Nicholas Ii & Alexandrea

Nicholas II & Alexandra

A Brief Overview

The son of Emperor Alexander III and his Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Nicholas was the grandson of Christian IX of Denmark through his mother and of Emperor Alexander II through his father. His hard, demanding father whom, not anticipating his own premature death did nothing to prepare his son for the crown of Russia he saw Nicholas as too soft. Nicholas fell in love with Princess Alix of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, but his father did not approve of the match, instead hoping for a marriage with a princess from the House of Orleans, to consummate Russia's newfound alliance with the French Republic. However, it was not until Alexander was on his deathbed did he consent to the marriage of Nicholas to the German Princess.

As Tsarevich, Nicholas did a fair amount of traveling, including a notable trip to the Far East that left him with a scar on his forehead. A crazed Japanese man had nearly killed him, but he was saved by the quick action of his cousin, Prince George of Greece. Nicholas returned to St. Petersburg with a bitter hatred of the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Nicholas assumed the throne on November 1 1894, and soon after married Princes Alix (also known as Empress Alexandra Fedorovna). They had five children: the Grand

- 2

Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and the Tsarevich Alexei. Peter the Great had officially abolished the title Tsar in 1721; however, it was informally used throughout Nicholas's reign.

At the festivities surrounding his 1895 coronation in Moscow several thousand people were trampled to death trying to get presents from the new Emperor. Nicholas heard of the tragedies later that day and wanted to cancel all the later festivities, but true to form his advisors, who would continue to be influential, persuaded not to, many citizens saw the deaths as a bad omen for the Tsar. Nicholas was poorly prepared to rule after his father's early death. His engagement to Princess Alix only slightly preceded his father's death and the wedding came very shortly after the funeral, which today some individuals think Nicholas might have instituted a plot on his father due to his undying love for Princess Alix, and his father's distain for the relationship. Nicholas now faced the unprepared task of being autocrat of Russia in a time of major turmoil. He relied heavily on the advice of his uncles, the Grand Dukes, and on his and his wife's cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. This advice was often more in the interests of "Cousin Willy", who hoped to prevent closer relations between Russia and Britain and with France, than of Nicholas. An ill-conceived war with Japan cost Russia dearly, and fear of a wider conflagration contributed to the very Anglo-Russian which Wilhelm feared.

In addition to these tense international situations, Nicholas faced domestic difficulties. His grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, was assassinated by a bomb set by revolutionaries, even though he had done many things to improve the situation of his country. The revolutionaries were bent not on achieving power through the existing

- 3

regime, but by toppling it altogether. As a child, Nicholas and his family had survived an assassination attempt by a bomb on a train. Defeat by Japan emboldened the internal opponents of his regime, unleashing the Russian Revolution of 1905, during which organized strikes and local uprisings forced Nicholas to concede and indirectly-elected national assembly, or Duma I the October Manifesto.

Nicholas's relations with the new Duma were not good. The first Duma, with a majority of Kadets, almost immediately came into conflict with him. Nicholas fired his relatively liberal prime minister, Sergei Witte, and dissolved the Duma. After the second Duma resulted in similar problems, new Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin unilaterally dissolved it, and changed the electoral laws to allow for more conservative future Duams, to be dominated by the liberal-conservative Octobrist Party of Alexander Guchkov. Stolypin, a skillful politician, had striving plans for reform. These included making loans available to the lower classes to enable them to buy land, with the intent of forming a farming class that was loyal to the crown. Conservatives at court who had more influence with the Emperor under minded his plans. By the time of Stolypin's assassination by an anarchist in 1911, he and the Emperor were barely on speaking terms, and his fall was widely foreseen.

To make Nicholas's life even more dramatic there was the matter of who would be the successor. Alexandra bore him four daughters before their son Alexei was born. The young heir was afflicted with hemophilia, which at that time was virtually untreatable and usually led to death. Because of the fragility of the autocracy at this time,

- 4

Nicholas and Alexandra chose not to divulge Alexei's condition to anyone outside the royal household.

In desperation, Alexandra sought help from a mystic, Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin seemed 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. Some to this day have said that she even offered her self and the throne if he was able to help her son and future heir to crown.

Nicholas wanted to be loved by his people, and did what he thought would embrace that need for acceptance. Left to his own devices he might have accepted a system of constitutional monarchy and became a reforming Emperor. The influence of political reactionaries, principally his wife, and his relatives, with Rasptuin behind the scenes, made this impossible.

Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serb nationalists in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Nicholas wavered as to Russia's course. He wanted neither to abandon his Serb allies to Austria-Hungary's demands, nor to provoke a general war. In a series of letters exchanged with the Kaiser (the so-called Willy and Nicky correspondence), the two proclaimed their desire for peace, and each attempted to get the other to back down. Nicholas took concrete measures in this regard, demanding that Russia's mobilization be only against the Austrian border, in the hopes of preventing war with Germany. It proved too late for personal communications to determine the course of events. The Russians had no contingency plan for a partial mobilization, and on July 31, 1914, Nicholas took the fateful step of ordering a general mobilization. This led almost