As Nicholas came into power in 1894, Russia was enjoying a mild industrial boom, thanks to Sergius Witte, the current prime minister’s policies. But the world price of grain had dropped and the discontent among the peasantry was growing. Nicholas was reigning in a time when political controversy was sparking under the noses of the imperial family. Socialist movements and thoughts of revolt were on the minds of many quietly planning out the best time to strike. Nicholas was untrained as a statesman and inept to take on the responsibilities of being the supreme power in Russia. Because of his inaptitude and inadequate decisions and inability to change with the times he paved the path for revolution. This revolution in 1917 led to the end of his family’s dynasty, the end of the autocracy in Russia.

1613, this year marked the beginning of a powerful family of rulers who would solely rule Russia for the next four centuries. This family was the Romanovs, the Tsars of Russia from 1613 to 1917. In Russia, the Tsar was seen as the ultimate power in a country where the citizens had no rights. He was deified, he was worshipped, he was glorified. As one Russian citizen said, “The Tsar is both Tsar and god, he was everything, you could do no further”. The last Tsar of this powerful Romanov dynasty was Nicholas II, son of Alexander II and Marie.

In Nicholas’s early years his life was a sheltered one. He was the oldest of four sons, although by a series of mishaps, he did not have the support which brothers could give a reigning monarch. Nicholas’s brothers consisted of Alexander who had died at infancy. The next was George who was Nicholas’s companion throughout his boyhood, it was often said that you could hear Nicholas laughing at George’s jokes. Unfortunately, George developed tuberculosis and was sent to live in the mountains of Caucasus. The youngest brother was Michael, ten years younger than Nicholas, who never became a serious companion to the Tsar.

Although the family lived in a 900-room palace, they lived a very simplistic lifestyle. The children woke in the morning, washed their faces, ate a porridge breakfast, and then got dressed in peasant clothes.

Nicholas received a well-rounded education. He spoke French, German, and English. He was very good at history, rode beautifully, danced gracefully, and had an excellent shot. At nineteen, Nicholas commanded a squadron of Horse Guards and went with them to Krasnoe Selo, a great military camp outside of St. Petersburg. One thing was missing from his education, the knowledge of being a statesman.

In these beginning years of his life Nicholas was not raised as if he were going to be the next Tsar of Russia. All of Nicholas’s childhood he was treated as an adolescent by his mother. She pampered him, looked over him and advised him on what decisions to make. Because of his mother’s treatment he lacked the maturity and experience to make his own decisions well. His father refused to teach him the work of being a statesman. He felt that he lacked maturity, but his mother prevented him from being mature. Nicholas was not ready to be Tsar of Russia because he was trained only as a soldier and not as a statesman. Nicholas himself even knew that he wasn’t ready to be Tsar. The day his father, Alexander II died he said, “My god, my god, what a day. My head is spinning, I don’t know how to be a Tsar, I have no idea about the business of ruling, I have no idea how to talk to the ministers.

As quickly as Nicholas realized he was not fit to be Tsar, so did the rest of Russia. He already was losing the faith of his people and officials. His own ministers talked of how he was incapable of making decisions to rule in his empire. Sergius Witte said of Nicholas that he was, “A ruler who cannot be trusted, who approves today what he will reject tomorrow, is incapable of steering the ship of the state.”

Many members of the intelligentsia were hopeful that Nicholas II would follow the liberal path of Alexander II, but the Prince of Wales told Lord Carrington that he was disturbed by the young man’s slavish adherence to his father’s autocratic ideas and fierce prejudices, and his total lack of worldly sense. Carrington replied back that revolution was inevitable. The Prince snapped back that nothing was inevitable if the Tsar would move with the times. The Russian people began to sense that the Tsar had too much power in their society. They had no rights, no way of expressing their grievances. Nicholas however, refused to move with the times, he would only make decisions that he thought his father would have approved, regardless of what he thought was right. He rejected the mildest form of representative government as a ‘senseless dream’ and declared that he would ‘maintain for the good of the whole nation the principle of absolute autocracy as firmly and strongly as his late lamented father. The citizens wanted representation that he would not grant to them. From that moment on every liberal person in Russia joined in battle against him to receive what they thought should be theirs: rights and representation.

Nicholas because of the Boxer rebellion in 1900 had a pretext for occupying all of Manchuria, which he did against the advice of his ministers. This upset the Japanese, who had their eye on Tokyo. Nicholas could have reached an agreement with Tokyo by promising to remain within the boundaries of Manchuria and by recognizing Japan’s rule in Korea. Instead of trying to keep peace in 1903 he personally authorized the infantry of Russian troops into Northern Korea and the exploitation of timber concession near the Youu River. By 1904 Russia and Japan were at war. Everyone thought Russia would win, but the Japanese inflicted heavy losses upon the Russian army, and Russia’s disorganization and corruption became strongly apparent. “This country [Russia] has no real government,” said the British Charge d’ Affaires in 1904, he further continued:

Each Minister acts on his own, doing as much damage as possible to the other Ministers…It is a curious state of things. There is an Emperor, a religious madman almost - without a statesman, or even a council-surrounded by a legion of Grand Dukes-thirty-five of them and not one of them at war this moment, with a few priests and priestly women behind them. No middle class; an aristocracy ruined and absolutely without influence, an underpaid bureaucracy living, of necessity, on corruption. Beneath this, about 100 million of people gradually becoming poorer and poorer as they bear all the burden of taxation, drafted into the army in thousands…

In 1902 the government’s lack of attention to the people stirred up two large parties. The first were the social democrats that embraced Marxism and concentrated on their propaganda to the factory workers. This party because of quarreling between Lenin and Plenkanov split into two groups the Melsheviks and Bolsheviks. The second group, the S. R.’s, worked to provoke peasant uprisings advocating a socialist society. Their goals were to carry out “the will of the people”.

In January a strike broke out in the Putilov engineering works in St. Petersburg and spread rapidly to other factories. Father Gapon, who led the union, was forced with the choice of relinquishing his job or taking positive action. He decided to lead a peaceful demonstration of the workers to the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar. The petition called for an 8-hour day, freedom of speech and religion, and an amnesty for political prisoners. He had prepared it with the S. R.’s and 135,00 signatures.

Nicholas had been informed of the demonstration the night before but chose not to be present to receive the document, instead he left the responsibility of receiving the document to the St. Petersburg police. When the mob started to approach the palace the police opened fire, two to four thousand people were killed and wounded. This day was known as Bloody Sunday. As a result of Bloody Sunday an unprecedented number of strikes paralyzed Russian government. Street demonstrations struck at the heart of the autocracy. The people were beginning to realize that they all had something in common: they wanted rights in their society. With this common goal they worked together to slowly grasp the unlimited power of the Tsar.

The perfect time was approaching for the people of Russia to make their revolt. The military had lost a series of battles: in August of 1904 at Turenchen, in April in Maio-Yang, in December at Port Aurther, and in May of 1905 the emperor dispatched the Baltic fleet in to the far east and it was annihilated in the Battle of Tsushmia. The whole empire was disaffected and losing great faith in the decisions of their Tsar.

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