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- He made poor decisions that led to worsening relations with the government and increased hardship for civilians and soldiers alike. Nicholas refused to accept any reduction in the absolute power he held. He was detached from the plight of the Russian people and his policies also alienated ethnic minorities.
www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/ztyk87h/revision/2Reasons for the February Revolution, 1917 Political problems
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Tsar Nicholas II was unable to rule effectively. He made poor decisions that led to worsening relations with the government and increased hardship for civilians and soldiers alike.
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Nicholas II’s father was Tsar Alexander III, and his mother was Maria Fyodorovna, daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark.
What was Nicholas II’s family like?
In 1894 Nicholas II married Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They had four daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia—and one son, Alexis.
How did Nicholas II die?
The Russian Revolution toppled the Romanov dynasty, and Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, 1917. The royal family was arrested by the Bolsheviks and held in seclusion. On July 17, 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas, his family, and their closest retainers.
How did Nicholas II change the world?
Nikolay Aleksandrovich was the eldest son and heir apparent (tsesarevich) of the tsarevitch Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (emperor as Alexander III from 1881) and his consort Maria Fyodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark). Succeeding his father on November 1, 1894, he was crowned tsar in Moscow on May 26, 1896.
Neither by upbringing nor by temperament was Nicholas fitted for the complex tasks that awaited him as autocratic ruler of a vast empire. He had received a military education from his tutor, and his tastes and interests were those of the average young Russian officers of his day. He had few intellectual pretensions but delighted in physical exercise and the trappings of army life: uniforms, insignia, parades. Yet on formal occasions he felt ill at ease. Though he possessed great personal charm, he was by nature timid; he shunned close contact with his subjects, preferring the privacy of his family circle. His domestic life was serene. To his wife, Alexandra, whom he had married on November 26, 1894, Nicholas was passionately devoted. She had the strength of character that he lacked, and he fell completely under her sway. Under her influence he sought the advice of spiritualists and faith healers, most notably Grigori Rasputin, who eventually acquired great power over the imperial couple.
Nicholas also had other irresponsible favourites, often men of dubious probity who provided him with a distorted picture of Russian life, but one that he found more comforting than that contained in official reports. He distrusted his ministers, mainly because he felt them to be intellectually superior to himself and feared they sought to usurp his sovereign prerogatives. His view of his role as autocrat was childishly simple: he derived his authority from God, to whom alone he was responsible, and it was his sacred duty to preserve his absolute power intact. He lacked, however, the strength of will necessary in one who had such an exalted conception of his task. In pursuing the path of duty, Nicholas had to wage a continual struggle against himself, suppressing his natural indecisiveness and assuming a mask of self-confident resolution. His dedication to the dogma of autocracy was an inadequate substitute for a constructive policy, which alone could have prolonged the imperial regime.
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Soon after his accession Nicholas proclaimed his uncompromising views in an address to liberal deputies from the zemstvos, the self-governing local assemblies, in which he dismissed as “senseless dreams” their aspirations to share in the work of government. He met the rising groundswell of popular unrest with intensified police repression. In foreign policy, his naïveté and lighthearted attitude toward international obligations sometimes embarrassed his professional diplomats; for example, he concluded an alliance with the German emperor William II during their meeting at Björkö in July 1905, although Russia was already allied with France, Germany’s traditional enemy.
After its ambitions in the Far East were checked by Japan, Russia turned its attention to the Balkans. Nicholas sympathized with the national aspirations of the Slavs and was anxious to win control of the Turkish straits but tempered his expansionist inclinations with a sincere desire to preserve peace among the Great Powers. After the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, he tried hard to avert the impending war by diplomatic action and resisted, until July 30, 1914, the pressure of the military for general, rather than partial, mobilization.
The outbreak of World War I temporarily strengthened the monarchy, but Nicholas did little to maintain his people’s confidence. The Duma was slighted, and voluntary patriotic organizations were hampered in their efforts; the gulf between the ruling group and public opinion grew steadily wider. Alexandra turned Nicholas’s mind against the popular commander in chief, his father’s cousin the grand duke Nicholas, and on September 5, 1915, the emperor dismissed him, assuming supreme command himself. Since the emperor had no experience of war, almost all his ministers protested against this step as likely to impair the army’s morale. They were overruled, however, and soon dismissed.
- John L.H. Keep
Oct 9, 2024 · Throughout his reign Nicholas gave the impression of being unable to cope with the tasks of ruling a vast Empire in the grips of a deepening revolutionary crisis. True, only a genius could have coped with it. And Nicholas was certainly no genius.
In mid-1915 Nicholas made the disastrous decision to take direct command of the Russian armies. From then on, every military failure was directly associated with him. With Nicholas...
Soviet-era historians described Nicholas II as unfit for rule, arguing that he had a weak will and was manipulated by adventurist forces. He was also criticised for fanning nationalism and chauvinism, and his regime was condemned for its extensive use of the army, police, and courts to destroy the revolutionary movement.
Nicholas famously expressed reluctance about taking the throne, declaring that he “never wanted to rule”. But tradition overcame his personal concerns: Nicholas later pledged to uphold the autocracy bequeathed by his father and to preserve the monarchy for his own son.
Nicholas II was a staunch defender of autocracy. A weak monarch, he was forced to abdicate, thus ending more than 300 years of Romanov rule in Russia. The son of Alexander III, Nicholas was born on May 6, 1868.
