The Road to Revolution Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia with Lucy Worsley

In the 1820s, the Romanov dynasty appeared invincible.

They'd ruled Russia for more than two centuries.

They'd built an empire and beaten Napoleon.

But now there was a new threat, more deadly than an invading army -

the Russian people themselves.

EXPLOSION

In July 1826, five revolutionaries were led out of this

St Petersburg fortress to their deaths.

These were the leaders of the Decembrists -

rebels who'd staged a failed uprising.

The execution went disastrously wrong.

The ropes weren't tied properly on the gallows and when the stools were

removed from underneath three of the men, they fell down to the ground.

They were squirming about. They were still alive!

One of them had broken legs and, as they strung him back up again,

he shouted out, "Poor Russia!

"They can't even hang men properly here!"

The Decembrist revolt was something new.

Not for nothing has it been called the first Russian Revolution.

These men wanted to change the system.

Some even wanted to do away with the Romanovs altogether.

EXPLOSION

In Russia, small groups of rebels were easily dealt with

but in the Romanovs' final century, their power unravelled...

..as the Russians went from executing revolutionaries

to murdering the tsar.

We're going to meet the last of the Romanovs -

Nicholas and Alexander, and Alexander and Nicholas.

And I'll show how these four tsars would meet

the challenge of revolution in different ways - with denial,

with liberal reform ended by a terrorist bomb,

with brutal reaction and refuge in the mysticism

of notorious holy man Rasputin.

And we'll see how the Romanovs collided with the people, reeling

from famine and war, bringing the dynasty to its tragic and bloody end.

GUNFIRE

In December 1825,

Tsar Alexander I, the hammer of Napoleon, was dead.

Who was to succeed him?

It was confusing and, sensing a power vacuum,

the Decembrists seized their moment.

3,000 soldiers gathered here,

refusing to swear the oath of loyalty to the new tsar, Nicholas.

Many of their leaders had been to Western Europe.

They'd been to Paris.

They'd been radicalised by the ideas that they'd

come across there.

So they gathered by the Bronze Horseman, the statue

of the moderniser Peter the Great, in order to call for change.

What they wanted was an end to serfdom and a free press.

In fact, they wanted the foundations of democracy.

The new tsar dithered. The situation seemed to be getting away from him.

As night fell, he ordered his artillery to open fire.

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE

Seven rounds emptied the square of all but the dead and the wounded.

That night, Nicholas wrote to his brother. "I am Emperor," he said.

"But, my God, at what a price! At the price of the blood of my people."

The traumatic events of his very first day would harden Nicholas.

The untested youth caught in this portrait soon discovered that

being tsar is much easier if people are scared of you.

It's said that he had a gaze like a rattlesnake that could

freeze the blood in your veins.

And these are the words of his own son.

Nicholas' ambition was laid out on the walls of the Winter Palace

in this interior, created to impress visiting diplomats.

The Decembrists had idealised Peter the Great as a moderniser

but Nicholas modelled himself on Peter, the great military conqueror.

Beneath Peter's larger-than-life portrait would sit Nicholas himself.

But Peter had wanted Russia to accelerate into the future.

Nicholas would spend the next 30 years trying to put on the brakes.

From his throne, Nicholas formulated a new philosophy for Russia.

The rest of Europe was struggling with concepts like liberty,

equality and fraternity, and Nicholas made a very Russian response.

For him, it was to be about orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality.

It was an ultra-conservative message.

In Nicholas' new mantra for Russia, there was

to be God on one side, Russia on the other,

and Nicholas himself in the centre, holding the whole thing together.

Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality was invented to create

an obedient people who didn't ask questions.

Even Nicholas' inner circle were chosen for their dependability.

He liked to say that he needed loyal advisers, not smart ones.

Nevertheless, groups of writers and thinkers emerged -

the intelligentsia, who set out to challenge this stupefying status quo.

By the middle of the century,

subjects like serfdom were openly tackled by radical journals

like The Contemporary,

whose roll call of writers included Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev.

More than any other writer,

it was Turgenev who changed people's minds about serfdom.

He grew up in a noble family on an estate rather like this.

He had a privileged childhood

but he witnessed his mother being tyrannical with the family's serfs.

He saw serfs beaten, sent off to the army, serf families split up.

Turgenev wrote a series of stories,

collected under the innocuous title Sketches From A Hunter's Album.

Here was a human portrait of the serfs themselves alongside

the cruelty of their masters, the landowners.

This book was published in 1852,

exactly the same year as Uncle Tom's Cabin in the United States.

And just as Uncle Tom helped to mobilise public opinion

against slavery over there,

this book had the same effect against serfdom over here.

Tsar Nicholas I was so angry about the book that he placed Turgenev

under house arrest for having insulted the landowners of Russia.

Privately, Nicholas acknowledged that serfdom

would eventually have to go, but not yet.

His beloved army depended on it to fill its ranks

and he needed the military to enlarge his empire.

Under Nicholas, Russia expanded its territory in the Caucasus

and Central Asia and became the dominant power in the Near East.

Russia had the largest army in the world.

All the other powers thought that she was a terrifying threat.

But these numbers were deceptive.

Mostly, the army was made up of these conscripted peasants whose

equipment was poor and whose motivation was poorer.

And Nicholas, although he loved military parades, hadn't helped.

He'd promoted people who were loyal as opposed to people who were

talented. He just didn't have the right generals to win a war.

So it would only be a matter of time before the might of the Russian

war machine would prove to be paper-thin.

That moment came in 1853

when Nicholas blundered into the Crimean War.

Russia was fighting France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire.

And to Nicholas' increasing horror, he was on the losing side.

The Russians lose the Crimean War, essentially,

because they're a pre-industrial country trying to fight countries

which are already being transformed by the Industrial Revolution.

The British and French get to the Crimea by modern

forms of transport - the steamship and the railway.

Meanwhile,

the Russians are still essentially in the pre-industrial era.

They have to walk to the Crimea.

They can't supply their troops in the Crimea by anything

but pre-industrial means, and Russian artillery is

outranged on the battlefield by English and French rifle muskets.

They also simply don't have the financial muscle to keep going.

To add to Nicholas' disgrace, Russia was losing on her own soil.

There was no escape from the humiliation,

not even at the Romanovs' Summer Palace at Peterhof.

Just over there on the horizon on a clear day is the island of Kronstadt.

It's the naval base that defends St Petersburg 20 miles that way.

And from the very palace grounds, Nicholas, with his telescope,

could see French and British warships stationed near the island.

To them, this was a terrific show of strength, but to Nicholas, it was a

personal humiliation to see the enemy so close, so deep into his empire.

He'd been brought face-to-face with his own military weakness.

His courtiers noticed a physical change in Nicholas.

He was perpetually downcast, his face in wrinkles.

In 1855, six months into the Siege of Sevastopol, the emperor,

an autocrat of all the Russias, was taken ill.

Nicholas had a chill but, even so, he went outside into the horrible

St Petersburg winter to review his troops.

While he was watching, the snow was falling,

but he took off his coat and he unbuttoned his shirt.

This made him even iller.

And when he went back inside his palace,

he wouldn't let his doctors see him until it was too late.

He had full-blown pneumonia.

Some historians have speculated that maybe,

this was a deliberate action by Nicholas.

Maybe he was trying to commit suicide by snow.

The broken Nicholas had kept Russia static for 30 years,

and now, his country was a backwater.

But did his son, Alexander, have what it took to change things?

Well, this is how Alexander II is remembered in Russia today...

..as the last great tsar. And with good reason.

This inscription lists Alexander's CV in glowing terms. And rightly so.

He introduced reforms in education, in the judiciary,

in local government, in the army.

But his biggest achievement is listed right here at the top.

It says, in 1861, Alexander overturned serfdom,

liberating millions of peasants from centuries of slavery -

an act that earned him his name, the Tsar-Liberator.

By the mid-1850s, the arguments for abandoning serfdom were immense.

It was part of the disgrace at Crimea.

It tied people to the land so that industry couldn't develop.

And increasingly, it was just seen as wrong.

But when it came to reforming the system,

huge self-interest was also at work.

What really convinced Alexander to end serfdom was

the threat that he perceived to the Romanovs themselves.

Unless he introduced change through reform from above,

his hand might be forced from below through revolution.

After years of consultation with landowners,

Alexander signed the decree of emancipation in 1861.

In the Moscow State Archives, it's possible to see how the serfs

themselves would have learned the news.

This is the official document announcing the end of serfdom

that was printed and sent out across Russia to be read aloud in churches.

Now, in democratic America,

they'd have a civil war before everybody could agree to end slavery.

But in autocratic Russia, Alexander thought

he could just send out a document and it would happen.

He also thought that there must be a way of pleasing all

the parties to this transaction.

Well, he was wrong about that.

Now the serfs could own property, marry according to their choice,

trade freely and vote in local elections.

But when it came to sharing out land,

Russia's elite were less than generous.

When the land was split up, the landlords got two-thirds of it

and the best parts. The ex-serfs were given the leftovers.

They were going to find it hard to scratch out a living from that.

And the landlords got compensation

but the ex-serfs now had to pay for the right to work their land,

placing them immediately in debt.

The devil was in the detail.

Many people had hoped that Alexander's reforms were

the first step towards Russia becoming a liberal democracy

but they were destined to be disappointed.

At the start of his reign, Alexander embraced a word that'll be familiar

to everybody who remembers the end of the Cold War - glasnost.

It means openness. He eased up on censorship.

He allowed people to have a voice in reform.

Sounds like a good idea but you can argue that it was a terrible

mistake because it raised expectations.

As it gradually became clear that the reforms were compromised,

a new disillusioned generation emerged - the student radicals.

They wanted a revolution to overthrow tsarism altogether.

And some of them would use violence to achieve this.

The story of modern political terrorism starts here.

GUNFIRE

In 1866, there was the first ever attempt

on the tsar's life by a member of the public.

A student radical tried to shoot Alexander as he was

walking in St Petersburg.

I've come to the European University at St Petersburg to meet

Alexey Miller, professor of history, to find out who these radicals

were and why it was the reforming Alexander who became their target.

Why did some of the radicals turn to violence? Were they frustrated?

Desperation, disenchantment because, on the one hand, they were

talking about political violence but they were not doing much.

Still, sentences, court sentences, to these people,

-were extremely harsh.

-So you might as well commit violence?

If you're going to Siberia for 25 years,

-you might as well throw a bomb?

-That is one thing.

The second thing, the liberal part of the society feels...

Well, not full solidarity with the terrorists

but it doesn't feel full solidarity with the government

and doesn't want to support the government.

Vera Zasulich, who shot the governor

of St Petersburg in his office,

was tried by the jury and acquitted

because they believed that she had a moral right to do so.

-That's quite surprising.

-That is not surprising. That is very sad.

And that is a powerful message on the side of the society - go ahead!

You can continue! We are on your side!

And then they want destabilisation of the situation.

And how do you destabilise the situation?

You start hunting the tsar.

Hunting the tsar would become the obsession

of a revolutionary group named People's Will,

who've been called the first modern terrorist organisation.

In August 1879, at a fateful meeting, they condemned Alexander to death.

For maximum secrecy,

they held a meeting in a forest outside St Petersburg,

and here they decided that they'd be wasting their time

if they went after middle-ranking government officials.

What they needed to do

was strike a blow at the heart of the tsarist regime.

They decided to go for the tsar himself - Alexander II.

And this was to be no ordinary murder, as they put it.

It needed drama and spectacle to wake up the peasants

and start a revolution.

People's Will relentlessly pursued Alexander,

launching a series of attacks on his life.

In 1880, one of their number detonated a bomb that

destroyed the dining room of the Winter Palace.

11 people died but Alexander, who was late for supper, survived.

Security was increased

while Alexander belatedly tried to restart his reformist programme.

Plans were drawn up to introduce

a new consultative assembly to advise the tsar.

These were just days away from being enacted when People's Will

finally caught up with Alexander on the streets of St Petersburg.

Trying to wrong-foot the terrorists,

his carriage had taken a detour alongside this canal.

But People's Will were prepared.

One of their members was a brilliant young scientist

and he created a special bomb, a bit like a hand grenade.

It contained vials of nitroglycerin.

When these shattered, it would explode.

As Alexander's carriage came round that corner, a member

of People's Will was standing by and lobbed a grenade right at him.

EXPLOSION

Several onlookers were wounded but Alexander was fine.

His carriage was bomb-proof.

He should have stayed inside and driven off but no! He got out.

He wanted to talk to his would-be assassin.

And this gave the opportunity to another member of

People's Will with another grenade.

EXPLOSION

When the smoke cleared, 20 people had been hurt,

and the lower half of Alexander's body was shattered.

They scooped him up, barely alive,

and carried him back to the Winter Palace.

At the Winter Palace, the dying tsar was surrounded by his stunned family.

He knew he was dying, they knew he was dying.

It's all very bloody and very horrible, and there, standing

watching, is his son, Alexander, who is going to be Alexander III.

And he's standing there, looking at what happens when you try

and offer people reform. That is how he viewed it.

So the death of Alexander II stops reform in its tracks.

The constitutional decrees, which would have come forward,

which would have introduced another level of government in Russia,

are put aside. Alexander III will have nothing of them.

He takes the line that Russia needs strong government.

Alexander III presented himself as a strong man

and he certainly looked the part.

A mixture of beard and muscle poured into a uniform.

He was an enormous man - 6'3", and built like a great big bear.

His party trick was to get an iron bar

and to bend it with his bare hands.

Alexander has had himself painted

greeting a collection of peasant leaders.

He's resolute, standing firm,

the weight of Russia on his broad shoulders.

And they're completely overwhelmed by the experience.

Some of them are swooning away

and others are shielding their eyes from the magnificent sight of him.

Alexander III wasn't exactly an intellectual giant,

but he held his autocratic regime together

almost through force of will.

Alexander introduced a new "era of reaction".

He gave the authorities extensive powers to jail people

and to close down newspapers.

There was a new secret police

and he was determined to stamp out all revolutionary movements -

starting with People's Will.

In the years following 1881,

dozens of revolutionaries made this boat trip

to that rather terrifying-looking castle.

Known as the "Russian Bastille", the Shlisselburg Fortress

was where political prisoners were sent to be forgotten.

Shlisselburg was built in the 14th century.

But in the 1880s, Alexander III oversaw the construction

of a new prison - for those associated with his father's murder.

Thank you.

In the first 20 years after it was built,

68 men and women were interned at His Majesty's pleasure.

15 were executed,

15 died of disease,

three committed suicide

and eight went insane.

On the surface, Alexander III's "era of reaction" was working well.

But every time he struck down a revolutionary,

another one popped up as a replacement.

In 1887, five prisoners were brought out

of the fortress's execution block

and hanged on a gallows just where the white tree is.

Their crime? Plotting to murder the Tsar.

One of them was a 21-year-old called Aleksandr Ulyanov -

that's his grey memorial up there.

Now, you might not have heard of Aleksandr,

but you will have heard of his younger brother.

On the day of Aleksandr's execution,

this brother was at school doing his geometry exam.

His brother's death radicalised him.

He got involved in student protests

and started producing revolutionary literature

under the pseudonym that would become

one of the 20th century's best-known names.

Lenin.

Contemporaries saw danger.

The novelist Tolstoy wrote to the Tsar

urging him to show love for his enemies.

But Alexander wanted to take the fight further

and he used the very site of his father's assassination

in St Petersburg to make a powerful statement.

This city had killed his father,

and here, Alexander would champion the traditions of the Motherland

over the bankrupt modernity of the West.

Peter the Great had conceived of St Petersburg

as a model for a new Russia.

Here, Russia was going to embrace Western ideals.

The city was even going to look like it belonged to Europe,

being largely in the Classical style.

And yet, bang in the middle of this city

full of Renaissance-style palazzi,

Alexander III has plonked down this building.

It's like a declaration of war on Peter's ideal.

A bit like a ghost at a feast,

this building revives the old Russia

that Peter the Great tried to obliterate.

For Alexander III, Russia had gone wrong

when it had tried to copy the West,

when it had tried to modernise itself.

Western ideas clearly led to tsars getting blown up.

Russia could only thrive by embracing Russian culture

and that traditional Russian form of government, autocracy.

Alexander III wasn't at the opening of the chillingly named

Church Of The Saviour On The Spilled Blood.

He died of kidney disease in 1894, aged only 49.

Responsibility for this, and nearly everything else in Russia,

landed suddenly in the lap of his 26-year-old son, Nicholas.

Outwardly, Nicholas II was a polite, cosmopolitan gentleman,

but under the surface was a ruler who felt deeply Russian.

His coronation revealed a vision of Russia rooted in tradition.

That most modern of technologies, moving film,

was used to capture a ceremony replete with 17th-century costumes.

After Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, were crowned,

the new tsar took the coronation oath

and vowed to uphold autocracy.

The royal couple were bound together by their intense religious devotion.

Near their favoured royal retreat, they built this.

A cathedral that stands above

Nicholas and Alexandra's private crypt church.

A visit is like a journey into Nicholas's own soul.

This is the family's private, personal entrance

to their private, personal chapel

buried beneath the main body of the church.

It feels like you're going into the inner sanctum of the Romanovs.

Nicholas was a fatalist -

he believed that whatever happened was ultimately God's will.

Misfortune would lead him to declare,

"God knows what is good for us.

"We must bow down our heads and repeat the sacred words,

"'Thy will be done.'"

Nicholas was a man of deep, deep piety.

With some other rulers, religion is for ceremony or show.

Not so with Nicholas.

During his reign, more churches were built in Russia

than during the preceding century.

And his first response to disaster wasn't what I would call practical.

It wasn't "How can I help?" He would spend several hours in prayer.

He felt that he had a very personal relationship with God.

This communion with the divine defined Nicholas's rule.

He never forgot that he was a vessel of God.

Nicholas tried to be a genuinely absolute monarch,

but, perversely, this made him a pretty ineffective one.

The trouble was that he believed that the will of the Almighty

ought to flow directly through him

to his 170 million subjects.

He found it very hard to delegate.

He didn't even have a secretary.

So, his desk would be piled high with papers.

He was meticulous about dealing with correspondence

on topics like the appointment of rural midwives

and whether or not a particular soldier ought to go on leave.

But while he was bogged down in these trivia,

big decisions about the future of his empire were getting away from him

Inside Nicholas's head,

the Russian Empire was still a medieval one.

Peasants toiling in their fields,

loyal to their "Little Father", the tsar.

But Russia was undergoing

a belated, and very rapid, industrial revolution.

Famine had drawn hundreds of thousands

of newly liberated peasants to the cities and to factory work.

St Petersburg had doubled in size in 15 years.

As peasants became factory workers,

they began to demand better conditions

and respect from their employers.

Everything came to a head on 9th January, 1905 - Bloody Sunday.

150,000 striking protesters planned to march on the Winter Palace

in the hope that the Tsar would listen to their grievances.

Many of those who turned out

believed that when they got to the Winter Palace,

the Tsar would be pleased to see them, would welcome them in.

Stories went round that he would put on a parade for them

and offer them refreshments.

Nicholas wasn't at home at the Winter Palace,

but 12,000 troops had been posted around the city

with orders to prevent the marchers from reaching it.

It was at the Narva Gate that the largest brigade of protesters

found themselves face-to-face with two companies

of the 93rd Irkutsk Infantry Regiment.

One of the thousands out on the streets that day

was the writer and communist Maxim Gorky.

Within hours, Gorky wrote this letter describing

exactly what happened next to the protesters.

"At the Narva Gate,

"they were met by the troops, who fired nine rounds.

"After the first shots, some of the workers began to shout,

"'Don't be frightened, they're blanks!' But this wasn't true.

"Already a dozen or so people had fallen to the ground,

"the front ranks were mown down

"and the soldiers fired again

"at anybody who tried to stand up and get away."

40 people died at this spot

and across the city,

more than 100 were killed and hundreds more wounded.

But, according to Gorky, there was another casualty.

"The Tsar's prestige has been killed here -

"that is the meaning of this day."

For a year, revolution raged across the Empire.

And it was only brought to an end

when Nicholas caved in and made concessions.

He promised a free press,

right of assembly and, above all,

a constitution.

And Russia was to have an elective assembly, the Duma,

whose approval would be needed to pass legislation.

Nicholas insisted that the state opening of the Duma

be on home ground at the Winter Palace.

And so, in April 1906, Russia's elite found themselves

face-to-face with the people for the first time.

On this side of the room stood Nicholas's existing government,

his state councillors, in their uniforms with gold lace.

On the other side stood members of the new Duma.

They were wearing the clothing of workers and peasants -

that's red shirts and big, rough boots.

And the two sides looked at each other with suspicion...

and hostility.

If there were ever a moment for Nicholas to reach across the divide

and bring people together, this was it.

But, no, he made a speech recommitting himself

to the principle of autocracy.

He was going to hold on to it, he said, "with unwavering firmness".

At the end of the speech, the state councillors let out a big cheer -

they were delighted.

But the members of the new Duma stood and listened in stony silence.

In the end, Nicholas's first Duma didn't last ten weeks.

He dissolved it.

And, ultimately, fixed the elections to get a more compliant one.

For now, autocracy had won the day.

After the 1905 Revolution, Nicholas and Alexandra

were spending more and more time

in the safety of this Neoclassical palace.

Here, the Tsar was able to be something

that he was actually good at - a husband and a father.

We're only 15 miles away from the centre of St Petersburg,

but the secluded Alexander Palace,

in its beautiful park, seems like a completely different world.

It was here that Nicholas and his family

found an escape from sycophantic courtiers

and the unkind gossip of the court.

But it was also here, at the centre of their happy, domestic life,

that a crisis was unfolding

with grave consequences for the dynasty.

Nicholas II had four daughters, as seen here,

Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

But with the birth of his fifth child, Alexei,

in 1904, he finally had an heir.

The royal children played in the palace's vast park.

A favourite den was this playhouse built for the children of Nicholas I.

But a handful of people knew that Alexei

had inherited the condition of haemophilia

through his maternal great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

At the start of the 20th century, this was a death sentence.

In 1907, the three-year-old Alexei had been playing

when he fell over and hurt his leg.

When he was carried into the palace,

it was clear that something was very wrong.

Poor Alexei had a haemorrhage in his leg.

It had swollen up and it was giving him excruciating pain.

His body was twisted

and he had dark shadows under his eyes.

For three days, the boy's condition deteriorated

and he came closer and closer to death.

The doctors couldn't even ease his pain.

With nothing to lose, Alexandra and Nicholas turned to Grigori Rasputin,

a mystic and holy man who, it was said, had healing powers.

Rasputin was brought into the palace through a side entrance

and he was taken up to Alexei's bedroom.

There, he made the sign of the cross,

and he prayed over the little boy for ten minutes.

And then, he said, "Your pain is leaving you,

"you must thank God for healing you. Now, go to sleep."

And that was it.

Rasputin's words appeared to make Alexei instantly better.

Those present felt that they had witnessed a miracle.

To Nicholas and Alexandra, the message was clear -

Rasputin was the only man in Russia who could save their son.

Rasputin could stop Alexei's bleeding

even when he wasn't there in person.

When he was talking on the telephone,

he could make the bleeding stop.

It's a very hard one for us to understand.

Russians can explain it.

The nearest I could come to it is to say that, perhaps,

it's the calming effect he has.

With Alexandra's anxiety,

her son's fragile health,

talk of revolution and the threat of assassination,

the Alexander Palace turned into a place of even greater seclusion.

The Empress and the children simply locked themselves away.

And just as the public were unable to see into this private world,

so the Romanovs found it increasingly hard

to see out to the changing nation beyond their gates.

A rare public appearance occurred in 1913,

the 300-year anniversary of the Romanovs gaining power.

When the family emerged, they were presented

with the stage-managed Russia of their imagination.

Nicholas relived the moment

when Michael Romanov was greeted at the Kremlin on the way to be crowned.

And the highlight was a journey around the ancient Russian cities,

including Kostroma,

where the Romanov story had begun three centuries before.

During the trip along the Volga,

not as many as expected turned out to see the royal steamer.

But, when they got here to Kostroma,

the weather warmed up and so did the crowds.

People were throwing themselves at the Tsar's feet.

They were even kissing the ground where his shadow had fallen.

This was a true spiritual homecoming.

This adulation made Alexandra cock-a-hoop.

"We need merely to show ourselves," she said,

"and, at once, their hearts are ours."

What no-one knew was that this

was to be imperial Russia's final golden summer.

EXPLOSIONS

In 1914, Nicholas let his people into the First World War.

Workers rallied to the Tsar as to our emblem.

12 million men would be mobilised

and Nicholas made a stirring speech from the Winter Palace,

likening the fight to Alexander I's war against Napoleon.

But the war would force Nicholas to make a fateful decision.

In 1915, Nicholas was praying

to an icon of the Protectress of the Romanovs,

and then, as he described it, an "inner voice" spoke,

and told him that he should take personal command of the army.

Afterwards, he experienced a feeling like after Holy Communion.

God was flowing directly through him.

But, by taking personal control of the army,

Nicholas shackled himself and his dynasty to the success of the war.

"The tsar directs the war not from the distance of hundreds of miles,"

said Nicholas, "he appears in the midst of battle.

"He feels the mood of his armies."

With the Tsar away at the front, a power vacuum was created,

one eagerly filled by Rasputin.

Because of Alexandra's reliance upon him,

many believed that a malign power was working behind the throne.

And Rasputin didn't help himself.

He drank heavily, enjoyed the flattery of society ladies,

and, well, other sorts of ladies, too.

He was known to visit prostitutes.

We don't quite know what he did with them,

but there's some suggestion he may have been

testing himself spiritually,

or that he also had the belief that the more you sin,

the more you can be forgiven,

so you should get on and do plenty of sinning.

MACHINERY SQUEAKS

Rasputin's continuing reputation as "Russia's greatest love machine"

is a relic from this time.

SQUEAKING

The rumours damaged Alexandra, who was tainted by association.

The fact that they were close to him and refused to speak about it

just exacerbated relations with the rest of the family

and with the wider aristocracy.

Certainly, calling into question their judgment

and increasing this sense of "us and them".

A plot was hatched to kill Rasputin.

It centred around the man who lived here,

Prince Felix Yusupov,

who was married to Tsar Nicholas's beautiful niece, Irina.

On the night of December 16th, 1916,

Felix lured Rasputin to his palace

with the promise of a midnight assignation with Irina.

GRAMOPHONE PLAYS

Upstairs, they could hear the sound of a party.

A gramophone was playing.

Felix explained that his wife had guests

and that she would come down when they'd left.

GRAMOPHONE PLAYS SCRATCHY MUSIC

Prince Felix said, "While we're waiting,

"let's have some cakes and some wine."

The cakes were rose-flavoured -

Rasputin's favourite - and both were laced with cyanide.

He ate and he drank, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with him.

He asked Prince Felix to play some songs on his guitar.

An hour later, Felix was getting impatient, so he got his pistol.

He distracted Rasputin by asking him to look at a crucifix,

and he shot him in the side.

Now, the conspirators started talking about what to do

with Rasputin's clothes, his overcoat,

but, unnoticed by them, Rasputin was still alive!

He managed to creep his way right out of the building

and into the courtyard before they spotted this.

There they shot him again, probably in the head,

and they weighed down his body with heavy iron chains

and threw it into the River Neva.

The removal of Rasputin was too little, too late,

to save the Romanovs.

The war was dragging on

and conditions were getting worse.

A decisive moment was reached in February 1917

on the streets of the Russian capital.

Workers, tired of long hours in the factories -

and even longer queues for bread -

came pouring out on to the streets.

The First World War was a disaster for Russia.

Three out of four Russian soldiers became casualties.

Workers and farmers had been taken from their jobs

and then slaughtered by the German army.

And this led to food shortages and rampant inflation.

Ultimately, the glittering Romanovs would be brought down

by a people who wanted the basic commodity of bread.

The breaking point came on International Women's Day.

Thousands of women flooded the streets to protest,

joining forces with striking workers.

By the next day,

a quarter of a million people were marching down Nevsky Prospect.

They were smashing up the shops and carrying banners

that said things like, "Stop the war!" "Feed the children!"

and, most worryingly to the Romanovs, "End autocracy!"

Alexandra wrote to Nicholas of a hooligan movement in the streets.

Nicholas commanded the local garrison to put a stop to the protests,

and orders were issued to use all necessary force.

BELLS TOLL

The thousands of people on the streets were met by soldiers

who followed their orders and fired at them.

But, that night, when the troops went back to their barracks,

they began to ask themselves whether they could face another day

of shooting at their fellow citizens

who were desperate for food.

The answer to that question became clear the next morning.

The streets were full again with the workers,

but also with soldiers with red ribbons on their bayonets.

The mutinies amongst the armed forces went on all day.

They broke into weapons factories, they set fire to police stations.

By sunset, the revolution was well underway.

By now, Nicholas had been abandoned by his generals,

who believed he was completely useless, an obstacle to victory.

Travelling home from the front, Nicholas's train was forced to divert

and he started getting telegrams from politicians and the military.

They said that in order to avoid a complete collapse of order,

he would have to go.

Now, for all of his failures, Nicholas was a patriot.

To avoid civil war, he agreed to abdicate.

And here's the document when Nicholas renounces an empire.

Effectively, bringing an end to 300 years of Romanov rule.

I can't help noticing that he signed it very lightly in pencil,

as if he didn't really mean it.

People present were struck by the calmness

with which Nicholas signed away his throne.

One of the generals present later said,

"He was such a fatalist, I couldn't believe it.

"He signed as simply as one hands over

"a cavalry squadron to its new commander."

Nicholas handed the throne to his brother, who refused it.

Instead, the mighty power of the tsar

flowed to Russia's new provisional government.

300 years of Romanov rule had come to an end.

The new provisional government immediately faced demands

for the ex-Tsar's arrest.

On 7th March, they ordered that Nicholas and Alexandra

be deprived of their freedom.

The family found themselves captive back at the Alexander Palace.

But even here, the world was turned upside down.

The soldiers moved freely through the palace,

coming into the family's rooms unannounced.

And outside the park railing, crowds gathered -

the "gapers" as Nicholas called them,

come to see the once-great Romanovs brought so low.

The guards liked to humiliate Nicholas for a joke.

One day, he was riding along on his bicycle,

and one of the soldiers thrust his bayonet

through the spokes of the wheel,

then laughed uproariously as the ex-Tsar went over the handlebars.

The new provisional government was still at war with the Germans.

And so, the Germans gave them a special present -

Lenin.

The exiled revolutionary was transported across Germany

in a sealed train to Russia.

Lenin stirred up a more militant mood

and pressure was put on the provisional government

to be harder on the royal family.

By the late summer, it was decided

that the Romanovs belonged in a cage less gilded.

At dawn, on 1st August, 1917,

Tsar Nicholas and his family

left the palace through these doors.

HINGES SQUEAK

Along with 39 courtiers and retainers,

they were to be taken under heavy guard to Siberia.

They didn't realise it, but they were leaving for ever.

In spite of this harder line,

the provisional government were out of step

with a people who wanted an end to the war

and who were flocking to Lenin's promise of peace, land and bread.

In October came the "ten days that shook the world",

when Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government.

The Winter Palace was stormed,

telegraph stations and government offices occupied.

With control of the state,

the Bolsheviks now founded their own militia, the Red Army.

And they would, in time, have to decide what to do

with Mr Nicholas Romanov and family.

The Bolsheviks have a deep loathing of the Russian imperial family.

Lenin describes the last Tsar not as "Nicholas II"

but as "Nicholas the Bloody".

And they hold the imperial family

and the Romanov regime responsible

for the events of 1905,

when peaceful, working people are shot down by tsarist troops.

And in the spring and summer of 1918,

Lenin and his comrades are fixed on one thing, and one thing only -

it is the maintenance of their own power.

They understand very clearly the fragility of their situation

and they're prepared to do almost anything

to hold on to the authority that they have gained in October 1917.

By July 1918, the family were being held in a house

in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.

Civil war was raging.

The guns of the White Army rumbled just a few miles away.

A decision was made somewhere in the Soviet bureaucracy

that Nicholas and his family should be killed

to prevent them from becoming a rallying point for their enemies.

It's hard to get a clear picture

of what actually happened at Yekaterinburg,

there are so many conflicting stories about it.

And, in any case, the whole thing was hushed up afterwards.

But most sources do agree that in the early hours of the morning,

Nicholas, Alexandra and the children were woken up.

They were told to dress and to go down to the cellar.

This was for their own safety. They had to be moved again.

They were accompanied by some of their servants and their dog.

Meanwhile, outside the cellar,

an execution squad was forming up.

One of its members was called Mikhail Medvedev,

and this...is the gun that he carried.

When the squad entered,

Nicholas was told that he and his family were to be killed.

And he was actually in the act of going, "What?!"

when the first shot was fired.

Medvedev later claimed it as his own.

What happened in the basement was a massacre.

As well as being shot multiple times,

members of the family were also bayoneted.

One of the soldiers later remembered

that it had been difficult to bayonet the girls,

because, thinking that the family was on the move once again,

they'd stored their diamonds and their jewels inside their corsets.

This had acted like armour plating.

After the whole business was over, there was only one survivor.

It was the little dog.

The question I keep coming back to is,

could all of this horror have been avoided

if Nicholas was a bit more politically astute

and a bit less determined to cling on to his autocracy?

If Nicholas had heeded the warning of the Revolution of 1905

and become a constitutional monarch, like in Britain,

then, maybe, his life, the lives of his family,

and the lives of millions of ordinary Russians could have been saved.

But, no, he was determined that his power should be undiluted.

And if you look back at the history of his dynasty,

you can sort of see why he made that decision.

Nicholas's devotion to autocracy wasn't a fetish.

For him, it was a rational response to how power worked in Russia.

His direct ancestors,

Peter the Great and Catherine the Great,

had used their absolute rule to turn Russia into a world power...

while Western-style reforms led to instability and assassination.

GUNSHOT ECHOES

BELLS RING

And even though Nicholas himself

didn't make a good job of being an autocrat,

the regime that followed him

would, in some ways, resemble that of tsarist rule

with its own "Red Tsars" around whom the State revolved.

For better or worse,

how the Romanovs governed paved the way for what was to come.

BELLS RING