November 2, 1894, 126 years ago, the last Russian emperor Nicholas II ascended the throne.

Nicholas II (Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov), the 26-year-old son of Emperor Alexander III, inherited the throne on November 2, 1894, after the sudden death of his father Alexander III of Russia. In 1894, Alexander III became ill with terminal kidney disease (nephritis) due an accident at Borki.

On 29 October [O.S. 17 October] 1888 the Imperial train derailed in an accident at Borki. At the moment of the crash, the imperial family was in the dining car. Its roof collapsed, and Alexander held its remains on his shoulders as the children fled outdoors. The onset of Alexander’s kidney failure was later attributed to the blunt trauma suffered in this incident.

 Tsar Alexander III died in the arms of his wife, and in the presence of his physician, Ernst Viktor von Leyden, at Maly Palace in Livadia on the afternoon of 1 November [O.S. 20 October] 1894 at the age of forty-nine, and was succeeded by his eldest son Tsesarevich Nicholas, who took the throne as Nicholas II.

In the same year, Nicholas II married in the Orthodox Church with Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine (in Orthodoxy Alexandra Feodorovna).

The reign of Nicholas II took place in an atmosphere of growing socio-political contradictions and revolutionary movement, the complication of the foreign policy situation. A succession followed: defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Bloody Sunday, the Revolution of 1905-1907, World War I, the February Revolution of 1917, during which he abdicated the throne and was placed under house arrest with his family in Tsarskoye Selo.

In August 1917, by decision of the Provisional Government, Nicholas II and his family were sent into exile in Tobolsk, where the Romanovs stayed until May 1918, and then were transported to Yekaterinburg. Here, in July 1918, the last Russian emperor was shot along with his family and servants.

In 2000, Nicholas II, along with his wife and children, were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Read the true story of the brutal murder of the Royal Family and the fate of the Romanovs’ relatives killed by the Bolsheviks in the books Trotsky’s White Negroes, Slaughter of a Dynasty and The Exiled Duke Romanov Who Turned Desert Into Paradise by Michael Walsh.