On July 17th, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II and his family, along with the family doctor and three servants, were gunned down in a small room in the house in the Ural Mountains where they had been taken to avoid possible rescue attempts. The youngest person, the Tsar’s only son Alexei, was 13.
Just over fifty years earlier, on May 6th, 1868, the future “Tsar of all the Russias,” Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov, known in the English-speaking world as “Tsar Nicholas II” was born at “Tsarskoye Selo” (“zar skoyuh zaylo”) – “The Tsar’s Village,” sixteen miles or so outside the then Russian capital of St. Petersburg.
The “tsar’s village” was not a village at all but a compound of palaces, chateaus, and government buildings. Away from the buildings of the Tsar, his extended family and favored nobility and clergy was the actual “village” where the hundreds of servants lived, and while the administrative workers and servants in the Tsar’s village lived in relative comfort because they lived at the Tsar’s sprawling compound, and it wouldn’t do for them to be seen, by the Tsar and others, living in the typical shacks that the peasants of Russia called home.
By 1868, the Tsar was one of the last absolute monarchs in Europe. His will was law, and though he was surrounded by opulence, the vast majority of his people lived in abject poverty and had virtually no freedom despite several laws that were supposed to alleviate the worst of their suffering. By contrast, just one room in one palace, the “Catherine Palace” of Empress Catherine the Great, the famous “Amber Room” (which was either destroyed or stolen during WWII), was worth between 100 million and half a billion dollars today – and considering its historical significance, was priceless.
Russia became one of the world’s great powers, reaching from the Baltic and Black Seas to the Pacific and the borders of China. Ultimately, all of it belonged to the Tsar.
In the later years of Nicholas’ reign, a small middle class emerged in Russia’s cities. The Industrial Revolution came late to Russia, and most of the growing middle class (some of whom became quite wealthy) were involved in one type of manufacturing or another. To power their factories, industrialists hired the poor. As more and more factories sprung up, peasants in the Russian countryside began to flock to the cities to find work.
In Russia, even the wealthiest men in the middle class were never considered aristocrats unless the Tsar gave them a title, but many lived even grander lives than many of the lesser nobility. With their growing wealth and power, the industrialists were also the focus of great resentment on the part of the poor.
In many cases, Russian peasants, often referred to as “serfs,” fled the estates they and their families, sometimes going back hundreds of years, had been forced to work on by the elaborate series of oppressive laws and customs that kept them living in squalor and ignorance. By the dawn of the 20th Century, many of the more repressive laws prohibiting serfs from enjoying any freedom whatsoever began to be lifted, but everyone knew that whether they were lifted, written down, not written down, etc. – the system that had kept the serfs down for hundreds of years was still in place.
Factory workers, whether born in the cities or coming from the countryside, had virtually no rights either. Workers who were injured on the job were fired, adding an additional burden on their families. Workers who grumbled about working conditions or pay were threatened, beaten, and sometimes “disappeared.” Pay was meager, taxes were high, and most working and living conditions were abysmal.
#darkhistory #historydocumentary #tsarnicholasii
Copyright © 2025 A Day In History. All rights reserved.
DISCLAIMER: All materials in these videos are used for entertainment purposes and fall within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. If you are, or represent, the copyright owner of materials used in this video, and have an issue with the use of said material, please send an email to adayinhistory2021@gmail.com
