Tsar Nicholas Ii Quotes

I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.

My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.

Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.

Maria cries unashamedly on my shoulder while I whisper and pet her cheek, but Anastasia grips my other hand and stares fiercely back at our Alexander Palace with her wet blue eyes until it is no more than a lemon-colored speck against the sunrise.

There was a happy irony in the first cousin of the autocratic Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II (with whom George bore a striking resemblance) furthering British democracy.

Russians love a good plot--camarillas, Masons, whatever--where in fact there is usually just plain sloppiness. Someone mistrusted someone else; someone failed to warn someone else. So someone decided to take out more insurance, called up the troops and removed the tsar from Petersburg. Great and terrible events in Russia are usually due to someone's stupidity or laziness.

July is a bad month for revolutionaries. In France, Robespierre was executed in July; in Russia, five eminent Decembrists, who had revolted against Nicholas I, were hanged in July. And now in July the hour of vengeance had come. Vengeance against the son and grandson of the man who had once killed Lenin's brother. The revolutionaries' age-old hunt for Russian tsars was drawing to a close.

The local Red Cross chapter volunteered to publish his book. It came out in a deluxe, gold-embossed, Japanese-paper edition to remind the reader of human artistry, which can be a refuge from evil and a source of new, platonic stirrings. One copy was reserved for His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II. (The Tsar fairly devoured mystical works, believing that hell could be avoided by a combination of education and deceit.) "The Book of Kings and Fools," p. 136.

All around me is cowardice and deceit.

The Pearl of Russia was one of fifty jeweled eggs handcrafted over a period of three decades for Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II. Each year they’d given them as Easter presents to their wives and mothers.

The last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, had been deposed and then murdered during the Russian Revolution in 1917,

Alexander II was known as the “Tsar-Liberator,” yet his murder became the preeminent objective of Russian revolutionaries. The assassins went to extraordinary lengths. Once, near Moscow, they purchased a building near the railway track and tunneled a gallery from the building under the track, where they planted a huge mine. The Tsar was saved when his train left Moscow in a different direction.

In his work habits, Nicholas was solitary. Unlike most monarchs and chiefs of state—unlike even his own wife—he had no private secretary. He preferred to do things for himself. On his desk he kept a large calendar of his daily appointments, scrupulously entered in his own hand. When official papers arrived, he opened them, read them, signed them and put them in envelopes himself.

With much the same sense of privacy, Nicholas disliked discussions of politics, especially in casual conversation. A new aide-de-camp, galloping at the side of the Tsar near Livadia on a morning ride, supposed that his duty was to amuse the Tsar with small talk. He chose politics as his subject. Nicholas replied reluctantly, and quickly switched the conversation to the weather, the mountain scenery, the horses and tennis. When the aide persisted, Nicholas put spurs to his horse and galloped ahead. This sense of privacy, along with an unwillingness to provoke personal unpleasantness, created perennial difficulty between the Tsar and his ministers. Ministers were appointed and dismissed directly by the crown. In theory, they were the servants of the Tsar, and he was free to give these posts to whomever he liked, to listen to or ignore a minister’s advice, and to hand down dismissals without explanation.

Nicholas never mastered the technique of forceful, efficient management of subordinates. He hated scenes and found it impossible to sternly criticize or dismiss a man to his face. If something was wrong, he preferred to give a minister a friendly reception, comment gently and shake hands warmly. Occasionally, after such an interview, the minister would return to his office, well pleased with himself, only to receive in the morning mail a letter regretfully asking for his resignation. Not unnaturally, these men complained that they had been deceived.

Unlike many a royal couple, Nicholas and Alexandra shared the same bed. The bedroom was a large chamber with tall windows opening onto the park. A large double bed made of light-colored wood stood between two windows. Chairs and couches covered in flowered tapestry were scattered about on a thick carpet of mauve pile. To the right of the bed, a door led to a small chapel used by the Empress for her private prayers. Dimly lit by hanging lamps, the room contained only an icon on one wall and a table holding a Bible. Another door led from the bedroom to Alexandra’s private bathroom, where a collection of old-fashioned fixtures were set in a dark recess.

The most famous room in the palace—for a time the most famous room in Russia—was the Empress’s mauve boudoir. Everything in it was mauve: curtains, carpet, pillows; even the furniture was mauve-and-white Hepplewhite. Masses of fresh white and purple lilacs, vases of roses and orchids and bowls of violets perfumed the air. Tables and shelves were cluttered with books, papers and porcelain and enamel knicknacks. In this room, Alexandra surrounded herself with mementoes of her family and her religion. The walls were covered with icons. Over her chaise-longue hung a picture of the Virgin Mary. A portrait of her mother, Princess Alice, looked down from another wall. On a table in a place of honor stood a large photograph of Queen Victoria. The only portrait in the room other than religious and family pictures was a portrait of Marie Antoinette.

In the evening after supper, Nicholas often sat in the family drawing room reading aloud while his wife and daughters sewed or embroidered. His choice, said Anna Vyrubova, who spent many of these cozy evenings with the Imperial family, might be Tolstoy, Turgenev or his own favorite, Gogol. On the other hand, to please the ladies, it might be a fashionable English novel. Nicholas read equally well in Russian, English and French and he could manage in German and Danish.

Books were supplied by his private librarian, whose job it was to provide the Tsar each month with twenty of the best books from all countries. This collection was laid out on a table and Nicholas arranged them in order of preference; thereafter the Tsar’s valets saw to it that no one disarranged them until the end of the month. Sometimes, instead of reading, the family spent evenings pasting snapshots taken by the court photographers or by themselves into green leather albums stamped in gold with the Imperial monograph. Nicholas enjoyed supervising the placement and pasting of the photographs and insisted that the work be done with painstaking neatness.

marriage would necessitate a change of religion, the still-hesitant Alix at first refused. But the otherwise impassive Nicky was nothing if not determined. The very day after Ernie and Ducky were married, the overwhelmed princess finally agreed to become both Russian Orthodox and wife of the heir to the Russian throne. Just as Queen Victoria, the preeminent guest at the festivities, was finishing her breakfast, Ella burst in on her grandmother with the dramatic announcement that “Alix and Nicky are to be engaged.” The wedding was planned for the spring of 1895, but the death of Nicky’s father changed all the elaborate arrangements, including sufficient time for Alix to become literate in the Russian language. Alix had just joined her future husband at the imperial summer palace of Livadia in the Crimea when Tsar Alexander III died on November 1, 1894. His widow Minnie, the princess of Wales’s sister, became the dowager empress; and her son Nicky the new tsar, Nicholas II. The morning after her fiancé’s accession, Alix was received into the Orthodox faith and at the same time given the new name of Alexandra Feodorovna. The imperial family decided the wedding should follow the late tsar’s funeral within the week. Like her mother’s wedding at Osborne in 1862, Alix’s was far more funereal in tone than joyous. All that saved it from complete gloom was the depth of the young bride and groom’s love for each other. During the years when Alice’s children were marrying their cousins and producing a multitude of little second cousins, Vicky had moved from the hurricane’s eye to near oblivion. Though she had been wounded by Fritz’s illness and Willy’s uncivil behavior, until June 1888 she at least had a loving and sympathetic husband to share her distress and lighten her sometimes intolerable burden. After his death, Vicky was left to face her martyrdom stripped of that unfaltering support. With her widowhood, her difficulties centered, inevitably, on the new emperor. Such was the exquisite release Willy experienced in succeeding his father to the throne that he took vainglory to new heights. To the horror of his mother and English grandmother, he jettisoned the standard symbols of mourning that were obligatory for a son in so visible a role, notably refusing to refrain from travel for pleasure. On a grander scale, in his eagerness to test his new powers, Willy made the most disastrous mistake of his early reign only two years after coming