The last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, gave up his throne on March 15, 1917, after a series of military blunders pushed both civil and military leaders to more or less tell him it was time to resign. Unlike in many other monarchies, however, there was no one to take his place. Nicholas meant for his brother, Michael, to become the next ruler, but he wasn’t interested in stepping into the quagmire and refused. For the first time in centuries, Russia was without a tsar — and it would stay that way.
The working government effectively imprisoned the former tsar and his wife and children, originally with the idea of sending them all to England where they might have received a warm enough reception from the royal family there. There were plenty of family connections there, including the fact that Nicholas and Britain’s George V were first cousins. But the Romanovs were deemed too inconvenient by the politically ascendant Bolsheviks and were assassinated in Siberia the night of July 17, 1918.
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Looking further back, Russia doesn’t seem to be a friendly place for abdicating tsars. Catherine the Great’s troublesome dunce of a husband, Peter III, was forced to abdicate by his wife’s supporters on July 10, 1762. He was hustled off to an out-of-the-way village where he mysteriously died soon thereafter — perhaps, as some have argued, at the command of his now very powerful wife who would have found a still-living former tsar very annoying.
