Nicholas Romanov: Life and Death

🔖 When, on 14 May 1896, the young Russian ruler Nicholas II was solemnly crowned Tsar of All the Russias, there can hardly have been a single person among the many thousands who crowded around the ancient Assumption Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin who thought for a moment that they were witnessing the end of a centuries-old tradition. Before a host of eager eyes the last of Russia's autocrats was formally invested with his awesome power in a ceremony that went back to 1547 and Ivan the Terrible. There were still four days left to the Khodynka Field catastrophe that was to cast its gloomy shadow over all the subsequent years of Nicholas's reign, and everything seemed to favour the new monarch as perhaps never before. His reign, met with hopes and expectations, began in a period of astonishing calm in both domestic affairs and international relations throughout Europe. Russia was experiencing an unprecedented economic upswing and the political turmoil that followed the great reforms under Alexander II seemed a thing of the distant past. Nevertheless, with every successive year the country, at first imperceptibly, but still ineluctably, was headed for a tremendous catastrophe. The causes of such a fateful turn in Russia's destiny and the degree of Nicholas II's personal responsibility for the tragic outcome of his reign are hard to determine even today, although a truly immense body of literature — both memoirs and researches — has been devoted to those questions. The aim of t...