The Romanov throne was destroyed not by young bomb-throwers or forerunners of the Soviets, but by the bearers of aristocratic surnames and court titles, bankers, publishers, lawyers, professors and other public figures.
Chapter 16 of the Memoirs of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich
Foreword
We are now in the fifth year of the disastrous and tragic war between Russia and the Ukraine. Between one and two million soldiers are dead. Of one thing we can be certain, this war would never have happened, indeed it would have been unthinkable, in the time of Tsar Nicholas II, because he represented not petty and hateful nationalist division, but multinational peace and unity.
In the meantime, pray for Amvrosy and Vladislav, young men in their twenties, dragged off the streets of Kiev by violent and overpaid thugs of the regime two weeks ago and now forced to the Front after two days’ training. They do not want to die needlessly. They do not want to fill the pockets of Ukrainian officials, warmongering Western politicians and arms-dealers with billions of dollars. Their only hope is surrender to the vastly superior Russian forces. Their mothers of these two young men, who live near my house in Kiev, are frenetic. But at least D. is safe in Portugal, and so is his brother in Norway. They got out in time over the mountains. Lord have mercy! Let us now return to our subject.
Slandered by Propaganda
Nicholas II is one of the most slandered people in history. He most certainly was not weak, indecisive, incompetent, stupid, or dominated by others, as atheist Western and Soviet propaganda portray. Every attempt to slander him with lies has been overturned. Thus, the tragic stampede after his Coronation, leaving 1,389 dead resulted from aristocratic incompetence, compared to the 2015 stampede in Saudi Arabia which left at least 2,400 dead; the unprovoked attack on Russia by Japan was plotted by the Western Powers and turned into a costly Russian victory, with Japan bankrupted by costly Western arms.
As for the 100 and more who died from the crowd of 3,000 in 1905, that was nothing to do with the Tsar – he was not even in Saint Petersburg when Marxists hid behind stolen church banners and icons ‘in a peaceful demonstration’ and opened fire on troops, who returned fire; the terrorist revolts of 1905 and their 9,000 victims were the result of guns smuggled into Russia for atheist revolutionaries paid to destroy Russia. As for World War I, this was the fault of Berlin, which supported the Austro-Hungarian attempt to genocide the South Slav peoples, and had been planning a War for years.
Socio-Economic Success
Even before he was crowned, Nicholas had worked for the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the remarkable opening up and settling of largely empty Siberia. Nicholas II reigned over an accelerating Industrial Revolution that led to a nearly 50% rise in the ever more prosperous Imperial population. This was accompanied by eleven reforms, including the huge agrarian reform, the reform which led to the massive growth of free education and literacy, which had reached 56% by 1916, and the introduction of a free health service in 1898, 50 years before the UK, and a social security and justice system.
The Tsar was a radical moderniser, who reigned over the electrification of his Empire, with the development of hydroelectricity, submarines, rocketry, radio, the first helicopter designs, monoplanes and bomber aircraft. Under the Tsar life expectancy reached 68. By 1913 he had brought Russian Imperial agriculture to be Europe’s breadbasket and its economy to be the world’s fourth largest, which is what it is again only today. By all accounts, by 1950, when the Tsar would have been 82 years old, the Russian economy would have overtaken that of every other nation, including that of the USA.
Foreign Policy
In foreign policy Nicholas II was the only world leader who promoted international peace, founding the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 and, though mocked, was called ‘the apostle of peace’. This was the beginning of many international treaties and the regulation of war. He had an excellent double education in law and military affairs, knew European history very well and spoke five European languages fluently. He also defended nations as diverse as Thailand, Ethiopia, Morocco, Persia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Hawaii and the Boers from aggressive Western colonisation and asset-stripping.
The Tsar also tried to find peace in the warring Balkans, with their divisive German puppet-kings, through establishing a Balkan Union. His diplomacy had long been successful in avoided the international conflict that the warmongering Western nations wanted to start in powderkeg Europe with its rival imperialisms in 1912 and 1913. His policy here was to balance each nation against the other. That he finally failed in this was not his fault. Tragically, it was not possible to stop the European attempt at suicide, when Europe absolutely wanted to commit suicide.
Projected Spiritual Reform
The Tsar wanted to debureaucratise the Church administration, which had opposed the canonisation of St Seraphim of Sarov, and to restore the Patriarchate. He failed, as he was opposed by the petty ambitions, jealousies, rivalries and quarrels of the State-loving episcopate. He had little time for the empty ritualism of a Church, where if anyone who took communion more than once a year would be eyed as a fanatic. He defended the pious name-glorifiers of Mt Athos, who were hated by loveless episcopal bureaucrats, who were backed by the largely atheist aristocrats. Both groups betrayed him in 1917.
He saw eighty-one saints canonised in twenty years against only five canonised in the previous 175 years. By 1917 there were 1,256 monasteries, against only 631 in 1890, 117 million Orthodox, with 163 bishops, over 115,000 priests and deacons and 78,767 churches – against only 39,700 in 1890. Tsar Nicholas made generous personal gifts to all the Local Churches which he wanted to free from ethnic narrowness. By 1898 there were 22,000 Orthodox in Japan, Orthodox missions in Korea and China, and seventeen churches had been built in major Western cities, including in Nice and New York.
A Military Genius
Nicholas II, a military man by training, was forced to become commander-in-chief of the Russian forces in August 1915, replacing his utterly incompetent and foul-mouthed overgrown cousin. That was the treasonous Grand Duke Nicholas, a snobbish, atheistic and anti-Semitic aristocrat, who treated his despised troops as cannon fodder, just like the Allied generals on the Western Front. His incompetence had led to the shell shortage and the retreat from the Carpathians in early 1915. Having taken 2 million Austro-Hungarian prisoners, by 1916 Tsar Nicholas had won the greatest Allied victory of the War.
If only his timid General Brusilov had had the courage to follow through on the Tsar’s carefully planned breakthrough in 1916, Austria-Hungary could have been knocked out of the war. Russian troops would have liberated both Vienna and Berlin by 1917. Unlike Napoleon who reached Moscow and later Hitler who almost did, the enemy in World War One did not reach Russia. They only occupied eastern Poland, Lithuania and what is now Catholic western Ukraine and western Belarus, where satanic anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place – none took place in Russia, though huge ones took place in Berlin and Vienna.
His armies suffered only some 50% of the casualties of the Allies on the immobile Western Front. This was despite the fact that his troops faced the vast majority of the German Army on a highly mobile Front that was half as long again as the Western, as well as facing the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans. Nicholas II failed on the very verge of victory in early 1917, as Churchill recorded. However, he failed only because of the ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’, as the Tsar described it, of decadent and Russophobic aristocrats, corrupt generals and bureaucrat-bishops, supported by the ‘Allies’.
Afterword
When Tsar Nicholas and his family were murdered 108 years ago on 17 July 1918, the order for it had gone out from financiers in New York. The victim of ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’, the world is still suffering from his murder. Without his overthrow, there would not have been a World War Two, let alone today’s tragedy. Without that, we would be living in a far different world.
Of this St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, who proposed his canonisation in the mid-1930s, wrote: ‘That blackest crime, which was committed against the Tsar, must be effaced by fervent veneration for him, glorifying his feat. The Russian Lands must kneel down before the humiliated, the slandered and the martyred….Then the Passion-Bearing Tsar will be granted great boldness before God and his prayer will save the Russian Lands from the disasters borne by them….Innocently shed blood will regenerate Russia….A restored Russia is needed by the world, which has lost the spirit of life and trembles with fear, as before an earthquake’.
17 July 2026