Rasputin

The task facing Nicholas was enormous.

marched towards the Winter Palace in St Petersburg with demands for economic and political improvements. The troops fired warning shots, and then opened fire on the crowd. Several hundred were killed and injured, and Nicholas II was cursed as Nicholas the Bloody

throne in 1894, the year of his marriage to Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, German by title but English by upbringing. On becoming a Romanov, Alix adopted Orthodox Christianity and changed her name to Alexandra, adopting the patronymic Fedorovna required of Russian empresses.
Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, had ruled since 1881, applying economic policies designed to stimulate industry, business and commerce, and with dramatic success. By the end of the century Russia had been transformed into a major player in the world league of oil, steel, coal and wheat producers. But economic success brought with it industrial unrest, the organization of workers in illegal trade unions and their political agitation by Marxist revolutionaries

Nicholas ascended the

They included politicians and journalists, writers and poets, composers and musicians, artists and critics, teachers, doctors and lawyers, scientists and engineers. Their ideas varied widely, but they shared a critical attitude towards the state and its effects on social development. Part of the intelligentsia plotted to overthrow the existing state, and the most extreme of them were organized by Vladimir Lenin into a party of ‘professional revolutionaries’,

They included politicians and

Standing outside this structure were the intelligentsia

The mentality of the fast-growing working class – mostly ex-peasants and poor town dwellers – was changing rapidly under the impact of harsh industrial working conditions and socialist

The vast multi-national empire was struggling to modernize: to continue the economic upsurge begun in the 1880s; to tackle peasant land-hunger by major reform; to enable popular participation in the political process by the introduction of