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Tsar Nicholas II was important because he was the absolute ruler of Russia and commander of the Russian army from September 1915 until his abdication in March 1917.

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He was often described as shy, weak, and even indecisive.

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He was the last Russian Emperor; his handling of WWI and Bloody Sunday enraged his subjects and led to his abdication.

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Nicholas II (born May 6 [May 18, New Style], 1868, Tsarskoye Selo [now Pushkin], near St. Petersburg, Russia-died July 17, 1918, Yekaterinburg) the last Russian emperor (1894-1917), who, with his wife, Alexandra, and their children, was killed by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution.

Early life and reign

Nikolay Aleksandrovich was the eldest son and heir apparent ( tsesarevich) of the tsarevitch Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (emperor as Alexander III from 1881) and his consort Maria Fyodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark). Succeeding his father on November 1, 1894, he was crowned tsar in Moscow on May 26, 1896.

Neither by upbringing nor by temperament was Nicholas fitted for the complex tasks that awaited him as autocratic ruler of a vast empire. He had received a military education from his tutor, and his tastes and interests were those of the average young Russian officers of his day. He had few intellectual pretensions but delighted in physical exercise and the trappings of army life: uniforms, insignia, parades. Yet on formal occasions he felt ill at ease. Though he possessed great personal charm, he was by nature timid; he shunned close contact with his subjects, preferring the privacy of his family circle. His domestic life was serene. To his wife, Alexandra, whom he had married on November 26, 1894, Nicholas was passionately devoted. She had the strength of character that he lacked, and he fell completely under her sway. Under her influence he sought the advice of spiritualists and faith healers, most notably Grigori Rasputin, who eventually acquired great power over the imperial couple.

Nicholas also had other irresponsible favourites, often men of dubious probity who provided him with a distorted picture of Russian life, but one that he found more comforting than that contained in official reports. He distrusted his ministers, mainly because he felt them to be intellectually superior to himself and feared they sought to usurp his sovereign prerogatives. His view of his role as autocrat was childishly simple: he derived his authority from God, to whom alone he was responsible, and it was his sacred duty to preserve his absolute power intact. He lacked, however, the strength of will necessary in one who had such an exalted conception of his task. In pursuing the path of duty, Nicholas had to wage a continual struggle against himself, suppressing his natural indecisiveness and assuming a mask of self-confident resolution. His dedication to the dogma of autocracy was an inadequate substitute for a constructive policy, which alone could have prolonged the imperial regime.

Soon after his accession Nicholas proclaimed his uncompromising views in an address to liberal deputies from the zemstvos, the self-governing local assemblies, in which he dismissed as "senseless dreams" their aspirations to share in the work of government. He met the rising groundswell of popular unrest with intensified police repression. In foreign policy, his naïveté and lighthearted attitude toward international obligations sometimes embarrassed his professional diplomats; for example, he concluded an alliance with the German emperor William II during their meeting at Björkö in July 1905, although Russia was already allied with France, Germany's traditional enemy.

Nicholas was the first Russian sovereign to show personal interest in Asia, visiting in 1891, while still tsesarevich, India, China, and Japan; later he nominally supervised the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. His attempt to maintain and strengthen Russian influence in Korea, where Japan also had a foothold, was partly responsible for the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). Russia's defeat not only frustrated Nicholas's grandiose dreams of making Russia a great Eurasian power, with China, Tibet, and Persia under its control, but also presented him with serious problems at home, where discontent grew into the revolutionary movement of 1905.

Nicholas considered all who opposed him, regardless of their views, as malicious conspirators. Disregarding the advice of his future prime minister Sergey Yulyevich Witte, he refused to make concessions to the constitutionalists until events forced him to yield more than might have been necessary had he been more flexible. On March 3, 1905, he reluctantly agreed to create a national representative assembly, or Duma, with consultative powers, and by the manifesto of October 30 he promised a constitutional regime under which no law was to take effect without the Duma's consent, as well as a democratic franchise and civil liberties. Nicholas, however, cared little for keeping promises extracted from him under duress. He strove to regain his former powers and ensured that in the new Fundamental Laws (May 1906) he was still designated an autocrat. He furthermore patronized an extremist right-wing organization, the Union of the Russian People, which sanctioned terrorist methods and disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda. Witte, whom he blamed for the October Manifesto, was soon dismissed, and the first two Dumas were prematurely dissolved as "insubordinate."

Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin, who replaced Witte and carried out the coup of June 16, 1907, dissolving the second Duma, was loyal to the dynasty and a capable statesman. But the emperor distrusted him and allowed his position to be undermined by intrigue. Stolypin was one of those who dared to speak out about Rasputin's influence and thereby incurred the displeasure of the empress. In such cases Nicholas generally hesitated but ultimately yielded to Alexandra's pressure. To prevent exposure of the scandalous hold Rasputin had on the imperial family, Nicholas interfered arbitrarily in matters properly within the competence of the Holy Synod, backing reactionary elements against those concerned about the Orthodox church's prestige.

After its ambitions in the Far East were checked by Japan, Russia turned its attention to the Balkans. Nicholas sympathized with the national aspirations of the Slavs and was anxious to win control of the Turkish straits but tempered his expansionist inclinations with a sincere desire to preserve peace among the Great Powers. After the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, he tried hard to avert the impending war by diplomatic action and resisted, until July 30, 1914, the pressure of the military for general, rather than partial, mobilization.

The outbreak of World War I temporarily strengthened the monarchy, but Nicholas did little to maintain his people's confidence. The Duma was slighted, and voluntary patriotic organizations were hampered in their efforts; the gulf between the ruling group and public opinion grew steadily wider. Alexandra turned Nicholas's mind against the popular commander in chief, his father's cousin the grand duke Nicholas, and on September 5, 1915, the emperor dismissed him, assuming supreme command himself. Since the emperor had no experience of war, almost all his ministers protested against this step as likely to impair the army's morale. They were overruled, however, and soon dismissed.

Nicholas II did not, in fact, interfere unduly in operational decisions, but his departure for headquarters had serious political consequences. In his absence, supreme power in effect passed, with his approval and encouragement, to the empress. A grotesque situation resulted: in the midst of a desperate struggle for national survival, competent ministers and officials were dismissed and replaced by worthless nominees of Rasputin. The court was widely suspected of treachery, and antidynastic feeling grew apace. Conservatives plotted Nicholas's deposition in the hope of saving the monarchy. Even the murder of Rasputin failed to dispel Nicholas's illusions: he blindly disregarded this ominous warning, as he did those by other highly placed personages, including members of his own family. His isolation was virtually complete.

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Nicholas II | Biography, Wife, Abdication, Death, & Facts

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Nicholas II, the last Russian emperor (1894-1917), whose autocratic but indecisive rule and disastrous military ventures led to the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. He abdicated in 1917 but was killed, along with his wife, Alexandra, and their children, by the Bolsheviks the following year.

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Vladimir Lenin advocated for Russian defeat during WWI.

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He believed that the war was the natural result of international capitalism.

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He was the leader of the Radical Socialist Bolshevik Party. The party was later renamed the Communist Party.

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Where was Vladimir Lenin born?

Where was Vladimir Lenin educated?

When was Vladimir Lenin married?

How did Vladimir Lenin change the world?

When did Vladimir Lenin die?

Vladimir Lenin, also called Vladimir Ilich Lenin, original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, (born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk, Russia-died January 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow), founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917-24) of the Soviet state. He was the founder of the organization known as Comintern (Communist International) and the posthumous source of "Leninism," the doctrine codified and conjoined with Karl Marx's works by Lenin's successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview.

If the Bolshevik Revolution is-as some people have called it-the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century's most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.

Early life

The making of a revolutionary

It is difficult to identify any particular events in his childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf, became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a voracious passion for learning. He graduated from high school ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a classical scholar. When he was 16, nothing in Lenin indicated a future rebel, still less a professional revolutionary-except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But, despite the comfortable circumstances of their upbringing, all five of the Ulyanov children who reached maturity joined the revolutionary movement. This was not an uncommon phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and political rights.

As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that unquestionably influenced his subsequent decision to take the path of revolution. First, his father was threatened shortly before his untimely death with premature retirement by a reactionary government that had grown fearful of the spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved eldest brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad State University), was hanged for conspiring with a revolutionary terrorist group that plotted to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a "state criminal."

Fortunately the income from his mother's pension and inheritance kept the family in comfortable circumstances, although it could not prevent the frequent imprisonment or exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin's high school principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin's Bolsheviks in November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn his back on the "criminal's" family. He courageously wrote a character reference that smoothed Lenin's admission to a university.

In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of the imperial Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I. Lenin] State University), but within three months he was expelled from the school, having been accused of participating in an illegal student assembly. He was arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather's estate in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read revolutionary political literature, especially Marx's Das Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.

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Vladimir Lenin | Biography, Facts, & Ideology

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Vladimir Lenin, also called Vladimir Ilich Lenin, original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, (born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk, Russia-died January 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow), founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917-24) of the Soviet state.

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Woodrow Wilson's goal was to keep America out of WWI.

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He led America into war to "make the world safe for democracy."

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He was the creator and leading advocate of the League of Nations.

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Woodrow Wilson | Biography, Presidency, & Accomplishments

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Woodrow Wilson: Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States.

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Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination led to the July Crisis and caused Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia.

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He was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary.

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He was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Este (born December 18, 1863, Graz, Austria-died June 28, 1914, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary [now in Bosnia and Herzogovina]) was the archduke of Austria-Este. His assassination in 1914 was the immediate cause of World War I.

Life until 1914

Franz Ferdinand was the eldest son of the archduke Charles Louis, who was the brother of the emperor Franz Joseph. The death of the heir apparent, Archduke Rudolf, in 1889 made Franz Ferdinand next in succession to the Austro-Hungarian throne after his father, who died in 1896. But because of Franz Ferdinand's ill health in the 1890s, his younger brother Otto was regarded as more likely to succeed, a possibility that deeply embittered Franz Ferdinand. His desire to marry Sophie, countess of Chotek, a lady-in-waiting, brought him into sharp conflict with the emperor and the court. Only after renouncing his future children's rights to the throne was the morganatic marriage allowed in 1900.

In foreign affairs he tried to restore Austro-Russian understanding without endangering the alliance with Germany. At home he thought of political reforms that would have strengthened the position of the crown and weakened that of the Magyars against the other nationalities in Hungary. His plans were based on the realization that any nationalistic policy pursued by one section of the population would endanger the multinational Habsburg empire. His relationship with Franz Joseph was exacerbated by his continuous pressure on the emperor, who in his later years left affairs to take care of themselves but sharply resented any interference with his prerogative. From 1906 onward Franz Ferdinand's influence in military matters grew, and in 1913 he became inspector general of the army.

Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

On June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand was in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina accompanied by his wife, Sophie. He was there as inspector general of the imperial army. The visit was not a popular one. Balkan politics were turbulent, and the neighbouring Kingdom of Serbia coveted Bosnia. Moreover, the date chosen for this imperial visit and Hapsburg show of force was June 28, a black date in Serbian history: it was the anniversary of the Turkish victory over Serbia at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This fanned the flames of dissent among Serbian nationalists even further.

The royal couple was travelling in a motorcade through Sarajevo in an open-topped car, ignorant of the fact that several would-be assassins awaited along the route of their preannounced stops. Shortly after 10 am, amid cheering crowds lining the wide avenue called Appel Quay, one of the attackers, Nedjelko Cabrinovic, threw a grenade at the royal couple's car. The bomb bounced off the back of the vehicle and exploded behind them, injuring members of the entourage who were in the next car and peppering bystanders with shrapnel.

After completing the planned reception at City Hall, the shaken royal couple insisted on changing their schedule and visiting the hospital to check on one of the officers injured in the morning attack. Confusion among the drivers in the motorcade followed, with the drivers starting off in the wrong direction, down the very avenue where the conspirators were still present. When the royal motorcade entered a side street and stopped to turn around, a compatriot of Cabrinovic, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, seized his opportunity. Approaching the royal couple's open car, he shot both Franz Ferdinand and Sophie with a Browning pistol. The driver of the couple's car then sped off for medical help. Sophie died en route and Franz Ferdinand died shortly after. Princip tried to shoot himself but was apprehended by bystanders. All of the conspirators were eventually found and arrested. Exempted from the death penalty because of his young age, Princip was sentenced to 20 years in prison, where he died from tuberculosis in 1918.

Anti-Serb protests and riots followed throughout Austria-Hungary in the wake of the assassination. One month later, on July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on the country seemingly behind the murders, Serbia. This set the Triple Alliance (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy) against Serbia's allies in the Triple Entente ( Russia, France, and Britain). Momentum became unstoppable, sparking one of the deadliest conflicts in history- World War I.
Fid Backhouse and others The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Este | Biography, Assassination, Facts, & World War I

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Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Este, Austrian archduke whose assassination was the immediate cause of World War I. He and his wife, Sophie, were murdered by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and a month later Austria declared war on Serbia.

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Zimmermann Planned to get the U.S. into war with Mexico and Japan. He sent out a code to Mexico to have a military alliance against the U.S.

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He was a German foreign secretary during part of the war.

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He was named foreign minister in 1916.

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Arthur Zimmermann | German Diplomat, WWI Foreign Minister

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Arthur Zimmermann, German foreign secretary during part of World War I (1916–17), the author of a sensational proposal to Mexico to enter into an alliance against the United States. After a career in the consular service, Zimmermann won transfer to the diplomatic branch in 1901. Because of the