Nicholas II

Nicholas II was the last emperor of Russia. Born near St. Petersburg in May 1868, he was the eldest son of Alexander III and Empress Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, which made him a first cousin of George V of Britain. In November 1894, weeks after his father's unexpected death brought him to the throne, he married Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who took the name Alexandra Feodorovna. The couple had four daughters and a son, Alexei, whose hemophilia, inherited through Victoria's line, was concealed from the public and drew the empress toward the Siberian healer Grigori Rasputin.

Trained for autocracy and committed to preserving it, Nicholas began his reign by dismissing hopes of constitutional reform. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and the shooting of petitioners on Bloody Sunday in January 1905 ignited revolution across the empire. The October Manifesto of 1905 conceded civil liberties and an elected Duma, but Nicholas curtailed its powers and dissolved its early sessions, and the constitutional experiment remained fragile.

Russia's entry into the First World War in 1914 initially rallied opinion behind the dynasty, but enormous casualties and supply failures eroded it. In 1915 Nicholas took personal command of the army, leaving domestic government under the influence of Alexandra and Rasputin, whose murder in December 1916 came too late to restore confidence. When bread riots and mutiny engulfed Petrograd in early 1917, his generals and Duma leaders urged him to step down, and he abdicated on 15 March, ending more than three centuries of Romanov rule.

Held with his family at Tsarskoye Selo, then Tobolsk, and finally Yekaterinburg, Nicholas was shot together with his wife, children, and four attendants by Bolshevik guards on 17 July 1918. The remains were identified after the Soviet collapse and reburied in St. Petersburg in 1998, and the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the family in 2000.