Vicky For The Win

mapsontheweb:

Europe in 1328.

fuckyeahhistorycrushes:

fuckyeahhistorycrushes:

Nicholas II of Russia
For our 100th post, I’m going to do one of my personal top history crushes.
[This mod is a huge sucker for the Romanovs; this may get long.]

Nicholas II was the last tsar of Russia, and part of the famous Romanov house. He was both a cutie and a downrightgood lookin’hunk of man. He also had a perfect beard. And I wish he were my papa, because he was a happy, adorable father as well. But his story is not a very happy one.

When he succeeded his father in 1894, he had very little experience; unfortunately for him, it showed. He thought expansion into Manchuria sounded fabulous, but Japan kicked his ass, resulting in riots in Russia. In January 1905, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, the army in St Petersburg shot at a crowd demanding radical reforms. People really started hating on Nick, and he pretty much was forced to grant a constitution and establish a parliament, the Duma. Yeah whatever, he still had a lot of control.

So WWI comes along and Nicky decides “HEY I’m the TSAR and I have POWER, so I’m going to directly command the Russian army!” Bad move, Nicho. This only lead to every failure that the military felt to be directly associated with him. His image was crying.

Nicholas stayed out of the public eye a lot [no surprise there], letting his wife, Alexandra, be the voice of the government. She wore the pants in their relationship, anyway. Russia was looking pretty awful by this time; people were broke and starving, and they had Alexandra and her BFF Rasputin to point their shaky fingers at.

In December 1916, Rasputin was [finally] killed, and a few months later huge riots and demonstrations had taken over St. Petersburg. The army finally said “screw you” and Nick had no alternative but to abdicate. A sad little provisional government was established in their place, later overthrown by the Bolsheviks.

Here’s where things get super sad for the former tsar. So the Bolsheviks decide to keep Nicholas and his family as prisoners, essentially. On July 17 1918, as anti-Bolsheviks approached Yekaterinburg, the family was moved to another room; they thought they were being put somewhere more safe because of the protesters. Just kidding! Here’s some executioners with revolvers pointed at you instead [this was probably Vladimir Lenin’s doing].

They say Nick’s last words were “you know not what you do.” He was the first one to die. His 4 girls survived the first hail of bullets; the sisters were wearing over 1.3 kilograms of diamonds and gems on their clothing, which served as freaking armor. The poor girls were then stabbed with bayonets and shot at close range in the head.

And so ends the sad, fail life of Nicholas II. Welp, at least he looked good.

i cant believe this was our 100th post back then! we are now at 4350! :D