Quotes About Nicholas II

The local Red Cross chapter volunteered to publish his book. It came out in a deluxe, gold-embossed, Japanese-paper edition to remind the reader of human artistry, which can be a refuge from evil and a source of new, platonic stirrings. One copy was reserved for His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II. (The Tsar fairly devoured mystical works, believing that hell could be avoided by a combination of education and deceit.) "The Book of Kings and Fools," p. 136.

President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s.

Not only did the barbaric incident shake the king's "confidence in the innate decency of mankind," it inspired his son's lifetime loathing of the Bolsheviks, the murder of his godfather, Nicholas II, setting his heart against the Soviets and all their works.

Lenin had just reflected that the revolution would never happen in his lifetime when in February 1917, hungry crowds in Petrograd overthrew Nicholas II while the revolutionaries were abroad, exiled, or infiltrated by the secret police.

Putin regards Stalin as a great tsar; he is a great tsar. Asked who the worst tsars were, he said Nicholas II and Gorbachev.

In the event of defeat," he wrote in the February 1914 memorandum to Nicholas II, "social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable." Durnovó specifically forecast that the gentry's land would be expropriated and that "Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.

For some, including Nicholas II, the mere existence of a prime minister was an affront to autocracy.63

The Tsarist system was not doomed by 1914.

There was a happy irony in the first cousin of the autocratic Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II (with whom George bore a striking resemblance) furthering British democracy.