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Mikhail I
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Mikhail
was related to the last tsar of the Rurik dynasty, Fyodor I (reigned 1584–98) through his grandfather Nikita Romanov, who was Fyodor’s maternal uncle. When the zemsky sobor (assembly of the land) met in 1613 to elect a new tsar after the Time of Troubles—a period of chaotic internal disorders, foreign invasions, and a rapid succession of rulers following the death of Fyodor I—it chose Michael Romanov as tsar (February 1613). -
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Peter I
Peter the Great, Peter I or Peter Alexeyevich ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 7 May [O.S. 27 April] 1682 until his death in 1725 -
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Catherine II
Catherine II, most commonly known as Catherine the Great, was empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796—the country's longest-ruling female leader. She came to power following a coup d'état that she organised—resulting in her husband, Peter III, being overthrown. -
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Alexander I
Alexander I was the Emperor of Russia between 1801 and 1825. He was the eldest son of Paul I and Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg. Alexander was the first king of Congress Poland, reigning from 1815 to 1825, as well as the first Russian Grand Duke of Finland, reigning from 1809 to 1825. -
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Nicholas I
At last the Crimean war at the end of his reign demonstrated to the world what no one had previously realized: Russia was militarily weak, technologically backward, and administratively incompetent. In the wake of the Decembrist revolt, the tsar moved to protect the status quo by centralizing the educational system. He wanted to neutralize the threat of foreign ideas and what he ridiculed as "pseudo-knowledge." -
Nicholas I
From 1839, Tsar Nicholas also used a former Byzantine Catholic priest named Joseph Semashko as his agent to force Orthodoxy upon the Eastern Rite Catholics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. -
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Alexander II
Alexander pivoted towards foreign policy and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, fearing the remote colony would fall into British hands if there were another war. He sought peace, moved away from bellicose France when Napoleon III fell in 1871, and in 1872 joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. -
Alexander II
Among his greatest domestic challenges was an uprising in Poland in 1863, to which he responded by stripping that land of its separate constitution and incorporating it directly into Russia. Alexander was proposing additional parliamentary reforms to counter the rise of nascent revolutionary and anarchistic movements when he was assassinated in 1881 -
Alexander III
Alexander's political ideal was a nation composed of a single nationality, language, and religion, all under one form of administration. Through the teaching of the Russian language in Russian schools in Germany, Poland, and Finland, the destruction of the remnants of German, Polish, and Swedish institutions in the respective provinces, and the patronization of Eastern Orthodoxy, he attempted to realize this ideal. -
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Alexander III
The Russian famine of 1891–92, which caused 375,000 to 500,000 deaths, and the ensuing cholera epidemic permitted some liberal activity, as the Russian government could not cope with the crisis The new Emperor believed that remaining true to Russian Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality would save Russia from revolutionary agitation. -
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Nicholas II
He supported modernization based on foreign loans and close ties with France, but resisted giving the new parliament (the Duma) major roles. The aristocracy was alarmed at the powerful influence of the despised peasant priest Grigori Rasputin over the czar. The severe military losses in WW1 led to a collapse of morale at the front and at home, leading to the fall of the House of Romanov in the February Revolution of 1917. -
Nicholas II
He was criticised for the Khodynka Tragedy, anti-semitic pogroms, Bloody Sunday, the violent suppression of the 1905 Russian Revolution, the repression of political opponents, and his perceived responsibility for defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), in which the Russian Baltic Fleet was annihilated at the Battle of Tsushima; the loss of Russian influence over Manchuria and Korea, and the Japanese annexation of the south of Sakhalin Island.