty

On the evening of 22 January 1905, after his troops fired into a peaceful workers' procession carrying icons and portraits of him toward the Winter Palace, the Tsar of All the Russias opened his diary. "Difficult day!" he wrote. "The troops had to shoot in different places of the city, there were many dead and wounded. Lord, how painful and bad!" Genuinely stricken, entirely passive — as though it had happened to him. Twelve years on, the dynasty was gone.

A Poet's Soul

Nicholas Alexandrovich was born on 18 May 1868 at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, eldest son of the future Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna, the former Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Raised in a deliberately Spartan English style and privately tutored, he became fluent in English, French and German; his favourite teacher was the Englishman Charles Heath. His grandfather Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881, making him heir apparent at thirteen.

His father then did him the injury from which nothing recovered: he declined to train him. Alexander III told his finance minister Sergei Witte that "Nikki is a good boy, but he has a poet's soul... God help him!" Nicholas was, in the standard verdict, ill-prepared for the demands of ruling a vast empire. In 1893 he visited the British House of Commons and watched constitutional monarchy at work. He drew no lesson from it whatsoever.

Coffin, Crown and Khodynka

Alexander III died on 1 November 1894, aged forty-nine, and Nicholas was consecrated Tsar that evening. Less than a month after the funeral he married Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, received into Orthodoxy as Alexandra Feodorovna. Court opinion recorded the omen: "She came to us from behind the coffin."

He was crowned on 26 May 1896 in the Kremlin's Uspensky Cathedral. Four days later, at a Khodynka Field festival distributing food and souvenirs, a rumour that supplies would run short triggered a stampede: roughly 1,389 crushed to death, some 1,300 injured. That evening, told by his uncles that absence would offend France, Nicholas attended the French ambassador's ball. Russia read it as indifference, and never stopped.

The Autocrat Who Would Not Bend

Nicholas believed his authority came directly from God and was answerable to no one else. When zemstvo delegates petitioned for constitutional reform, he crushed the idea in public: he would maintain "the principle of absolute autocracy, as firmly and as strongly as did my late lamented father." He distrusted his own ministers too, fearing abler men would erode his prerogative — an insecurity that cut him off from the expertise he needed.

That combination detonated in the Far East. Backing the Bezobrazov group's Manchurian timber concessions, Nicholas dismissed Japanese capability on frankly racial grounds and expected a short, patriotic war. Japan attacked Port Arthur in February 1904. The Pacific Fleet was bottled up; the Baltic Fleet, sent nine months around the world, was annihilated at Tsushima in May 1905. He refused to negotiate until Tsushima left nothing to refuse with, then sent Witte to Portsmouth forbidden to concede territory. Witte ignored him, gave up southern Sakhalin, and got a treaty.

1905: Blood and a Paper Constitution

Defeat abroad ignited revolution at home. Bloody Sunday — the priest Georgy Gapon's march of 9/22 January 1905 — left an official 92 dead and hundreds wounded, the real figures likely higher. Gapon, in hiding, denounced him as "formerly Tsar and at present soul-murderer of the Russian empire... you Hangman."

With the regime near collapse, Nicholas signed the October Manifesto, promising civil liberties and an elected Duma with legislative power. The 1906 constitution kept him "the supreme autocrat," free to dissolve parliament at will — and he did. The First Duma, its Kadet majority demanding universal suffrage and land reform, lasted barely two months; the Second was dissolved in 1907, after which Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin rewrote the electoral law to manufacture a compliant Third. Nicholas had granted a parliament and immediately set about proving it did not matter.

Industry Without Politics

The grimmest irony of the reign is that Russia was, economically, flying. Growth averaged over nine per cent a year between 1880 and 1910. Railway mileage rose from 50,000 kilometres in 1900 to 75,000 by 1914; coal output climbed from six million tonnes in 1890 to thirty-six million; Baku made Russia the world's second oil producer; industrial output ranked fourth globally, ahead of France and Austria-Hungary. But the foundations were rotten — French loans, imported technology, debt service outrunning the trade surplus — and politically worse: a modernising industrial society governed by a man who thought the seventeenth century had settled the question.

The Boy, the Mystic, and the War

Alexei, born in August 1904 after four daughters, had haemophilia B, inherited through Alexandra from Queen Victoria and then untreatable and usually fatal. The secret was kept, and into the gap stepped Grigori Rasputin. When Alexei nearly bled to death in 1912 and priests gave last rites, Rasputin's message — "God has seen your tears... The Little One will not die" — was followed by the bleeding stopping. Historians propose hypnosis, or interference with the aspirin then given for pain and not known as an anticoagulant until the 1950s. Alexandra concluded he was holy, poisoning the crown's standing with nobility, army and church.

The First World War finished it. In December 1916 the monarchist Vladimir Purishkevich thundered in the Duma against the "dark forces" at court: "Revolution threatens, and an obscure peasant shall govern Russia no longer!" Sent by the family to plead for reform, Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich was rebuked for asking his nephew to break his coronation oath. In March 1917 strikes, bread queues and the Petrograd garrison's mutiny forced the abdication, ending 304 years of Romanov rule. As the University of York's David Moon notes, those who pushed him out believed it would restore order and save the war effort, and "were proved badly wrong." On 17 July 1918 Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children and four retainers were shot at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.

Why Nicholas Is Called a Genius

He was not one, and pretending otherwise insults the record. The consensus verdict is blunt: a well-intentioned but poor ruler of average ability and indecisive character, without the rigour or nerve his own theory of kingship demanded. His biographer noted a "tolerance if not preference for charlatans and adventurers," producing "vacillating conduct and erratic decisions."

The one genuine claim on the word is the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, which he promoted to limit armaments and build machinery for settling disputes without war — an idea decades ahead of its moment, and one that brought him and the jurist Friedrich Martens a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1901. Even here the honest reading cuts against him: the historian Dan L. Morrill records that most scholars judge the invitation "conceived in fear, brought forth in deceit, and swaddled in humanitarian ideals." Russia could not afford an arms race, so it proposed to stop one.

What he possessed was not intellect but conviction: a belief unmoved by defeat, massacre or his family's pleading that his authority came from God and could not be shared. That is a kind of strength, and it was the instrument of his destruction. He was also willing to use antisemitism as a tool, his interior minister funding the Kishinev press that fed the pogrom. Call him a tragic figure, a devoted father, a man overmatched by his inheritance. Do not call him a genius.

Legacy

He left an empire that had industrialised without modernising, and a vacuum Lenin filled. His remains were reburied in 1998, and in 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonised him, Alexandra and their children as passion bearers — sanctity for the manner of their deaths, not of his rule. Historians still argue whether the revolution came from the war or from decades of autocratic refusal to reform. Nicholas is why the second answer remains live.

Achievements

• Emperor of all the Russias (1894–1917)
• King of Poland (1894–1916)
• Grand Duke of Finland (1894–1917)
• member of the State Council of the Russian Empire
• Order of St. Andrew
• Order of St. George, 4th class
• Order of St. Vladimir, 4th class
• Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky