Tsar of Russia, eldest son and successor of Alexander III.; born at St. Petersburg on the 18th of May 1868. He received the ordinary education of Russian grand-dukes, under the direction of General Danilovitch, assisted by M. Pobêdonostsev and other eminent professors. Among these was an Englishman, Mr. Charles Heath, for whom he had great respect and affection. By the death of his grandfather, Alexander II., in 1881, he became heir-apparent (cesarevich). Though he received, like all the heirs-apparent to the Russian throne, a certain amount of military training, his personal tastes did not lie in that direction, nor did he show any inclination for the boisterous amusements of the jeunesse dorée of St. Petersburg. Like his father, he was nowhere happier than in the family circle, and he was particularly attached to his sister, the grand-duchess Xenia, who was seven years younger than himself. In 1890–1891 he made a tour in Greece, Egypt, India, Ceylon and Japan, where he narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a Japanese fanatic. On the return journey by Siberia, at Vladivostok, he turned the first sod of the eastern section of the Siberian railway, and two years afterwards (1893) he was appointed president of the imperial committee for that great undertaking. By the death of his father on the 1st of November 1894 he became emperor, and on the 26th of that month he married Princess Alix of Hesse (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), to whom he had been betrothed in the presence of his father during the latter’s last illness. Eighteen months later the coronation took place at Moscow with great pomp, but a gloom was thrown over the festivities by the unfortunate incident of the Khodinskoe Polye, a great open space near the city, where a popular fête had been prepared and where, from defective police arrangements, a large number of men, women and children, roughly estimated at 2,000, were crushed and trampled to death. Nicholas II. followed in the footsteps of his father, seeking to preserve peace in foreign relations, and continuing in home affairs, though in a much milder form, the policy of centralization and Russification which had characterized the previous reign. His pacific tendencies were shown by his systematic opposition to all bellicose excitement, by his maintaining M. Girs in the post of minister of foreign affairs, by his offering the post, on the death of that statesman, to M. de Staal, by his restraining France from dangerous adventures, and by initiating the Peace Conference at The Hague. To these ought perhaps to be added the transformation of the Franco-Russian entente cordiale into a formal alliance, since the alliance in question might be regarded as favourable to the preservation of the status quo in Europe. In the internal administration during the first years of his reign he introduced by his personal influence, and without any great change in the laws, a more humane spirit towards those of his subjects who did not belong by language and tradition to the dominant nationality, and who were not members of the Eastern Orthodox Church; but he disappointed the men of liberal views by giving it to be clearly understood soon after his accession that he had no intention of circumscribing and weakening the autocratic power by constitutional guarantees or parliamentary institutions. In spite, however, of his desire for peace he let his country drift into the disastrous war with Japan; and notwithstanding his sincere attachment to the principles of bureaucratic autocracy, it was he who granted the constitutional reforms which altered the whole political outlook in Russia.—[Unattributed].
In view of the tragic end of the Tsar Nicholas II. and his family, in the Russian revolution, it may be noted that, even in the lifetime of his father, Alexander III., his mind had been deeply imbued by mystic belief in divine rights and providential guidance, and he was prepared to suffer and to endure, if necessary, in carrying out the duties of his office. His intellectual preparation as heir to the throne was very insufficient. As the second son he had been left in the background for some time, and even when it became clear that his elder brother, George, was doomed to untimely death by consumption, no special efforts were made to prepare him for his task by any elaborate teaching. An English tutor, Mr. Heath, taught him indeed good English, and inspired a love of sports and healthy exercise, while a Russian general, Danilovitch, supervised his military training, but there was no attempt to provide him with the comprehensive knowledge required from one whom fate had destined to rule an immense empire. The only occasion which was offered to the young Tsarevitch to acquaint himself with the problems of the world was his journey to the Far East, so abruptly cut short in Kioto by the sabre cut of a Japanese fanatic. It is not to be wondered at that Nicholas II.’s range of ideas was not very wide or profound, although he was by no means unintelligent and possessed in high degree the royal habit to move with ease and tact in complicated personal surroundings. His disposition towards fatalistic mysticism made him particularly amenable to the promptings of superstitious and irrational suggestion. He told Stolypin on one occasion, when he had to take an important decision, that he was loth to do so, because he was sure that his interference would be accompanied by bad luck; he saw a warning in the fact that he had been born on May 6, the day when the Church honoured the memory of Job; he was predestinated to say with Job: “As soon as I apprehend a danger, it occurs, and all the misfortunes dreaded by me come over me.” His career was bent with many dismal predestinations of every kind. He wedded Princess Alix of Hesse, at the deathbed of his father; at the festival of his Coronation more than three thousand people were crushed to death through the negligence of the officials who had to arrange a distribution of bounties; and during the Coronation itself the imperial chain on his breast fell to the ground. Such impressions contributed strongly to inspire him with a mystic resignation, especially unsuitable for a monarch who had to lead the nation through times of great crisis at home and in foreign affairs.
Nicholas II.’s political outlook was dominated by a kind of theocratic or hieratic spirit; he was looking back for inspirations to the ideas and customs of the Moscovite period; he was induced to impersonate the figure of Alexius Mikhailovitch, the father of the western reformer Peter the Great; in 1913 the tercentenary of Michail Feodorovitch’s accession to the throne after the “Great Troubles” was celebrated with great splendour and emphasis. Pilgrimages were performed with great devotion and circumstance.
The courtiers and bureaucrats in the immediate surroundings of the Tsar, men like Sipiaguin, Nicolas Maklakov, and Sabler, took advantage of these prepossessions in order to keep up a constant hostility against progressive reformers and western adaptations. But the most dangerous representative of mystic reaction was the Tsar’s consort, the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Of German descent on her father’s side and of English descent on the side of her mother (Princess Alice, the daughter of Queen Victoria), she had received her education in England, but, on coming to Russia, she surrendered completely to the most extreme form of theocratic exaltation. While her sister, the widow of the Grand Duke Sergius, killed by a terrorist, had devoted herself to an almost monastic life at the head of a community of hospital nurses, Alexandra Feodorovna, highly strung and hysterical, sought providential guidance in the midst of unbalanced women and false prophets like the French medium Philippe and the famous Rasputin. The latter obtained a hold on her through the hypnotizing influence he exercised over her son, the Tsarevitch Alexis, a boy affected by the rare disease of hereditary haemophilia. But the crafty peasant had contrived to obtain gradually a psychical domination over the Empress and her friends which made it possible for him to distribute political favours and to have his say in the most important affairs of State. The Empress considered him as the God-sent representative of the Russian nation, of that mass of peasants which, as she was convinced, was the firm mainstay of autocracy in Russia. And in the later years of Nicholas II.’s reign, the years of great trial and danger, Alexandra Feodorovna stepped in more and more often to direct the Tsar’s choice of his ministers and to prevent him from making concessions to the spirit of the time.
The suspicion that Alexandra Feodorovna was secretly favouring the cause of Germany and revealing military secrets to the Kaiser—a suspicion often expressed abroad and popularly accepted in Russia—is, according to most competent witnesses, devoid of any basis in fact. The Empress was intensely patriotic in her own way, opposed to the aggressive policy of the Hohenzollerns, and never advocated a treacherous compromise with the Central Powers. A former lady-in-waiting, Princess Vassiltchikov, who towards the close of 1916 brought the project of such a compromise from Germany was promptly ordered out of Petrograd. Nevertheless, Alexandra Feodorovna proved to be the evil genius of the Russian dynasty, by her blind and obstinate support of reactionary tendencies and of worthless adventurers, at a time when a wise and firm policy of reform was more needed than ever. All the better representatives of the dynasty—the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovitch, the Grand Duchess Victoria, warned the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of the imminent danger of that régime of fleeting ministerial shadows which set in after the catastrophe of the War Office in 1915.
The Emperor remained passive as commander-in-chief at headquarters while the Empress Alexandra spurned all advice with contempt and continued to pull the strings by dismissing men like Sazonov and Palivanov, and appointing timeservers like Stürmer, Protopopov, or Galitzin. The assassination of Rasputin did not frighten but enraged her; she erected a kind of shrine over the body of the prophet and sent the Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovitch, who had taken part in the murder, into exile. Her power was broken only by the revolution.
The thread of the Romanov dynasty was cut without much resistance. When in March 1917 the Emperor received at headquarters a telegram from the president of the Duma informing him of the events of Petrograd and demanding his abdication, and MM. Gutchkov and Shulgin arrived with the act of abdication itself, he submitted with fatalistic composure. He refused to give up his crown to his son with Grand Duke Michael as regent, because he did not wish to trust the boy to the danger of a political storm; and his abdication was made in favour of the Grand Duke Michael, who in his turn refused to accept the crown unless it was tendered to him by the will of the people. The last chance of a régime of constitutional monarchy was cut short. Proposals were made on behalf of the British Government to allow Nicholas II. and his family to take up their abode in England; but the Provisional Government in Petrograd did not accede to that plan. Kerensky and Milyukov declared that the imperial family were in safety in Russia. Later on the Emperor submitted meekly to be transferred from Pskov to Tsarskoe Selo and then to Tobolsk, where he was interned with his family—his wife, his son and his four daughters for months.
The life in Tobolsk has been described by a French tutor, M. Gillard, who followed the imperial family into exile. All the qualities of the unfortunate prisoners of State came to the fore in these sad times. The Tsar taught his son history and Russian literature, the family circle assembled in the evening to read and converse, they prayed and attended the church services with touching devotion. In Ekaterinburg, where they were transferred by the Bolsheviks in 1918, their captivity assumed an oppressive form. They were huddled together in an apartment consisting of two bedrooms and one sitting-room. Their guard consisted mainly of Lettish soldiers, while Russians were kept on the outskirts of the house; they had to listen to the uproar and the ribald songs of their watchmen; the walls of the sitting-room were covered with obscene drawings and inscriptions; the head gaoler, Yourkovsky, was a fanatical communist, a Jew, who harboured feelings of fierce hatred against the potentates of Holy Russia.
The end came in connection with Kolchak’s advance on the Ural in 1918. The Soviet of Commissaries in Moscow enjoined the greatest vigilance to the Ekaterinburg commissar, Yourkovsky, and the commander of the guard, Medvediev, without indicating any means for removing the prisoners from the threatened zone. The communists of Ekaterinburg held a secret meeting in which they decided to put the Tsar and his family to death, and sent an order in this sense to Yourkovsky. The latter demanded that it should be duly signed, and sixteen signatures were affixed to it. On the night of July 16 Yourkovsky roused the prisoners and conducted them into a cellar of the house. Medvediev, with the Lettish guards, entered the room while some Russian soldiers were looking in from the staircase. Yourkovsky placed the seven doomed persons at one end of the room and read the sentence hurriedly by torchlight. The Tsar stepped forward and said something indistinctly, when Yourkovsky drew his revolver and shot him in the head. A general fusillade followed, and not content with this, the executioners pierced the bodies with their bayonets and struck them with the butt-end of their rifles. The Grand Duchess Tatiana is said to have recovered consciousness for a while, but she was struck down once more and forever. Besides the seven members of the imperial family four of their attendants were probably slaughtered the same night. In the course of the next few days the corpses were removed to an isolated spot in the neighbourhood of Ekaterinburg and destroyed by fire, after having been soaked with petroleum. A few objects of apparel were later picked up on the spot.—[Paul Vinogradoff].
