During the reign of the Rurik dynasty which died with the death of Tsar Feodor in 1598, the Romanov family became a boyar, the highest rank of the Russian nobility in the Grand Duchy of Moscow and in Tsarist Russia. Russia experienced 15 chaotic years after the death of Fedor, the last ruler of the Romanov dynasty, in 1598, known as the period of unrest (1598-1613) that ended with the Semski Sobor, an assembly of the country that elected its brother Nikita, the grandson of Mikhail Romanov, as its new tsar. According to historian Chester Dunning in his extensive history of the first Russian Civil War, the country emerged from the 15-year crisis in 1613, when Michael was elected Tsar at the age of 16.
On February 21, 1613, Semski Sobor elected Michael Romanov Tsar of Russia, and established the Romanovs as Russia’s second ruling dynasty. The Revolution came to Russia in February 1917, a month after Nicholas II, the emperor and autocrat of Russia, seized his throne and became Nicholas Romanov. It is hard to imagine a time four years ago when the days of glory were over when the Russian Revolution toppled the Romanian family from the imperial throne and the Romanov dynasty of the third century came to an end.
Early March 1917 marked the beginning of the end of the Romanov dynasty in general and of the imperial family in particular when the head of state announced that autocracy would continue in Russia and that the throne would pass to Nicholas’s son Alexei. Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, the male grandson of Tsar Alexander II, claimed the head of the deposed tsar Nicholas II family and assumed the pretentious title of Russian Emperor (Autocrat) until 1924 when the evidence seemed clear that all Romanovs had been killed in succession. The dynasty’s direct male bloodline ended when Elizabeth I of Russia died in 1762, and Peter III succeeded Catherine as the German-born royal.
For more than 300 years, a family – Romanovs – ruled the Russian Empire. It ended with their assassination by Tsar Nicholas II and his family during the Russian Revolution. The Romanov Dynasty was the second great royal dynasty in Russia to emerge from the Rurik Dynasty which had ruled the seat of power in Russia for six centuries before the dynasty began.
During Romanov’s reign, Russia became and remained a great European power. The descendants of Andrej Ivanovich (Kobyla Kambila), a Moscow boyar who lived during the reign of Grand Duke of Moscow, Ivan the Kalita (reigned 1328 — 41), the Romanian dynasty got its name from Roman Yuryev (died 1543), daughter of Anastasia Romanovna (Zakharina Yuryeva), the first wife of Ivan the Terrible.
Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, the father of Vladimir Cyrillovitch, was the last male dynasty of the Romanovs. The basis for this claim was that other men descended from Emperor Nicholas I of Russia in violation of domestic law married, which meant their descendants had no inheritance rights to the Russian throne. In the first centuries of their rule, the Romans followed the custom of the deceased rulers of Rurik to hand over the throne to the Tsar’s eldest son, the tsar’s son of his closest male relative.
Peter ruled Russia, stylized himself as Emperor of Russia in 1721, and reigned until his death in 1725. In 1696, after the death of his half-brother Ivanas, Peter became the only tsar of Russia.
The emperors of Russia became known as Tsars, imposing autocratic rule and government by one man. The last Romanov tsar, Nicholas II., began his reign as the second Russian emperor in the autumn of 1894, named after a direct descendant of Catherine the Great when he ascended to the throne. In the ensuing chaos of World War I, Russia’s last ruling family suffered brutal forms of regime change by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution and a public outcry for individual equality, that mirrored the violence of the last century’s French Revolution.
After the assassination of the former monarchic family, members of the Romanov dynasty were found murdered who could not leave Russia after the revolution for some reason. They were thought to have been buried near Yekaterinburg in the Ganina Yama region, but they were not found until 1979, and their remains were found not far from the city of Sverdlovsk.
The heirs of the Romanov dynasty suffered from hemophilia, which was one of the main reasons why tsar and tsarina isolated themselves in Tsarskoye Selo and tried their best not only to protect Tsessarevich Alexei’s health from their subjects but also from the family members of the Romanov dynasty. The British royal family was also a carrier of the disease, but not the Romanovs.
Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, and their son Alexis celebrated the 300-year rule of the dynasties in the Kremlin. The political rule of the Romanovs is the story of a line of the last ruler and his family, not of anyone else. The Romanov reign began in 1598 with the death of the last tsar of the Rurik Dynasty which can only be described as a troubled period. Michael, the father, was forced to make a monastic vow and took the name Philaret. The reign of Tsar Boris Godunov, which lasted until 1605, led to the banishment of the Romanian family to the Urals and other remote areas.