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Tsar Nicholas ii, Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia (6 May 1868 to 4 July 1918 in the Julian Calendar, or 18 May 1868 to 17 July 1918 in the Gregorian Calendar), was the last crowned Emperor of Russia. He ruled from November 1, 1894 until his abdication on March 15, 1917, and was murdered, along with his family, in 1918.
Tsar Nicholas ii's full name was Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov. His official title was: Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, &c.1 The title Tsar (or Czar), derived from the Roman title Caesar via the Byzantine form Kaisar, had been officially abolished in 1721 by Peter the Great, but it was informally used throughout Nicholas's reign.
Family background and early life - Tsar Nicholas ii
The son of Emperor Alexander III and his Empress Marie Feodorovna (born Princess Dagmar of Denmark), Tsar Nicholas ii was the grandson of Christian IX of Denmark through his mother, and of Emperor Alexander II through his father. Nicholas was generally seen as too soft by his hard, demanding father, who, not anticipating his own premature death, did nothing to prepare his son for the crown that would one day be his. Nicholas fell in love with Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, but his faot approve the match, hoping instead for a marriage with a princess of the House of Orléans to consummate Russia's newfound alliance with the French Republic. Only when Nicholas' father, Alexander III, was in his death bed, did he consent to the marriage of Nicholas to the German princess, fearing the succession of the Romanov Dynasty.
As Tsarevich, Tsar Nicholas ii also did a fair amount of traveling, including a notable trip to the Far East, which left him with a scar in his forehead after a crazed Japanese man nearly killed him were it not for the quick actions of his cousin, Prince George of Greece. After the event, Nicholas returned to St. Petersburg with a bitter hatred of the Empire of the Rising Sun.
Nicholas becomes Tsar
lalalalala Nicholas assumed the throne in 1894, on the death of his father. Immediately thereafter, Nicholas married Alix (thenceforth Empress Alexandra Feodorovna). They had five children: the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria (or Marie) and Anastasia, and the Tsarevich Alexei.
At the coronation day in Moscow in 1895 there were folk festivities in which several thousand people were trampled to death trying to get presents from the Emperor. Nicholas learned about the catastrophe later that day. He wished to cancel all later festivities but was persuaded not to by close relatives and advisors. The deaths were seen by many to be a bad sign for his future. Nicholas had not been well prepared to rule. His father had died at a fairly young age, leaving Nicholas unprepared for his future tasks. His engagement to Princess Alix only slightly preceded his father's death, and his wedding came very shortly after the last ceremony of his father's funeral. He then faced the task of being autocrat of Russia in a time of major turmoil.
Tsar Nicholas ii relied heavily on the advice of his uncles, the Grand Dukes (brothers of the late Alexander III), and also on his and his wife's cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. This advice was often more in the interests of "cousin Willy", who hoped in particular to prevent closer relations between Russia and Britain and with France, than of Nicholas. An ill-conceived war with Japan (1904–1905) cost Russia dearly, but fear of a wider conflagration contributed to the very Anglo-Russian Entente which Wilhelm feared.
In addition to a tumultuous international situation, Tsar Nicholas ii also faced deep domestic difficulties. His grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, had been assassinated by a bomb set by revolutionaries, even though he had done much to improve the situation in the country. The purpose of the revolutionaries, however, was to achieve power not through the existing regime, but by toppling it altogether. When he was a child, Nicholas, along with his family, survived an assassination attempt by a bomb on a train. Defeat by Japan emboldened the regime's internal opponents, unleashing the Russian Revolution of 1905, during which organized strikes and explosive local uprisings forced Nicholas to concede an indirectly-elected national assembly, or Duma, in the October Manifesto.
Nicholas as quasi-constitutional monarch
Nicholas's relations with the new Duma were not good. The First Duma, with a majority of Kadets, almost immediately came into conflict with the emperor, who fired his relatively liberal prime minister, Sergei Witte, and dissolved the Duma. After the second Duma resulted in similar problems, Nicholas's new prime minister Peter Stolypin, unilaterally dissolved it and changed the electoral laws to allow for more conservative Dumas in the future, dominated by the liberal-conservative Octobrist Party of Alexander Guchkov. Stolypin, a skillful politician, had ambitious plans for reform. These reforms included the availability of loans to the lower classes to enable them to buy a plot of land, with intensions of forming a farming class loyal to the crown. He was, however, undercut by conservatives at court who had more influence with the Emperor. By the time of Stolypin's assassination by an anarchist (and police informant!) in 1911, he and the Emperor were barely on speaking terms, and his fall was widely foreseen.
In the years that followed, matters largely drifted on, with inertia and Russia's tremendous economic growth keeping Russia afloat.
Tsarevich Alexei's illness
Further complicating domestic matters was the matter of succession. Alexandra bore him four daughters before their son, Alexei, was born on August 12, 1904. The young heir proved to be afflicted with hemophilia, which, at that time was virtually untreatable and usually led to untimely death. Because of the fragility of the autocracy at this time, Tsar Nicholas ii and Alexandra chose to not divulge Alexei's condition to anyone outside the royal household.
In desperation, Alexandra sought help from a mystic, Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin seemed to be able to help when Alexei was suffering from internal bleeding, and Alexandra became increasingly dependent on him and his advice (which she accepted as coming directly from God through him).
Tsar Nicholas ii wanted mainly to be loved by his people, and left to his own devices he might well have accepted a system of constitutional monarchy and become a reforming Emperor. The influence of political reactionaries, principally his wife and his relatives, with Rasputin behind the scenes, prevented this.
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