Nicholas II
The last Russian emperor, whose refusal to share power with anyone destroyed a three-hundred-year dynasty and his family with it.
Nicholas II inherited the Russian throne in 1894 at twenty-six, reportedly telling a cousin that he was not prepared to be tsar and did not know how to talk to ministers. He then ruled for twenty-three years as though nothing were more important than passing his autocratic authority intact to his son. He was a devoted husband and father, personally gentle, and one of the most consequentially bad rulers of the modern era, and the second fact is not unrelated to the first.
The reign began with an omen nobody missed. At the coronation festivities on Khodynka Field outside Moscow in 1896, a rumor of a shortage of free gifts started a stampede that killed well over a thousand people. Nicholas attended a French embassy ball the same evening on his advisers' urging. Petersburg took note.
1905
His government drifted into a war with Japan in 1904, partly on the theory that a small victorious war would steady the country. Russia lost, humiliatingly, culminating in the destruction of its Baltic fleet at Tsushima after that fleet had sailed most of the way around the world to be sunk.
Defeat cracked the domestic order. In January 1905 a priest led a peaceful procession of workers to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the tsar they still called their father. Troops fired on them. Bloody Sunday killed perhaps a couple of hundred people and something more important: the belief, genuinely widespread among Russian peasants and workers, that the tsar was on their side and only his officials were the problem. Strikes, mutinies, and peasant risings ran through the year.
Cornered, Nicholas issued the October Manifesto granting civil liberties and an elected legislature, the Duma. He then spent the following decade undermining it, dissolving assemblies he disliked and rewriting the franchise to produce compliant ones. He had conceded under duress and regretted it immediately, which is the worst possible way to concede.
Alexei, Rasputin, and the war
The private tragedy poisoned the public one. The heir, Alexei, born in 1904, had hemophilia, a fact hidden from the country. His mother Alexandra, desperate, came to depend on the Siberian holy man Grigori Rasputin, who seemed able to stop the boy's bleeding. Rasputin's presence at court, and the wild rumors it generated, corroded what remained of the monarchy's prestige.
Then came 1914. Russia mobilized in support of Serbia, and the war exposed every weakness of the state: rifles in short supply, railways failing, cities short of bread. In the late summer of 1915 Nicholas made the decision that finished him. He went to the front to take personal command of the armies, which meant every subsequent defeat was his alone, and left Alexandra, a German-born empress widely and falsely suspected of treason, running the government at home with Rasputin's advice. Ministers were shuffled at a farcical pace. Even the aristocracy concluded the dynasty had to go; a group of nobles murdered Rasputin in December 1916.
The end
In March 1917 bread riots in Petrograd turned into a general uprising, the garrison refused to fire, and the generals and Duma leaders told Nicholas he had lost the army. He abdicated on March 15, first for himself and then, on medical advice about Alexei, for his son too. His brother declined the crown. Three hundred and four years of Romanov rule ended in a railway carriage in Pskov.
The family was moved east and, on the night of July 17, 1918, with forces fighting the Bolsheviks closing on Yekaterinburg, they were shot in a cellar: Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children, and four servants. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized them in 2000.
Nicholas is often described as a man out of his depth, which is true and lets him off lightly. He was not asked to be a genius. He was asked to accept limits on his own authority at several moments when doing so might have preserved both the monarchy and a constitutional path for Russia, and each time he treated the demand as a religious betrayal of his inheritance. The regime that followed him was more autocratic than his by an order of magnitude, which is the sort of thing that happens when the mildest available reform is refused for twenty years.