Nicholas II

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, carried a large dragon tattooed on his right forearm. The artist was Hori Chiyo, and the tattoo was a souvenir of the young heir's visit to Japan. That same journey nearly ended in disaster. At Otsu, a policeman named Tsuda Sanzo, one of his escorts, swung a sabre at the heir's face. The blow left a scar nine centimetres long on his forehead. It was not life-threatening, but it cut the trip short.

  This documentary follows the man who bore those marks. He was a shy heir, trained as a soldier and widely thought unready to rule. How did he come to govern a vast empire, and why did it slip from his hands? Why did one government later call him a tyrant while a church honoured him? The answers begin in a nursery with very plain furniture.

  14151210

• 2. The Making of an Heir

  ›

  Rising at 6 for a cold bath, the children of Alexander III were raised in the English fashion. Breakfast was porridge and black bread. Lunch brought lamb chops or roast beef with peas and roasted potatoes, and tea meant bread, butter and jam. Nicholas was born in 1868 at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. He shared a plain suite with his younger brother George, with its own salon, dining room, play room and bedroom. The only prominent object was an icon surrounded by pearls and jewels.

  His parents were Alexander Alexandrovich, then heir to the throne, and Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Their marriage was happy, so Nicholas grew up with a love and safety that many royal children never knew. Five siblings followed: Alexander, who lived only from 1869 to 1870, then George, Xenia, Michael and Olga. He was named for his father's elder brother, who died in 1865 and had been his mother's first fiancé. The family called him Nicky. Within the imperial family he was also Nicholas the Short, to tell him apart from his tall cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich.

  Charles Heath, his favourite teacher, had earlier taught his uncles Sergei and Paul. Under Heath, Nicholas and George learned to speak and write perfect English, and he inspired them to love shooting and fly fishing. They also spoke fluent French and passable German and Danish. Konstantin Pobedonostsev taught Nicholas law and history. His lessons convinced the boy that an emperor ruled by the grace of God and owed a sacred duty to uphold autocracy and the Orthodox faith. A home tutor, General Danilovich, asked little of him, reasoning that "the sacrament of coronation will give the ruler all the information he needs."

  In February 1880, nihilist activists detonated a bomb in the dining room of the Winter Palace and destroyed almost the entire room. No one was injured. On the 1st of March 1881, the group Narodnaya Volya assassinated Alexander II, and Nicholas and other relatives witnessed his death at the Winter Palace. Nicholas became heir that day. For safety, the new Tsar moved the family to Gatchina Palace, 48 kilometres from the capital, and entered the city only for ceremonies.

  By his own diary, Nicholas played childish games well past the age of 20. He loved uniforms, insignia and parades, but he felt uncomfortable in official situations. His father could not tolerate weakness. When Nicholas once let a playmate take the blame for his mistake, Alexander shouted, "You are a girl!" The Tsar told his finance minister, Sergei Witte, that his son was too childish for responsibility. In his words, "Nikki is a good boy, but he has a poet's soul...God help him!"

  Witte argued the opposite. If Nicholas never met affairs of state, he would never understand them. Witte proposed placing him on the Siberian Railway Committee. Meanwhile, the heir spent evenings with young officers of the Preobrazhensky and Hussar Guards, dining in restaurants on the islands off St Petersburg. His uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, influenced him strongly. Alexander III assumed he had years left to prepare his son, but by 1894 his health was failing.

  16238

• 3. Wedding and Coronation

  ›

  At a wedding in St Petersburg in 1884, the sixteen-year-old Nicholas admired the bride's youngest surviving sister, twelve-year-old Princess Alix of Hesse. The bride was Princess Elizabeth, marrying his uncle Grand Duke Sergei. Admiration became love after Alix visited St Petersburg in 1889. She returned his feelings, but as a devout Lutheran she was reluctant to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. Meanwhile Nicholas carried on a relationship with the St Petersburg ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, despite his father's disapproval. In 1894 he told her he wished to marry Alix, and the relationship ended. In 1921 she married his cousin, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, in Paris.

  In April 1894, Nicholas travelled to Coburg for the wedding of Alix's brother, Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse. Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm II were among the guests. Nicholas proposed, and Alix refused at first because of the conversion. Persuaded by the Kaiser, she reconsidered, and the couple became engaged on the 20th of April. His parents hesitated, citing Alix's poor impression in Russia. They consented as Alexander III's health declined.

  By autumn, the Tsar had only weeks to live, and he summoned Alix to Livadia Palace. She arrived on the 22nd of October. Alexander, in full uniform, urged his son to heed the advice of Sergei Witte. He died ten days later, aged 49, and Nicholas was consecrated as Tsar that same evening. The next day, Alix entered the Russian Orthodox Church as Alexandra Feodorovna. They married at the Winter Palace on the 26th of November 1894, less than a month after the funeral. Because of the mourning period, the ceremony was modest. Observers remarked of the new empress: "She came to us from behind the coffin..."

  Soon after his accession, a deputation from the zemstvos, the local assemblies, came to the Winter Palace. Their proposal, known as the Tver Address, was couched in mild and loyal terms. It floated court reforms and even a constitutional monarchy. Nicholas was furious and called their hopes a senseless dream. He promised to defend "the principle of absolute autocracy, as firmly and as strongly as did my late lamented father."

  His formal coronation took place on the 26th of May 1896 in Uspensky Cathedral, within the Kremlin. Lieutenant Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, a future president of Finland, was one of four officers who escorted the new emperor. Brown trout from Finland was served to the guests. Nicholas announced that he would use the Russian title Tsar rather than the Western title Emperor.

  On the 30th of May 1896, a festival with food, free beer and souvenir cups was held at Khodynka Field outside Moscow. It was the only space near the city large enough for the crowd, but it was a military training ground, uneven and cut with trenches. Rumours spread that there would not be enough for everyone, and the crowd rushed forward. People tripped, were trampled and suffocated in the dirt. Of about 100,000 present, an estimated 1,389 died and roughly 1,300 were injured.

  That night, the French ambassador held a gala. Nicholas wanted to stay in his chambers and pray for the dead. His uncles warned that his absence would strain relations with France, particularly the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894. He attended, and the mourning public saw him as frivolous and uncaring.

  That autumn the couple toured Europe. They visited the emperor and empress of Austria-Hungary, the Kaiser, and Nicholas's Danish relatives. In Denmark they took possession of their new yacht, the Standart. At Balmoral, Queen Victoria welcomed them. Nicholas wrote to his mother that he disliked being dragged out shooting with the Prince of Wales in bad weather, and he was suffering from a toothache. The Standart would later carry the family to Finland for their summers.

  116272829

• 4. The Royal Disease

  ›

  In January 1903, the Russian Orthodox Church declared Seraphim of Sarov worthy of canonisation, after heavy pressure from the throne. The year before, someone had suggested that if Seraphim were canonised, the imperial couple would have a son. In July 1902, Alexandra demanded that it be done in less than a week. Nicholas asked for it within a year. Despite a public outcry, the Church gave way, and the imperial family travelled to Sarov for the ceremony that summer. The episode bred new distrust between the Tsar and the church hierarchy.

  Olga was born on the 15th of November 1895, Tatiana on the 10th of June 1897, Maria on the 26th of June 1899 and Anastasia on the 18th of June 1901. Their only son, Alexei, was born on the 12th of August 1904. He had haemophilia B, a hereditary disease that prevents blood from clotting properly. At the time it was untreatable and usually brought an early death. Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, carried the gene. It had spread through several royal houses, including those of Prussia and Spain, so it became known as the royal disease.

  Because the autocracy was fragile, Nicholas and Alexandra kept the boy's condition secret. Even within the household, many did not know its exact nature. The secret held until 1912. Russian doctors treated Alexei at first, but their methods generally failed. The couple had already consulted mystics, charlatans, holy fools and miracle workers. One historian describes this as a deliberate retreat from the secular forces of the age, an act of faith in a spiritual past.

  On the 14th of November 1905, Princess Milica of Montenegro presented Grigori Rasputin to Nicholas and Alexandra at Peterhof Palace. He was an illiterate Siberian holy man, or starets. His influence grew stronger after 1912, when the tsesarevich nearly died from an injury. The bleeding worsened, doctors despaired, and priests administered the Last Sacrament. Alexandra called for Rasputin, who answered: "God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much." The hemorrhage stopped the next day, and the boy began to recover.

  Historians disagree about why. The writers Massie and Ferro suggest that Rasputin stopped the bleeding through hypnosis, which some modern physicians say can help manage haemophilia. Pierre Gilliard, Alexei's French-language tutor, speculated differently. Rasputin may have forbidden aspirin, then widely used for pain but not known as an anti-clotting agent until the 1950s. Whatever the cause, Alexandra took it as proof that God was with the starets.

  For the rest of her life she defended Rasputin fiercely and turned her anger on anyone who questioned him. Many saw him as lecherous and uncivilised, and his place at court deepened distrust of the monarchy. Alexandra distrusted Witte, who had instigated an investigation of Rasputin. Prime minister Pyotr Stolypin also ordered an investigation and gave the report to the Tsar, who read it and did nothing. On his own authority, Stolypin then ordered Rasputin to leave St Petersburg. Alexandra protested vehemently, but Nicholas refused to overrule a minister who had more influence with him. She came to believe Stolypin had severed the bonds her son's life depended on, and she hated him for it.

  Nicholas let his wife steer his choice of ministers. According to the source, reforms often failed on a single point. Any change would have run against the interests of their children, and above all those of Alexei.

  202123241

• 5. Peace Conferences and War

  ›

  The state visit of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in April 1897 produced a gentlemen's agreement to keep the status quo in the Balkans. A similar commitment covered Constantinople and the Straits. The result was years of peace that allowed rapid economic growth. Nicholas strengthened the Franco-Russian Alliance, and he pursued a policy of general European calm.

  That policy led to the Hague peace conference of 1899, which Nicholas suggested and promoted. It aimed to end the arms race and to build machinery for settling international disputes peacefully. The results fell short because the great powers distrusted one another. Even so, the Hague conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war. In 1901 Nicholas and the Russian diplomat Friedrich Martens were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The historian Dan L. Morrill states that most scholars agree the invitation was "conceived in fear, brought forth in deceit, and swaddled in humanitarian ideals."

  In 1901, Nicholas told his brother-in-law, Prince Henry of Prussia, "I do not want to seize Korea but under no circumstances can I allow Japan to become firmly established there. That will be a casus belli." Russia had expanded in the Far East, and its ambitions collided with Japan's. Nicholas pursued an aggressive policy toward Manchuria and Korea. He strongly backed the timber concession scheme developed by the Bezobrazov group. War began in February 1904, when Japan attacked the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur before any formal declaration.

  With the Far East fleet trapped, Russia sent its Baltic Fleet on a nine-month voyage to the east. Britain, allied with Japan, refused to let the ships use the Suez Canal. The fleet had also fired on British fishing boats in the North Sea in the Dogger Bank incident. After many misadventures, it was nearly annihilated by the Japanese in the Battle of Tsushima. On land, supplies and troops moved along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The 9,200 km line between St Petersburg and Port Arthur was single-track, with no track around Lake Baikal. Port Arthur fell after nine months of resistance.

  The Tsar's confidence baffled observers. The scholar Rotem Kowner argues that Nicholas, since his 1891 visit to Japan, saw the Japanese as small, feminine, weak and inferior. He ignored reports on Japanese prowess in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. His advisors never gave him a clear picture of Russia's weaknesses. In October 1904 he told the Kaiser by telegram that he meant to fight until the Japanese were driven from Manchuria, though his mother and Wilhelm II both urged peace.

  Only the annihilation of the fleet on the 27th and the 28th of May 1905 persuaded him to negotiate. He accepted American mediation and appointed Witte chief plenipotentiary. He forbade Witte to accept any indemnity or loss of territory. The war ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth. To secure it, Witte disobeyed his orders and ceded southern Sakhalin to Japan.

  3538363739

• 6. Revolution and Manifesto

  ›

  On Saturday the 21st of January 1905, Nicholas wrote in his diary that troops had been brought in to reinforce the garrison. He put the number of workers at 120,000, led by "a kind of socialist priest named Gapon." He had left for Tsarskoye Selo on his ministers' advice. No one seriously planned for him to receive the petition.

  On Sunday the 22nd of January, Georgy Gapon led the workers toward the Winter Palace. They locked arms, carried icons, banners, national flags and portraits of the Tsar, and sang hymns and God Save the Tsar. At bridges and boulevards, infantry backed by Cossacks and hussars blocked their way and opened fire. The official toll was 92 dead and several hundred wounded. As bullets tore through icons and portraits, the people cried, "The Tsar will not help us!"

  That evening Nicholas wrote, "Difficult day!" and ended with "Lord, how painful and bad!" His sister Olga recalled that she and their mother wanted him to stay in the capital and face the crowd. She was sure his presence would have calmed the marchers. He followed his ministers instead, and he was the first to repent. Abroad, the future British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald called him a "blood-stained creature and a common murderer." From hiding, Gapon wrote a letter calling Nicholas a "Hangman" and urging an armed uprising.

  In February 1905, a revolutionary's bomb killed Grand Duke Sergei in Moscow as he left the Kremlin. In June, the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet mutinied. After the peace with Japan, Witte wrote urging political reform, but the Tsar spent most of that autumn hunting. He complained to his mother that his ministers gathered in council "like a lot of frightened hens." In October a railway strike grew into a general strike that paralysed the country. In a city without electricity, Witte warned that Russia stood at the verge of cataclysmic revolution.

  Nicholas signed the October Manifesto, which promised an Imperial Duma and widened citizens' rights to speech, religion and assembly. The clause on religion outraged the Church, since it allowed people to switch to evangelical Protestantism. The 1906 constitution still described him as supreme autocrat. He kept a veto and the power to dissolve the Duma, and ministers answered only to him.

  The 524 members of the First Duma, with a majority of Kadets, sat down in the Tauride Palace and drafted an Address to the Throne. It demanded universal suffrage, radical land reform, the release of all political prisoners and ministers acceptable to the Duma. Nicholas dissolved it. He dissolved the Duma twice, in 1906 and in 1907. Witte wrote to resign on the 14th of April 1906, though other accounts say the emperor forced him out. Nicholas made him a Knight of the Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky, and wrote the words "with diamonds" in his own hand.

  The Second Duma met in February 1907. Leftist parties, who had boycotted the first, won 200 seats, more than a third. Nicholas told his mother that the deputies should be allowed to do something "manifestly stupid or mean," and then they would be gone. Stolypin dissolved it, rewrote the electoral laws to favour conservatives, and made loans available so peasants could buy land. He invoked Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws for emergency decrees. The Third Duma proceeded cautiously. In 1909 Nicholas told Stolypin, "This Duma cannot be reproached with an attempt to seize power."

  Court reactionaries, such as Prince Vladimir Nikolayevich Orlov, whispered that Stolypin was a traitor conniving with the Duma. Nicholas once returned a document unsigned, saying an inner voice kept urging him not to accept responsibility for it. When Stolypin mentioned resigning in 1909, Nicholas answered, "It is my will." Stolypin was assassinated in September 1911. In 1912 a Fourth Duma was elected, with almost the same membership as the third. Nicholas told Sir Bernard Pares, "The Duma started too fast. Now it is slower, but better, and more lasting."

  5455566266

• 7. Giant With Fault Lines

  ›

  In 1907, Russia and the United Kingdom signed the Anglo-Russian Convention, ending decades of friction over central Asia known as the Great Game. With Britain's 1904 Entente Cordiale with France, it formed the Triple Entente. In May 1908, Nicholas's "Uncle Bertie," King Edward VII, and Queen Alexandra became the first reigning British monarchs to visit Russia. They never set foot on Russian soil. The two sides met aboard yachts off the coast of modern-day Tallinn for three days and signed agreements of political and military assistance.

  Later in 1908, foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky struck a secret deal with the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Alois von Aehrenthal. Russia would accept Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in return would gain naval access to the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. Nicholas was taken off guard. When Austria-Hungary annexed the territory that October, the Bosnian Crisis followed. The Austrians threatened to leak the secret communications, and Nicholas wrote to Franz Joseph about a breach of confidence.

  On the 5th of July 1912, Nicholas met Wilhelm II at Paldiski. The Kaiser arrived aboard the Hohenzollern II, escorted by the battlecruiser Moltke. A lunch for fifty on the Standart opened talks on the political situation in Europe. They did not stop the approach of war. In 1913, during the Balkan Wars, Nicholas personally offered to arbitrate between Serbia and Bulgaria. The Bulgarians rejected the offer.

  Within the empire, the February Manifesto of 1899 restricted Finland's autonomy and began censorship and political repression. More than 500,000 Finns signed a protest, and a delegation of 500 carried it to St Petersburg. Nicholas did not receive them. The measures were suspended after 1905 and reintroduced in 1908. When he made his only visit to Helsinki, on the 10th of March 1915, he met an icy reception.

  The newspaper Bessarabets in Kishinev, which published antisemitic material, received funds from the interior minister, Viacheslav Plehve. These publications helped fuel the Kishinev pogrom. The government formally condemned the rioting, dismissed the regional governor and had perpetrators punished. The leaders of the Orthodox Church also condemned the violence, and appeals were read in churches across Russia. In private, though, Nicholas expressed admiration for the mobs, seeing antisemitism as a tool to unify the people behind the government. After the revolutionary Dmitry Bogrov, who was Jewish, assassinated Stolypin in 1911, Nicholas approved government efforts to prevent pogroms.

  In February 1913, Nicholas presided over the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. A Te Deum was sung on the 21st of February at Kazan Cathedral, followed by a state reception at the Winter Palace. In May the family made a pilgrimage down the Volga. They retraced the route taken in 1613 by the teenage Michael Romanov from the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma to Moscow, when he finally agreed to become tsar.

  On the eve of the First World War, Russia had 175 million inhabitants, almost three times the population of Germany. Its army counted 1.3 million men and almost 5 million reservists. Industry grew by about 5 percent a year between 1860 and 1913. The railway network grew from 50,000 km in 1900 to 75,000 in 1914. Coal output rose from 6 million tonnes in 1890 to 36 million in 1914, and the Baku fields made Russia's oil output second only to that of the United States.

  German Chief of Staff Moltke predicted that from 1916-1917, German military power would be outclassed. French planners expected a "Russian steamroller." Yet the foundations were unstable. Russian industry ranked fourth in the world, far behind the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. Growth leaned on government loans, notably from France, and Russia carried the highest interest on debt in the world. In 1914, foreign firms owned 90 percent of mining, all of oil, 40 percent of metallurgy and half of the chemical industry. On the 28th of June 1914, a Bosnian Serb assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

  6768694572

• 8. Abdication and Verdict

  ›

  On the 2nd of December 1916, the patriot and monarchist Vladimir Purishkevich gave a two-hour speech in the Duma that drew tumultuous applause. He denounced the dark forces around the throne. "Revolution threatens," he warned, "and an obscure peasant shall govern Russia no longer!"

  By late 1916, the war was going badly. Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, the younger brother of Alexander III and the Tsar's only surviving uncle, was sent to beg Nicholas to grant a constitution and a government responsible to the Duma. Nicholas sternly refused. He reproached his uncle for asking him to break the coronation oath to preserve autocratic power for his successors. Military losses and economic hardship had already eroded public confidence in his rule.

  In March 1917, the February Revolution forced Nicholas to abdicate, ending 304 years of Romanov rule. The Provisional Government imprisoned him and his family, and they were later transferred to Bolshevik custody. On the 17th of July 1918, they were executed in Yekaterinburg. His wife, his four daughters and his son died with him.

  Soviet historians and state propaganda later portrayed him as a "callous tyrant" who "persecuted his own people while sending countless soldiers to their deaths in pointless conflicts." Views have softened in recent years. The majority view among historians is that Nicholas was a well-intentioned yet poor ruler, incapable of handling the challenges facing his nation. Even harsher accounts call him modest and frugal, and say he did better as a father and husband than as ruler of a restless realm.

  The remains of the family were discovered and reburied in 1998. Two years later, in 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonised Nicholas and his family as passion bearers.

  1031953486