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Person1868 – 1918

Nicholas II

Also called: Nikolai II

Last emperor of Russia (1894–1917), who abdicated in the February Revolution of 1917 and was executed with his family by the Bolsheviks the next year

Son of Alexander III, he came to the throne in 1894. Determined to preserve autocracy, he was nonetheless forced to concede a parliament, the Duma, after defeat by Japan and the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of 1905. When he took personal command of the army in the First World War, the empress and the monk Rasputin meddled in government in the capital, and the dynasty lost public support. Deposed in the February Revolution, he was held with his family and executed at Yekaterinburg in July 1918.

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1 related event

  1. 1
    1917February Revolutionmonarch

    Exhausted by war and hunger, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd rose up; Nicholas II abdicated and the Romanov dynasty came to an end. Power was split between the Provisional Government and the Soviet.

People who appear alongside

  • Alexander Kerensky1881 – 1970

    Minister of justice and war and then prime minister (1917) of the Provisional Government after the February Revolution; he kept Russia in the war and was overthrown in October

  • Vladimir Lenin1870 – 1924

    Leader of the Bolsheviks who set up the Soviet government in the October Revolution of 1917, chaired it, and founded the USSR in 1922

Themes this person appears in

  • World War I and the Russian Revolution1908 – 1923

    From the Balkan crises to a war of trenches and total mobilization that toppled four empires; the Russian Revolution it unleashed, which created the first socialist state; and the Versailles settlement of national self-determination and the League of Nations