Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Tsaritsa Alexandra, their four daughters and son, a portrait of the Russian imperial family in 'An Ambassador's Memoirs' by Maurice Paléologue, the last French Ambassador to the Russian Court.
The Imperial Family
"In the freezing cold of 9 January the streets of Petrograd were filled with 145,000 strikers. They were commemorating the tragedy of Bloody Sunday in 1905, when the priest Father Georgi Gapon had led 200,000 men, women and children through the snow to the Winter Palace. The people he led had wanted political rights and an end to the war with Japan. Dressed in their Sunday best they had carried aloft pictures of the Tsar but he rewarded their protest with bullets — among the 1,240 casualties 370 were killed. And now, 12 years on, the people at least knew where they stood. Their banners read 'Down with the Romanovs!' — gone were the portraits of 'the Tsar of all the Russias'. Now the red flags fluttered in the bitter breeze."
The bitterly cold winter of 1916–17 strained all the combatant nations, perhaps none more so than Russia. The cold and a coal shortage prevented transport of adequate food supplies to the cities including the Russian capital of Petrograd. Russian Tsar Nicholas II was Nicholas Romanoff, autocrat and Tsar of all Russias. He hoped to pass the autocracy on to his son intact.
1917: Russia's Year of Revolution by Roy Bainton, page 50, copyright © Roy Bainton 2005, publisher: Carroll and Graf Publishers, publication date: 2005
1917-01-22, 1917, January, Petrograd, strike, Petrograd strike, Russian Imperial Family
