Who Was the Last Tsar of Russia?
At 11:50 p.m. on 17 July 1918 (4 July O.S.) in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, a squad of eight Latvian and Russian Chekists under the command of Yakov Yurovsky raised their revolvers and fired eleven bullets into the chest of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of All the Russias, and a fusillade into the rest of the family. Nicholas was 50; Alexandra was 46; the children were Olga (22), Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17), and the Tsarevich Alexei (13). The four Romanov retainers — the court physician Dr. Yevgeny Botkin, the prikhod kuhmister Ivan Kharitonov, the footman Alexei Trupp, and the lady’s maid Anna Demidova — were killed at the same time. The Romanov dynasty’s three hundred and four-year rule ended in the cellar of a Yekaterinburg merchant’s house (Massie, The Last Days of the Romanovs, 1995; Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, 1992; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).
The execution was ordered by the Ural’skii oblastnoy sovet (the Ural Regional Soviet) and approved by the central Soviet government in Moscow.
The accession of 1894
Nicholas Alexandrovich was born on 18 May 1868 (6 May O.S.) in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, the first child and eldest son of Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna (née Dagmar of Denmark). The education of the heir was supervised by the tutor K. P. Pobedonostsev, who would later be the ober-procurator of the Holy Synod, and the curriculum emphasised military and political history, English, German, French, and the Sudebniki (Russian legal codes). Nicholas inherited the throne on 1 November 1894 (20 October O.S.), at the age of 26, on the death of his father. The coronation at the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin on 14 May 1896 (2 May O.S.) was the first Russian coronation to be filmed (by the Lumière cameramen of Charles Moisson and Francis Doublier) and was marred by the Khodynka catastrophe of 18 May 1896 (6 May O.S.): 1,389 people were killed in the panic on the Khodynka field, and 645 more died of their injuries in the following days (Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed., 2000; Lieven, The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. III, 2006; Pipes, 1990).
The Russo-Japanese War and 1905
War with Japan broke out in February 1904 with the Japanese torpedo-boat attack on Port Arthur and ended in September 1905 with the Treaty of Portsmouth. The first general strike in Russian history, of October 1905, brought the empire to a standstill and produced the October Manifesto of 17 October 1905 — a written acceptance that the tsar would not be the only source of law. The first State Duma met in the Tauride Palace on 27 April 1906; the second, in February 1907. The Fundamental Laws of 23 April 1906 retained the tsar’s power over war, peace, and the church but required the consent of the Duma for legislation. The third Duma (1 November 1907 – 9 June 1912) and the fourth (15 November 1912 – 6 October 1917) sat for their full terms (Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2004; Pipes, 1990).
Stolypin
The third Duma and the voivoda Pyotr Stolypin, the Minister of Internal Affairs and Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 8 July 1906, drove the Stolypinskaya reform: the decree of 9 November 1906 (ukaz 9.xi.1906) freed the peasant from the compulsory obshchina (commune) and the decree of 14 June 1910 consolidated the holding in lichnaya sobstvennost’ (personal property). By 1916, about 2.5 million households had withdrawn from the obshchina (about 28 percent of the eligible households of European Russia). Stolypin was assassinated in the Kiev Opera House on 14 September 1911 by the double agent Dmitry Bogrov (Yanov, The Fall of the Romanovs, 2013; Riasanovsky, 2000).
The war and the revolution
The war of 1914–1917 is the last of Nicholas’s reign. The mobilisation of 1914 raised 1,548,000 men from the first four cohorts. The Stavka (the Russian General Headquarters) at Baranowicze in present-day Belarus was at the centre of the strategy. The Brusilov offensive of June 1916 was the most successful Allied operation of the war; the Russian advance was 80 km, the Austrian losses 420,000, the Russian losses 500,000. The political crisis of 1915 was the tsar’s order of 5 September 1915 taking Verkhovnoe komandovanie (supreme command) into his own hands. The State Duma’s “Progressive Bloc” of August 1915 demanded a ministerstvo doveriya (a government of confidence). The murder of Rasputin on 30 December 1916 (17 December O.S.) by Prince Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and the deputies V. M. Purishkevich, A. I. Suvorin, and Dr. S. N. Landa was the last of the dynasty’s lost initiatives. Nicholas was at Mogilev; he was told of the murder at 4:00 a.m. on 31 December 1916 (18 December O.S.); he wrote in his diary: “Decent people are so few” (Lieven, Russia and the Making of the First World War, 1983; Pipes, 1990; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).
The February Revolution
The 23 February 1917 (8 March N.S.) strike of women textile workers in the Vyborg district of Petrograd began the February Revolution. By 27 February (14 February O.S.) the garrison of 160,000 men had mutinied. The Ispolkom of the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Committee of the State Duma had agreed to a dual power. Nicholas, on 28 February (15 February O.S.), left Mogilev for Tsarskoye Selo; his train was turned back at the Dno junction. The vysochaishee (imperial) manifesto of 2 March 1917 (15 March N.S.) at Pskov was the abdication. The Grand Duke Mikhail, on 3 March 1917 (16 March N.S.) at the apartment of Princess V. A. Putyatina on Millionnaya Street, signed the akt ob otrechenii of 3 March, and the Romanov dynasty’s three centuries of rule was over. The Petrograd Soviet’s Prikaz No. 1 of 1 March 1917 (16 March N.S.) had already dissolved the officer corps. The Provisional Government was a federation of the Duma and the Soviet; it would last until October (Figes, 1996; Pipes, 1990; Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1982).
The captivity and the death
The Romanovs were confined in the Alexander Palace until 13 August 1917, then at Tobolsk from 31 August 1917 to 30 April 1918, then at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg from 30 April 1918. The advance of the White Czechoslovak Legions in July 1918 precipitated the execution. Yurovsky’s squad of 8 Chekists used 14 Nagant revolvers. The total of dead was 11, including the doctor and the retainers. The bodies were stripped, the jewellery and the Romanov diamonds were taken, and the bodies were brought to the Motovilikha forest and burned. A second burial in the Rogozhka forest on 19 July 1918 was the final disposal. The remains of Nicholas and Alexandra were identified in 1989; the remains of the children — including the nayshya (heirlooms) — were identified in 2007 (Massie, 1995; Radzinsky, 1992; Pipes, 1990).
The canonisations
Nicholas and the family were canonised as novomučeniki (new martyrs) by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in 1981 and were added to the Russian liturgical calendar with the Sobor novomučenikov i ispovednikov Rossiiskikh. The Moscow Patriarchate canonised the family in 2000, with the title of strastoterptsy (passion-bearers), the same status as the medieval Boris and Gleb. The derzhavnaya (the “sovereign”) icon of the Mother of God, in the Kazan Cathedral of Moscow, is associated with the Romanovs (Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 1998; Figes, 1996).