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Both the Provisional Government and Nicholas wanted the royal family to go into exile following his abdication, with the United Kingdom being the preferred option. [116] The British government reluctantly offered the family asylum on 19 March 1917, although it was suggested that it would be better for the Romanovs to go to a neutral country. News of the offer provoked uproar from the Labour Party and many Liberals, and the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, advised the government that the extreme left would use the ex-tsar's presence "as an excuse for rousing public opinion against us". [117] The Liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, preferred that the family went to a neutral country, and wanted the offer to be announced as at the request of the Russian government. [118] The offer of asylum was withdrawn in April following objections by King George V, who, acting on the advice of his secretary, Lord Stamfordham, was worried that Nicholas's presence might provoke an uprising like the previous year's Easter Rising in Ireland. However, later the king defied his secretary and went to the Romanov memorial service at the Russian Church in London. [119] In the early summer of 1917, the Russian government approached the British government on the issue of asylum and was informed the offer had been withdrawn due to the considerations of British internal politics. [120] Under pressure from the attempted 1905 Russian Revolution, on 5 August of that year Nicholas II issued a manifesto about the convocation of the State Duma, known as the Bulygin Duma, initially thought to be an advisory organ. In the October Manifesto, the Tsar pledged to introduce basic civil liberties, provide for broad participation in the State Duma, and endow the Duma with legislative and oversight powers. He was determined, however, to preserve his autocracy even in the context of reform. This was signalled in the text of the 1906 constitution. He was described as the supreme autocrat, and retained sweeping executive powers, also in church affairs. His cabinet ministers were not allowed to interfere with nor assist one another; they were responsible only to him. [ citation needed] The six-month interval between the death of Elizabeth of Russia and the accession of Catherine the Great witnessed the six-month reign of Catherine's husband, Peter III, who was assassinated thanks to his pro-Prussian policies. Ironically, Catherine was herself a Prussian princess who had married into the Romanov dynasty.

In 1884, Nicholas's coming-of-age ceremony was held at the Winter Palace, where he pledged his loyalty to his father. Later that year, Nicholas's uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, married Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and his late wife Princess Alice of the United Kingdom (who had died in 1878), and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. At the wedding in St. Petersburg, the sixteen-year-old Tsarevich met with and admired the bride's youngest surviving sister, twelve-year-old Princess Alix. Those feelings of admiration blossomed into love following her visit to St. Petersburg five years later in 1889. Alix had feelings for him in turn. As a devout Lutheran, she was initially reluctant to convert to Russian Orthodoxy to marry Nicholas, but later relented. [9] Nicholas Alexandrovich, Tsarevich of Russia, 1880s In 1979, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsaritsa Alexandra, three of their daughters, and those of four non-family members killed with them, were discovered near Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) by amateur archaeologist Alexander Avdonin. [166] [167] In January 1998, the remains excavated from underneath the dirt road near Yekaterinburg were officially identified as those of Nicholas II and his family, excluding one daughter (either Maria or Anastasia) and Alexei. The identifications—including comparisons to a living relative, performed by separate Russian, British and American scientists using DNA analysis—concur and were found to be conclusive. [168] [169] [170] [171]After the Second Duma resulted in similar problems, the new prime minister Pyotr Stolypin (whom Witte described as "reactionary") [ citation needed] unilaterally dissolved it, and changed the electoral laws to allow for future Dumas to have a more conservative content, and to be dominated by the liberal-conservative Octobrist Party of Alexander Guchkov. Stolypin, a skilful politician, had ambitious plans for reform. These included making loans available to the lower classes to enable them to buy land, with the intent of forming a farming class loyal to the crown. Nevertheless, when the Duma remained hostile, Stolypin had no qualms about invoking Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws, which empowered the tsar to issue 'urgent and extraordinary' emergency decrees 'during the recess of the State Duma'. Stolypin's most famous legislative act, the change in peasant land tenure, was promulgated under Article 87. [84]

Robert D. Warth, "Before Rasputin: Piety and the Occult at the Court of Nicholas II." Historian 47.3 (1985): 323–337. In view of the enemy's proximity to Yekaterinburg and the exposure by the Cheka of a serious White Guard plot with the goal of abducting the former tsar and his family… In light of the approach of counterrevolutionary bands toward the Red capital of the Urals and the possibility of the crowned executioner escaping trial by the people (a plot among the White Guards to try to abduct him and his family was exposed and the compromising documents will be published), the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet, fulfilling the will of the Revolution, resolved to shoot the former Tsar, Nikolai Romanov, who is guilty of countless, bloody, violent acts against the Russian people. [163] In a celebration on 27 May 1896, a large festival with food, free beer and souvenir cups was held in Khodynka Field outside Moscow. Khodynka was chosen as the location as it was the only place near Moscow large enough to hold all of the Moscow citizens. [31] Khodynka was primarily used as a military training ground and the field was uneven with trenches. Before the food and drink was handed out, rumours spread that there would not be enough for everyone. As a result, the crowd rushed to get their share and individuals were tripped and trampled upon, suffocating in the dirt of the field. [32] Of the approximate 100,000 in attendance, it is estimated that 1,389 individuals died [30] and roughly 1,300 were injured. [31] The Khodynka Tragedy was seen as an ill omen and Nicholas found gaining popular trust difficult from the beginning of his reign. The French ambassador's gala was planned for that night. The Tsar wanted to stay in his chambers and pray for the lives lost, but his uncles believed that his absence at the ball would strain relations with France, particularly the 1894 Franco-Russian Alliance. Thus Nicholas attended the party; as a result the mourning populace saw Nicholas as frivolous and uncaring. [ citation needed] In 1981, Nicholas and his immediate family were recognised as martyred saints by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. [186] On 14 August 2000, they were recognised by the synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. This time they were not named as martyrs, since their deaths did not result immediately from their Christian faith; instead, they were canonized as passion bearers. [187] According to a statement by the Moscow synod, they were glorified as saints for the following reasons: In the last Orthodox Russian monarch and members of his family we see people who sincerely strove to incarnate in their lives the commands of the Gospel. In the suffering borne by the Royal Family in prison with humility, patience, and meekness, and in their martyrs' deaths in Yekaterinburg in the night of 17 July 1918 was revealed the light of the faith of Christ that conquers evil. [ citation needed]

Shain, Yossi The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State University of Michigan Press (2005) p.69. The Kishinev newspaper Bessarabets, which published anti-Semitic materials, received funds from Viacheslav Plehve, Minister of the Interior. [54] These publications served to fuel the Kishinev pogrom (rioting). The government of Nicholas II formally condemned the rioting and dismissed the regional governor, with the perpetrators arrested and punished by the court. [55] Leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church also condemned anti-Semitic pogroms. Appeals to the faithful condemning the pogroms were read publicly in all churches of Russia. [56] In private Nicholas expressed his admiration for the mobs, viewing anti-Semitism as a useful tool for unifying the people behind the government; [57] however in 1911, following the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin by the Jewish revolutionary Dmitry Bogrov, he approved of government efforts to prevent anti-Semitic pogroms. [58] Russification of Finland

Before Rasputin's arrival, the tsarina and the tsar had consulted numerous mystics, charlatans, "holy fools", and miracle workers. The royal behavior was not some odd aberration, but a deliberate retreat from the secular social and economic forces of his time—an act of faith and vote of confidence in a spiritual past. They had set themselves up for the greatest spiritual advisor and manipulator in Russian history. [90] This is a list of all reigning monarchs in the history of Russia. It includes the princes of medieval Rus′, tsars, and emperors of Russia. The list begins with the semi-legendary prince Rurik of Novgorod, sometime in the mid 9th century ( c.862) and ends with emperor Nicholas II who abdicated in 1917, and was executed with his family in 1918. Radziwill, Catherine (1931) Nicholas II, The Last of the Tsars, London: Cassell And Company Ltd., p. 100. The letters of Tsar Nicholas and Empress Marie: being confidential correspondence between Nicholas II, last of the Tsars, and his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. Edward J. Bing (ed.). London: Nicholson and Watson, 1937.

Further complicating domestic matters was the matter of the succession. Alexandra bore Nicholas four daughters, Grand Duchess Olga in 1895, Grand Duchess Tatiana in 1897, Grand Duchess Maria in 1899, and Grand Duchess Anastasia in 1901, before their son Alexei was born on 12 August 1904. The young heir was afflicted with Hemophilia B, a hereditary disease that prevents blood from clotting properly, which at that time was untreatable and usually led to an untimely death. As a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra carried the same gene mutation that afflicted several of the major European royal houses, such as Prussia and Spain. Hemophilia, therefore, became known as " the royal disease". Through Alexandra, the disease had passed on to her son. As all of Nicholas and Alexandra's daughters were assassinated with their parents and brother in Yekaterinburg in 1918, it is not known whether any of them inherited the gene as carriers. [ citation needed] In late 2015, at the insistence of the Russian Orthodox Church, [179] Russian investigators exhumed the bodies of Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, for additional DNA testing, [180] which confirmed that the bones were of the couple. [181] [182] [183] Funeral