The last Tsar, who believed autocracy was a duty from God
On the night of 2 March 1917, after signing the act of abdication, Nicholas II wrote in his diary: "At one in the morning I left Pskov with a heavy feeling of what I had lived through. All around there is treason, cowardice, and deceit!"
After the shootings of 1905, and even after taking personal command in 1915 and with it the blame for defeat, he held autocracy to be a trust from God that could not be yielded by an inch. In February 1917, when no army would fire for him, three hundred years of Romanov rule ended in a week; in July 1918 he was shot with his family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg.
Career Timeline
- 1894Accedes to the throne
- 1904–05Defeat by Japan; the 1905 revolution
- 1906Fundamental Laws: a hedged Duma order
- 1915Takes supreme command, defeat now attaches to the throne
- 1917.3Abdicates
- 1918.7Shot with his family at Yekaterinburg
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905TsarHe met the revolution with gunfire and martial law, and in the reaction took back one by one the concessions of the October Manifesto he had signed under the pressure of the general strike.
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionThe abdicated tsarHaving lost both the army and the capital, he abdicated on 15 March, ending three hundred years of Romanov rule.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionDeposed by revolution and executed during the Civil War
Rasputin and the Imperial Family
Grigori Rasputin, a Siberian peasant, first met Nicholas II in November 1905. The emperor noted in his diary that he had 'met a man of God, Grigori from Tobolsk province.' The decisive reason Rasputin won the imperial family's trust was his ability to ease the suffering of the hemophiliac Tsarevich Alexei when medicine was powerless. After Nicholas II took supreme command in 1915 and left for the front, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna remained in the capital managing state affairs, and Rasputin's influence swelled to the point of dictating ministerial appointments. The 'ministerial leapfrog' (ministers replaced every few months) eroded the monarchy's authority, while rumors of Rasputin's debauched private life became fodder for revolutionary propaganda. In December 1916, monarchists including Prince Felix Yusupov and Vladimir Purishkevich assassinated Rasputin, but by then the dynasty's credibility was already shattered beyond repair.