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00:00In the 1820s, the Romanov dynasty appeared invincible.
00:09They'd ruled Russia for more than two centuries.
00:14They'd built an empire and beaten Napoleon.
00:17But now there was a new threat, more deadly than an invading army.
00:24The Russian people themselves.
00:27In July 1826, five revolutionaries were led out of this St. Petersburg fortress to their deaths.
00:47These were the leaders of the Decembrists, rebels who'd staged a failed uprising.
00:54The execution went disastrously wrong.
00:58The ropes weren't tied properly on the gallows.
01:01And when the stools were removed from underneath three of the men, they fell down to the ground.
01:06They were squirming about. They were still alive.
01:09One of them had broken legs.
01:11And as they strung him back up again, he shouted out,
01:15Poor Russia! They can't even hang men properly here.
01:22The Decembrist revolt was something new.
01:25Not for nothing has it been called the first Russian revolution.
01:29These men wanted to change the system.
01:33Some even wanted to do away with the Romanovs altogether.
01:42In Russia, small groups of rebels were easily dealt with.
01:46But in the Romanovs' final century, their power unraveled.
01:53As the Russians went from executing revolutionaries to murdering the Tsar.
01:59We're going to meet the last of the Romanovs.
02:02Nicholas and Alexander.
02:05And Alexander and Nicholas.
02:09And I'll show how these four Tsars would meet the challenge of revolution in different ways.
02:15With denial.
02:17With liberal reform ended by a terrorist bomb.
02:21With brutal reaction.
02:24And refuge in the mysticism of notorious holy man Rasputin.
02:29And we'll see how the Romanovs collided with the people reeling from famine and war.
02:36Bringing the dynasty to its tragic and bloody end.
02:50In December 1825, Tsar Alexander I, the hammer of Napoleon, was dead.
03:15Who was to succeed him?
03:18It was confusing.
03:20And sensing a power vacuum, the Decembrists seized their moment.
03:263,000 soldiers gathered here.
03:30Refusing to swear the oath of loyalty to the new Tsar Nicholas.
03:34Many of their leaders had been to Western Europe.
03:37They'd been to Paris.
03:38They'd been radicalised by the ideas that they'd come across there.
03:41So they gathered by the bronze horsemen.
03:45The statue of the moderniser Peter the Great.
03:48In order to call for change.
03:50What they wanted was an end to serfdom.
03:53And a free press.
03:55In fact, they wanted the foundations of democracy.
03:58The new Tsar differed.
04:00The situation seemed to be getting away from him.
04:03As night fell, he ordered his artillery to open fire.
04:07Seven rounds emptied the square of all but the dead and the wounded.
04:13That night, Nicholas wrote to his brother.
04:18I am emperor, he said.
04:20But my God, at what a price.
04:23At the price of the blood of my people.
04:26The traumatic events of his very first day would harden Nicholas.
04:34The untested youth caught in this portrait soon discovered that being Tsar is much easier if people are scared of you.
04:42It's said that he had a gaze like a rattlesnake that could freeze the blood in your veins.
04:50And these are the words of his own son.
04:53Nicholas's ambition was laid out on the walls of the Winter Palace.
05:01In this interior, created to impress visiting diplomats.
05:06The Decembrists had idealised Peter the Great as a moderniser.
05:11But Nicholas modelled himself on Peter, the great military conqueror.
05:15Beneath Peter's larger-than-life portrait would sit Nicholas himself.
05:23But Peter had wanted Russia to accelerate into the future.
05:28Nicholas would spend the next 30 years trying to put on the brakes.
05:32From his throne, Nicholas formulated a new philosophy for Russia.
05:39The rest of Europe was struggling with concepts like liberty, equality and fraternity.
05:45And Nicholas made a very Russian response.
05:49For him, it was to be about orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality.
05:55It was an ultra-conservative message.
05:57In Nicholas's new mantra for Russia, there was to be God on one side.
06:03Russia on the other.
06:04And Nicholas himself in the centre, holding the whole thing together.
06:13Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality was invented to create an obedient people.
06:20Who didn't ask questions.
06:22Even Nicholas's inner circle were chosen for their dependability.
06:29He liked to say that he needed loyal advisers, not smart ones.
06:40Nevertheless, groups of writers and thinkers emerged.
06:44The intelligentsia, who set out to challenge this stupefying status quo.
06:52By the middle of the century, subjects like serfdom were openly tackled by radical journals like the contemporary.
07:00Whose roll call of writers included Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Terganev.
07:06More than any other writer, it was Terganev who changed people's minds about serfdom.
07:11He grew up in a noble family on an estate rather like this.
07:17He had a privileged childhood.
07:19But he witnessed his mother being tyrannical with the family serfs.
07:23He saw serfs beaten, sent off to the army, serf families split up.
07:28Terganev wrote a series of stories, collected under the innocuous title, sketches from a hunter's album.
07:38Here was a human portrait of the serfs themselves, alongside the cruelty of their masters, the landowners.
07:46This book was published in 1852, exactly the same year as Uncle Tom's cabin in the United States.
07:56And just as Uncle Tom helped to mobilise public opinion against slavery over there, this book had the same effect against serfdom over here.
08:04Zal Nicholas I was so angry about the book that he placed Terganev under house arrest, having insulted the landowners of Russia.
08:15Privately, Nicholas acknowledged that serfdom would eventually have to go.
08:22But not yet. His beloved army depended on it to fill its ranks.
08:28And he needed the military to enlarge his empire.
08:32Under Nicholas, Russia expanded its territory in the Caucasus and Central Asia and became the dominant power in the Near East.
08:45Russia had the largest army in the world.
08:49All the other powers thought that she was a terrifying threat.
08:53But these numbers were deceptive.
08:55Mostly the army was made up of these conscripted peasants whose equipment was poor and whose motivation was poorer.
09:04And Nicholas, although he loved military parades, had and helped.
09:08He'd promoted people who were loyal as opposed to people who were talented.
09:12He just didn't have the right generals to win a war.
09:15So it would only be a matter of time before the might of the Russian war machine would prove to be paper thin.
09:26That moment came in 1853 when Nicholas blundered into the Crimean War.
09:31Russia was fighting France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire.
09:37And to Nicholas' increasing horror, he was on the losing side.
09:42The Russians lose the Crimean War essentially because they're a pre-industrial country trying to fight countries which are already being transformed by the Industrial Revolution.
09:55The British and French get to the Crimea by modern forms of transport, the steamship and the railway.
10:01Meanwhile, the Russians are still essentially in the pre-industrial era.
10:04They have to walk to the Crimea. They can't supply their troops in the Crimea by anything but pre-industrial means.
10:12And Russian artillery is outranged on the battlefield by English and French rifled muskets.
10:19They also simply don't have the financial muscle to keep going.
10:25To add to Nicholas' disgrace, Russia was losing on her own soil.
10:30There was no escape from the humiliation, not even at the Romanov Summer Palace at Peterhof.
10:38Just over there on the horizon, on a clear day, is the island of Kronstadt.
10:44It's the naval base that defends St. Petersburg 20 miles that way.
10:49And from the very palace grounds, Nicholas with his telescope could see French and British warships stationed near the island.
10:57To them, this was a terrific show of strength, but to Nicholas, it was a personal humiliation.
11:04To see the enemy so close, so deep into his empire.
11:08He'd been brought face to face with his own military weakness.
11:12His courtiers noticed a physical change in Nicholas.
11:21He was perpetually downcast, his face in wrinkles.
11:31In 1855, six months into the siege of Sevastopol, the emperor and autocrat of all the Russians was taken ill.
11:41Nicholas had a chill, but even so, he went outside into the horrible St. Petersburg winter to review his troops.
11:50While he was watching, the snow was falling, but he took off his coat and he unbuttoned his shirt.
11:56This made him even iller.
11:57And when he went back inside his palace, he wouldn't let his doctors see him until it was too late.
12:04He had full-blown pneumonia.
12:06Some historians have speculated that maybe this was a deliberate action by Nicholas.
12:12Maybe he was trying to commit suicide by snow.
12:15The broken Nicholas had kept Russia static for 30 years, and now his country was a backwater.
12:27But did his son, Alexander, have what it took to change things?
12:32Well, this is how Alexander II is remembered in Russia today.
12:41As the last great czar.
12:44And with good reason.
12:45This inscription lists Alexander's CV in glowing terms, and rightly so.
12:57He introduced reforms in education, in the judiciary, in local government, in the army.
13:02But his biggest achievement is listed right here at the top.
13:07It says, in 1861, Alexander overturned serfdom, liberating millions of peasants from centuries of slavery.
13:18An act that earned him his name, the Tsar Liberator.
13:23By the mid-1850s, the arguments for abandoning serfdom were immense.
13:28It was part of the disgrace at Crimea.
13:32It tied people to the land so that industry couldn't develop.
13:36And increasingly, it was just seen as wrong.
13:41But when it came to reforming the system, huge self-interest was also at work.
13:47What really convinced Alexander to end serfdom was the threat that he perceived to the Romanovs themselves.
13:53Unless he introduced change through reform from above, his hands might be forced from below, through revolution.
14:02After years of consultation with landowners, Alexander signed the Decree of Emancipation in 1861.
14:11In the Moscow State Archives, it's possible to see how the serfs themselves would have learned the news.
14:21This is the official document announcing the end of serfdom that was printed and sent out across Russia to be read aloud in churches.
14:30Now, in democratic America, they'd have a civil war before everybody could agree to end slavery.
14:38But in autocratic Russia, Alexander thought he could just send out a document and it would happen.
14:44He also thought that there must be a way of pleasing all the parties to this transaction.
14:49Well, he was wrong about that.
14:53Now the serfs could own property, marry according to their choice, trade freely and vote in local elections.
15:02But when it came to sharing out land, Russia's elite were less than generous.
15:07When the land was split up, the landlords got two thirds of it and the best parts.
15:14The ex-serfs were given the leftovers.
15:17They were going to find it hard to scratch out a living from that.
15:21And the landlords got compensation, but the ex-serfs now had to pay for the right to work their land, placing them immediately in debt.
15:30The devil was in the detail.
15:32Many people had hoped that Alexander's reforms were the first step towards Russia becoming a liberal democracy.
15:43But they were destined to be disappointed.
15:46At the start of his reign, Alexander embraced the word that will be familiar to everybody who remembers the end of the Cold War.
15:54Glasnost.
15:55It means openness.
15:58He eased up on censorship.
15:59He allowed people to have a voice in reform.
16:02Sounds like a good idea.
16:04But you can argue that it was a terrible mistake because it raised expectations.
16:09As it gradually became clear that the reforms were compromised, a new disillusioned generation emerged.
16:17The student radicals.
16:19They wanted a revolution to overthrow Tsarism altogether.
16:23And some of them would use violence to achieve this.
16:25The story of modern political terrorism starts here.
16:26In 1866, there was the first ever attempt on the Tsar's life by a member of the public.
16:40A student radical tried to shoot Alexander as he was walking in St. Petersburg.
16:45I've come to the European University at St. Petersburg to meet Alexei Miller, Professor of History, to find out who these radicals were and why it was the reforming Alexander who became their target.
17:04Why did some of the radicals turn to violence?
17:07Why did some of the radicals turn to violence?
17:11Were they frustrated?
17:13Desperation, disenchantment, because on the one hand, they were talking about political violence, but they were not doing much.
17:21Still, sentences, court sentences to these people were extremely harsh.
17:30So you might as well commit violence.
17:32If you're going to Siberia for 25 years, you might as well throw a bomb.
17:36That is one thing.
17:37Second thing, the liberal part of the society feels, well, not full solidarity with the terrorists, but it doesn't feel full solidarity with the government and doesn't want to support the government.
17:56Vera Zasulic, who shopped the governor of St. Petersburg in his office, was tried by the jury and acquitted because they believed that she had a moral right to do so.
18:14That's quite surprising.
18:16That is not surprising.
18:17That is very sad.
18:18And that is a powerful message on the side of society.
18:21Go ahead.
18:22You can continue.
18:23You can continue.
18:24We are on your side.
18:25And then they want destabilization of the situation.
18:30And how you destabilize the situation.
18:32You start hunting the Tsar.
18:38Hunting the Tsar would become the obsession of a revolutionary group named People's Will, who have been called the first modern terrorist organization.
18:48In August 1879, at a fateful meeting, they condemned Alexander to death.
18:58For maximum secrecy, they held a meeting in a forest outside St. Petersburg.
19:03And here they decided that they'd be wasting their time if they went after middle-ranking government officials.
19:10What they needed to do was strike a blow at the heart of the Tsarist regime.
19:15They decided to go for the Tsar himself, Alexander II.
19:20And this was to be no ordinary murder, as they put it.
19:23It needed drama and spectacle to wake up the peasants and start a revolution.
19:32People's Will relentlessly pursued Alexander, launching a series of attacks on his life.
19:39In 1880, one of their number detonated a bomb that destroyed the dining room of the Winter Palace.
19:44Eleven people died, but Alexander, who was late for supper, survived.
19:51Security was increased, while Alexander belatedly tried to restart his reformist program.
19:59Plans were drawn up to introduce a new consultative assembly to advise the Tsar.
20:04These were just days away from being enacted, when People's Will finally caught up with Alexander on the streets of St. Petersburg.
20:17Trying to wrong-foot the terrorists, his carriage had taken a detour alongside this canal.
20:27But People's Will were prepared.
20:29One of their members was a brilliant young scientist, and he created a special bomb.
20:35A bit like a hand grenade, it contained vials of nitroglycerin.
20:40When these shattered, it would explode.
20:43As Alexander's carriage came round that corner, a member of People's Will was standing by and lobbed a grenade right at him.
20:50Several onlookers were wounded, but Alexander was fine. His carriage was bomb-proof.
21:00He should have stayed inside and driven off, but no, he got out.
21:05He wanted to talk to his would-be assassin.
21:08And this gave the opportunity to another member of People's Will with another grenade.
21:13When the smoke cleared, 20 people had been hurt, and the lower half of Alexander's body was shattered.
21:22They scooped him up, barely alive, and carried him back to the Winter Palace.
21:27At the Winter Palace, the dying Tsar was surrounded by his stunned family.
21:39He knew he was dying, they knew he was dying.
21:42It's all very bloody and very horrible.
21:46And there standing watching is his son, Alexander, who is going to be Alexander III.
21:52And he's standing there looking at what happens when you try and offer people reform.
21:58That's how he viewed it.
22:00So the death of Alexander II stops reform in its tracks.
22:04The constitutional decrees which would have come forward, which would have introduced another level of government in Russia are put aside.
22:14Alexander III will have nothing of them.
22:17He takes the line that Russia needs strong government.
22:19Alexander III presented himself as a strong man, and he certainly looked the part.
22:33A mixture of beard and muscle poured into a uniform.
22:38He was an enormous man, six foot three inches, and built like a great big bear.
22:44His party trick was to get an iron bar and to bend it with his bare hands.
22:51Alexander has had himself painted greeting a collection of peasant leaders.
22:57He's resolute, standing firm, the weight of Russia on his broad shoulders.
23:03And they're completely overwhelmed by the experience.
23:07Some of them are swooning away, and others are shielding their eyes from the magnificent sight of him.
23:15Alexander III wasn't exactly an intellectual giant, but he held his autocratic regime together, almost through force of will.
23:27Alexander introduced a new era of reaction.
23:30He gave the authorities extensive powers to jail people and to close down newspapers.
23:37There was a new secret police.
23:40And he was determined to stamp out all revolutionary movements, starting with people's will.
23:51In the years following 1881, dozens of revolutionaries made this boat trip to that rather terrifying-looking castle.
23:58Known as the Russian Bastille, the Schlisselberg Fortress was where political prisoners were sent to be forgotten.
24:08Schlisselberg was built in the 14th century.
24:13But in the 1880s, Alexander III oversaw the construction of a new prison for those associated with his father's murder.
24:22In the first 20 years after it was built, 68 men and women were interred at his majesty's pleasure.
24:40Fifteen were executed. Fifteen died of disease. Three committed suicide. And eight went insane.
24:53On the surface, Alexander III's era of reaction was working well.
24:59But every time he struck down a revolutionary, another one popped up as a replacement.
25:05In 1887, five prisoners were brought out of the fortress's execution block and hanged on a gallows, just where the white tree is.
25:17Their crime, plotting to murder the Tsar.
25:21One of them was a 21-year-old called Alexander Ulyanov.
25:24That's his great memorial up there.
25:28Now, you might not have heard of Alexander, but you will have heard of his younger brother.
25:33On the day of Alexander's execution, this brother was at school doing his geometry exam.
25:40His brother's death radicalised him.
25:42He got involved in student protests and started producing revolutionary literature under a pseudonym that would become one of the 20th century's best known names.
25:54Lenin.
25:55Contemporaries saw danger.
26:00The novelist Tolstoy wrote to the Tsar, urging him to show love for his enemies.
26:08But Alexander wanted to take the fight further.
26:11And he used the very sight of his father's assassination in St. Petersburg to make a powerful statement.
26:21This city had killed his father.
26:24And here, Alexander would champion the traditions of the motherland over the bankrupt modernity of the West.
26:31Peter the Great had conceived of St. Petersburg as a model for a new Russia.
26:38Here, Russia was going to embrace Western ideals.
26:42The city was even going to look like it belonged to Europe, being largely in the classical style.
26:49And yet, bang in the middle of this city full of Renaissance-style palazzi, Alexander III has plonked down this building.
26:56It's like a declaration of war on Peter's ideal.
27:02A bit like a ghost at a feast.
27:05This building revives the old Russia that Peter the Great tried to obliterate.
27:13For Alexander III, Russia had gone wrong when it had tried to copy the West.
27:19When it had tried to modernise itself.
27:22Western ideas clearly led to Tsars getting blown up.
27:29Russia could only thrive by embracing Russian culture.
27:33And that traditional Russian form of government, autocracy.
27:38Alexander III wasn't at the opening of the chillingly named Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood.
27:45He died of kidney disease in 1894, aged only 49.
27:52Responsibility for this, and nearly everything else in Russia, landed suddenly in the lap of his 26-year-old son, Nicholas.
28:01Outwardly, Nicholas II was a polite cosmopolitan gentleman.
28:08But under the surface was a ruler who felt deeply Russian.
28:13His coronation revealed a vision of Russia rooted in tradition.
28:19That most modern of technologies, moving film, was used to capture a ceremony replete with 17th-century costumes.
28:27After Nicholas and his wife Alexandra were crowned, the new Tsar took the coronation oath and vowed to uphold autocracy.
28:40The royal couple were bound together by their intense religious devotion.
28:45Near their favourite royal retreat, they built this.
28:53A cathedral that stands above Nicholas and Alexandra's private crypt church.
29:00The visit is like a journey into Nicholas's own soul.
29:04This is the family's private, personal entrance to their private, personal chapel, buried beneath the main body of the church.
29:17It feels like you're going into the inner sanctum of the Romanovs.
29:23Nicholas was a fatalist.
29:37He believed that whatever happened was ultimately God's will.
29:40Misfortune would lead him to declare, God knows what is good for us.
29:47We must bow down our heads and repeat the sacred words,
29:52Thy will be done.
29:54Nicholas was a man of deep, deep piety.
29:58With some other rulers, religion is for ceremony or show.
30:01Not so with Nicholas.
30:04During his reign, more churches were built in Russia than during the preceding century.
30:10And his first response to disaster wasn't what I'd call practical.
30:15It wasn't how can I help.
30:17He would spend several hours in prayer.
30:20He felt that he had a very personal relationship with God.
30:23This communion with the divine defined Nicholas's rule.
30:38He never forgot that he was a vessel of God.
30:43Nicholas tried to be a genuinely absolute monarch.
30:47But perversely, this made him a pretty ineffective one.
30:53The trouble was that he believed that the will of the Almighty
30:57ought to flow directly through him to his 170 million subjects.
31:04He found it very hard to delegate.
31:06He didn't even have a secretary.
31:08So his desk would be piled high with papers.
31:12He was meticulous about dealing with correspondence
31:14on topics like the appointment of rural midwives
31:19and whether or not a particular soldier ought to go on leave.
31:24But while he was bogged down in these trivia,
31:27big decisions about the future of his empire were getting away from him.
31:33Inside Nicholas's head, the Russian Empire was still a medieval one.
31:38Peasants toiling in their fields, loyal to their little father, the Tsar.
31:45But Russia was undergoing a belated and very rapid industrial revolution.
31:51Famine had drawn hundreds of thousands of newly liberated peasants
31:55to the cities and to factory work.
31:58St Petersburg had doubled in size in 15 years.
32:02As peasants became factory workers, they began to demand better conditions and respect from their employers.
32:13Everything came to a head on the 9th of January 1905.
32:18Bloody Sunday.
32:20150,000 striking protesters planned to march on the Winter Palace
32:24in the hope that the Tsar would listen to their grievances.
32:29Many of those who turned out believed that when they got to the Winter Palace,
32:33the Tsar would be pleased to see them, would welcome them in.
32:37Stories went round that he would put on a parade for them and offer them refreshments.
32:41Nicholas wasn't at home at the Winter Palace, but 12,000 troops had been posted around the city,
32:54with orders to prevent the marchers from reaching it.
32:56It was at the Narva Gate that the largest brigade of protesters found themselves face to face with two companies
33:09of the 93rd Irkutsk Infantry Regiment.
33:13One of the thousands out on the streets that day was the writer and communist Maxim Gorky.
33:19Within hours, Gorky wrote this letter describing exactly what happened next to the protesters.
33:27At the Narva Gate, they were met by the troops who fired nine rounds.
33:34After the first shot, some of the workers began to shout,
33:38Don't be frightened, they're blanks.
33:40But this wasn't true.
33:42Already a dozen or so people had fallen to the ground.
33:44The front ranks were mown down and the soldiers fired again at anybody who tried to stand up and get away.
33:53Forty people died at this spot and across the city more than a hundred were killed and hundreds more wounded.
34:00But according to Gorky, there was another casualty.
34:05The Tsar's prestige has been killed here.
34:09That is the meaning of this day.
34:11For a year, revolution raged across the empire.
34:17And it was only brought to an end when Nicholas caved in and made concessions.
34:22He promised a free press, right of assembly and above all, a constitution.
34:29And Russia was to have an elected assembly, the Duma, whose approval would be needed to pass legislation.
34:44Nicholas insisted that the state opening of the Duma be on home ground at the Winter Palace.
34:49And so, in April 1906, Russia's elite found themselves face to face with the people for the first time.
34:58On this side of the room stood Nicholas's existing government, his state councillors, in their uniforms with gold lace.
35:06On the other side stood the members of the new Duma.
35:11They were wearing the clothing of workers and peasants.
35:14That's red shirts and big rough boots.
35:17And the two sides looked at each other with suspicion and hostility.
35:22If there were ever a moment for Nicholas to reach across the divide and bring people together, this was it.
35:31But no, he made a speech, recommitting himself to the principle of autocracy.
35:36He was going to hold on to it, he said, with unwavering firmness.
35:40At the end of the speech, the state councillors let out a big cheer.
35:45They were delighted.
35:47But the members of the new Duma stood and listened in stony silence.
35:55In the end, Nicholas's first Duma didn't last ten weeks.
35:59He dissolved it and ultimately fixed the elections to get a more compliant one.
36:05For now, autocracy had won the day.
36:07After the 1905 revolution, Nicholas and Alexandra were spending more and more time in the safety of this neoclassical palace.
36:17Here, the Tsar was able to be something that he was actually good at.
36:22A husband and a father.
36:24We're only 15 miles away from the centre of St. Petersburg.
36:29But the secluded Alexander Palace, in its beautiful park, seems like a completely different world.
36:35It was here that Nicholas and his family found an escape from sycophantic courtiers and the unkind gossip of the court.
36:45But it was also here, at the centre of their happy domestic life, that a crisis was unfolding.
36:52With grave consequences for the dynasty.
36:54Nicholas II had four daughters.
36:59As seen here, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.
37:04But with the birth of his fifth child, Alexei, in 1904, he finally had an heir.
37:14The royal children played in the palace's vast park.
37:19A favourite then was this playhouse, built for the children of Nicholas I.
37:24But a handful of people knew that Alexei had inherited the condition of haemophilia through his maternal great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
37:37At the start of the 20th century, this was a death sentence.
37:41In 1907, the three-year-old Alexei had been playing when he fell over and hurt his leg.
37:50When he was carried into the palace, it was clear that something was very wrong.
37:56Poor Alexei had a haemorrhage in his leg.
38:03It had swollen up and it was giving him excruciating pain.
38:07His body was twisted and he had dark shadows under his eyes.
38:12For three days, the boy's condition deteriorated and he came closer and closer to death.
38:19The doctors couldn't even ease his pain.
38:21With nothing to lose, Alexandra and Nicholas turned to Grigori Rasputin, a mystic and a holy man who, it was said, had healing powers.
38:39Rasputin was brought into the palace through a side entrance and he was taken up to Alexei's bedroom.
38:45There, he made the sign of the cross and he prayed over the little boy for 10 minutes.
38:52And then he said, your pain is leaving you.
38:55You must thank God for healing you.
38:58Now go to sleep.
39:00And that was it.
39:03Rasputin's words appeared to make Alexei instantly better.
39:08Those present felt that they'd witnessed a miracle.
39:11To Nicholas and Alexandra, the message was clear.
39:15Rasputin was the only man in Russia who could save their son.
39:22Rasputin could stop Alexei's bleeding.
39:25Even when he wasn't there in person, when he was talking on the telephone, he could make the bleeding stop.
39:32It's a very hard one for us to understand.
39:37Russians can explain it.
39:41The nearest I could come to it is to say that perhaps it's the calming effect he has.
39:47With Alexandra's anxiety, her son's fragile health, talk of revolution and the threat of assassination, the Alexandra Palace turned into a place of even greater seclusion.
40:06The Empress and the children simply locked themselves away.
40:12And just as the public were unable to see into this private world, so the Romanovs found it increasingly hard to see out to the changing nation beyond their gates.
40:23A rare public appearance occurred in 1913, the 300-year anniversary of the Romanovs gaining power.
40:33When the family emerged, they were presented with the stage-managed Russia of their imagination.
40:39Nicholas relived the moment when Mikhail Romanov was greeted at the Kremlin, on the way to be crowned.
40:50And the highlight was a journey around the ancient Russian cities, including Pastroma, where the Romanov story had begun three centuries before.
41:01During the trip along the Volga, not as many as expected turned out to see the royal steamer.
41:17But when they got here, to Kostroma, the weather warmed up and so did the crowds.
41:23People were throwing themselves at the Tsar's feet.
41:26They were even kissing the ground where his shadow had fallen.
41:30This was a true spiritual homecoming.
41:37This adulation made Alexandra cock-a-hoop.
41:42We need merely to show ourselves, she said, and at once their hearts are ours.
41:51What no one knew was that this was to be Imperial Russia's final golden summer.
42:00In 1914, Nicholas let his people into the First World War.
42:11Workers rallied to the Tsar as to our emblem.
42:16Twelve million men would be mobilized.
42:18And Nicholas made a stirring speech from the Winter Palace, likening the fight to Alexander I's war against Napoleon.
42:27But the war would force Nicholas to make a fateful decision.
42:41In 1915, Nicholas was praying to an icon of the Protectress of the Romanovs.
42:46And then, as he described it, an inner voice spoke and told him that he should take personal command of the army.
42:57Afterwards, he experienced a feeling like after Holy Communion, God was flowing directly through him.
43:04But by taking personal control of the army, Nicholas shackled himself and his dynasty to the success of the war.
43:13The Tsar directs the war not from the distance of hundreds of miles, said Nicholas.
43:18He appears in the midst of battle. He feels the mood of his armies.
43:24With the Tsar away at the front, a power vacuum was created.
43:29One eagerly filled by Rasputin.
43:33Because of Alexandra's reliance upon him, many believed that a malign power was working behind the throne.
43:40And Rasputin didn't help himself. He drank heavily, enjoyed the flattery of society ladies and, well, other sorts of ladies too.
43:52He was known to visit prostitutes. We don't know quite what he did with them.
43:57That there's some suggestion he may have been testing himself spiritually.
44:01Or that he also had the belief that the more you sin, the more you can be forgiven.
44:05So you should get on and do plenty of sinning.
44:07Rasputin's continuing reputation as Russia's greatest love machine is a relic from this time.
44:22The rumours damaged Alexandra, who was tainted by association.
44:28The fact that they were close to him and refused to speak about it just exacerbated relations with the rest of the family.
44:35And with the wider aristocracy, certainly calling into question their judgment and increasing this sense of us and them.
44:47A plot was hatched to kill Rasputin. It centred around the man who lived here, Prince Felix Yusupov, who was married to Tsar Nicholas's beautiful niece, Irina.
45:01On the night of December the 16th, 1916, Felix lured Rasputin to his palace with the promise of a midnight assignation with Irina.
45:15Upstairs, they could hear the sounds of a party. A gramophone was playing.
45:21Felix explains that his wife had guests and that she would come down when they'd left.
45:26Prince Felix said, while we're waiting, let's have some cakes and some wine.
45:43The cakes were rose-flavoured, Rasputin's favourite, and both were laced with cyanide.
45:50He ate and he drank, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with him.
45:53He asked Prince Felix to play some songs on his guitar.
45:59An hour later, Felix is getting impatient.
46:03So he got his pistol, he distracted Rasputin by asking him to look at a crucifix, and he shot him in the side.
46:10Now the conspiracists started talking about what to do with Rasputin's clothes, his overcoat.
46:18But, unnoticed by them, Rasputin was still alive.
46:23He managed to creep his way right out of the building and into the courtyard before they spotted this.
46:28There, they shot him again properly in the head, and they weighed down his body with heavy iron chains and threw it into the river Neva.
46:40The removal of Rasputin was too little too late to save the Romanovs.
46:50The war was dragging on, and conditions were getting worse.
46:54A decisive moment was reached in February 1917, on the streets of the Russian capital.
47:00Workers, tired of long hours in the factories and even longer queues for bread, came pouring out onto the streets.
47:09The First World War was a disaster for Russia.
47:14Three out of four Russian soldiers became casualties.
47:19Workers and farmers had been taken from their jobs, and then slaughtered by the German army.
47:27And this led to food shortages and rampant inflation.
47:31Ultimately, the glittering Romanovs would be brought down by a people who wanted the basic commodity of bread.
47:44The breaking point came on International Women's Day.
47:48Thousands of women flooded the streets to protest, joining forces with striking workers.
47:54By the next day, a quarter of a million people were marching down Nevsky Prospect.
48:04They were smashing up the shops, and carrying banners that said things like,
48:09stop the war, feed the children, and most worryingly to the Romanovs, end autocracy.
48:15Alexandra wrote to Nicholas of a hooligan movement in the streets.
48:25Nicholas commanded the local garrison to put a stop to the protests,
48:29and orders were issued to use all necessary force.
48:36The thousands of people on the streets were met by soldiers,
48:41who followed their orders and fired at them.
48:43But that night, when the troops went back to their barracks,
48:47they began to ask themselves whether they could face another day of shooting at their fellow citizens,
48:52who were desperate for food.
48:54The answer to that question became clear the next morning.
48:58The streets were full again with the workers, but also with soldiers with red ribbons on their bayonets.
49:04The mutinies amongst the armed forces went on all day.
49:08They broke into weapons factories, they set fire to police stations.
49:13By sunset, the revolution was well underway.
49:21By now, Nicholas had been abandoned by his generals, who believed he was completely useless, an obstacle to victory.
49:28Travelling home from the front, Nicholas's train was forced to divert, and he started getting telegrams from politicians and the military.
49:38They said that in order to avoid a complete collapse of order, he would have to go.
49:47Now, for all of his failures, Nicholas was a patriot. To avoid civil war, he agreed to abdicate.
49:56And here's the document where Nicholas renounces an empire, effectively bringing an end to 300 years of Romanov rule.
50:08I can't help noticing that he signed it very lightly, in pencil, as if he didn't really mean it.
50:18People present were struck by the calmness with which Nicholas signed away his throne.
50:23One of the generals present later said,
50:27He was such a fatalist, I couldn't believe it.
50:30He signed as simply as one hands over a cavalry squadron to its new commander.
50:35Nicholas handed the throne to his brother, who refused it.
50:44Instead, the mighty power of the Tsar flowed to Russia's new provisional government.
50:50300 years of Romanov rule had come to an end.
50:54The new provisional government immediately faced demands for the ex-Tsar's arrest.
50:59On the 7th of March, they ordered that Nicholas and Alexandra be deprived of their freedom.
51:06The family found themselves captive, back at the Alexander Palace.
51:11But even here, the world was turned upside down.
51:15The soldiers moved freely through the palace, coming into the family's rooms unannounced.
51:21And outside the park railing, crowds gathered.
51:23The Gapers, as Nicholas called them, come to see the once great Romanov's brought so low.
51:32The guards liked to humiliate Nicholas for a joke.
51:36One day he was riding along on his bicycle,
51:39and one of the soldiers thrust his bayonet through the spokes of the wheel,
51:43then laughed uproariously as the ex-Tsar went over the handlebars.
51:47The new provisional government was still at war with the Germans.
51:55And so the Germans gave them a special present.
51:59Lenin.
52:01The exiled revolutionary was transported across Germany in a sealed train to Russia.
52:07Lenin stirred up a more militant mood,
52:10and pressure was put on the provisional government to be harder on the royal family.
52:14By the late summer, it was decided that the Romanov's belonged in a cage less gilded.
52:22At dawn on the 1st of August, 1917,
52:27Tsar Nicholas and his family left the palace through these doors.
52:31Along with 39 courtiers and retainers, they were to be taken under heavy guard to Siberia.
52:41They didn't realize it, that they were leaving forever.
52:44In spite of this harder line, the provisional government were out of step with a people who wanted an end to the war,
53:00and who were flocking to Lenin's promise of peace, land and bread.
53:04In October came the 10 days that shook the world.
53:10When Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government.
53:14The Winter Palace was stormed.
53:17Telegraph stations and government offices occupied.
53:20With control of the state, the Bolsheviks now founded their own militia, the Red Army.
53:25And they would, in time, have to decide what to do with Mr. Nicholas Romanov and family.
53:34The Bolsheviks have a deep loathing of the Russian imperial family.
53:40Lenin describes that the last Tsar, not as Nicholas II, but as Nicholas the Bloody.
53:44And they hold the imperial family and the Romanov regime responsible for the events of 1905,
53:54when peaceful working people are shot down by Tsarist troops.
53:58And in the spring and summer of 1918, Lenin and his comrades are fixed on one thing and one thing only.
54:05It is the maintenance of their own power.
54:07They understand very clearly the fragility of their situation,
54:11and they are prepared to do almost anything to hold on to the authority that they have gained in October 1917.
54:20By July 1918, the family were being held in a house in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.
54:28Civil war was raging.
54:31The guns of the White Army rumbled just a few miles away.
54:35A decision was made somewhere in the Soviet bureaucracy
54:39that Nicholas and his family should be killed to prevent them from becoming a rallying point for their enemies.
54:49It's hard to get a clear picture of what actually happened at Yekaterinburg.
54:54There are so many conflicting stories about it.
54:58And in any case, the whole thing was pushed up afterwards.
55:00But most sources do agree that in the early hours of the morning, Nicholas, Alexandra and the children were woken up.
55:09They were told to dress and to go down to the cellar.
55:13This was for their own safety. They had to be moved again.
55:17They were accompanied by some of their servants and their dog.
55:19Meanwhile, outside the cellar, an execution squad was forming up.
55:26One of its members was called Mikhail Mebedev.
55:29And this is the gun that he carried.
55:33When the squad entered, Nicholas was told that he and his family were to be killed.
55:38And he was actually in the act of going, what, when the first shot was fired.
55:44Mebedev later claimed it as his own.
55:49What happened in the basement was a massacre.
55:53As well as being shot multiple times, members of the family were also bayoneted.
55:58One of the soldiers later remembered that it had been difficult to bayonet the girls.
56:04Because, thinking that the family was on the move once again,
56:08they'd stored their diamonds and their jewels inside their corsets.
56:12This had acted like armor plating.
56:15After the whole business was over, there was only one survivor.
56:19It was the little dog.
56:20The question I keep coming back to is could all of this horror have been avoided?
56:41If Nicholas was a bit more politically astute
56:44and a bit less determined to cling on to his autocracy.
56:47If Nicholas had heeded the warning of the revolution of 1905
56:52and become a constitutional monarch like in Britain,
56:56then maybe his life, the lives of his family,
56:59and the lives of millions of ordinary Russians could have been saved.
57:03But no, he was determined that his power should be undiluted.
57:08And if you look back at the history of his dynasty,
57:11you can sort of see why he made that decision.
57:13Nicholas's devotion to autocracy wasn't a fetish.
57:19For him, it was a rational response to how power worked in Russia.
57:24His direct ancestors, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great,
57:28had used their absolute rule to turn Russia into a world power.
57:32While Western-style reforms led to instability and assassination.
57:41And even though Nicholas himself didn't make a good job of being an autocrat,
57:47the regime that followed them would in some ways resemble that of Tsarist rule,
57:51with its own Red Tsars around whom the state revolved.
58:00For better or worse, how the Romanos governed paved the way for what was to come.
58:07What was to come.
58:08What was to come.
58:30Transcription by CastingWords
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