Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia — a man who inherited the largest country on earth and lost it all through a combination of personal weakness, catastrophic judgment, and a refusal to accept that the world his dynasty had built was collapsing around him. He responded to calls for reform with machine guns, led Russia into a war it could not win, and was executed with his entire family in a basement in Yekaterinburg.

This episode traces Nicholas from his sheltered upbringing through the Russo-Japanese War, Bloody Sunday, Rasputin’s influence, the abdication, and the execution that ended three centuries of Romanov rule.

• Nicholas’s unprepared ascent to the throne and his early resistance to constitutional reform
• Bloody Sunday, the 1905 Revolution, and the half-measures that satisfied nobody
• Rasputin’s influence over the royal family and its corrosive effect on the dynasty’s credibility
• World War I, the abdication, and the Bolshevik execution of the entire imperial family