https://www.city-journal.org/html/killing-of-the-romanovs-16030.html
The family was roused early in the morning and told to dress in preparation for an immediate change of location. They were brought to a dingy basement room and ordered to wait, while their killers fortified themselves with liquid courage. One hundred years ago, in the early hours of July 17, 1918, the abdicated Czar Nicholas II and his immediate family, along with four retainers, were murdered, and buried in haste under cover of night.
Studying the years that led to that savage night, it’s hard not to want to shout across time at the last Romanov, to wake him from his walking stupor. His feckless rule was marked by indecision and half-steps at political reform, the necessity of which was obvious to everyone. Sergei Witte, the brilliant diplomat and reformer who engineered Russia’s first constitution, warned Nicholas in 1905 that “Russia has outgrown its existing governmental forms. . . . You must give the people their constitution; otherwise, they will wrest one away.”
Nicholas dithered, while also imploring his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to become dictator. The Grand Duke (known as “Tall Nicholas,” for his imposing height) took out his pistol and said that he would shoot himself in the head if the czar refused to sign the decree authorizing the formation of a parliament. Nicholas, himself incapable of dramatic, decisive gestures, signed.
From the outset of his reign, Nicholas was as detached from authority as he was captivated by the weight and romance of its history. His own mother told Witte, years before the premature death of her husband, Czar Alexander III, that Nicholas was incapable of ruling and lacked the character and will to become emperor. His rule bears out this judgment. Inspired by the ideal of the mystical union of the “people and the czar,” Nicholas possessed the political worldview of an early-modern absolutist, along the lines of King James I of England. He tried to convince himself, while revolt and turmoil boiled around him, that the 300-year legacy of the divinely inspired Romanov rule could not possibly end with him.