St. James's Auctions (Knightsbridge Coins)
Lot 430
Russia, Nicholas II (1894-1917), large gold award medal ‘For Zeal in Services to the Government’, undated, by A. Vasyutinsky and Klenov, bust of Nicholas II l., rev. FOR ZEAL in Cyrillic, within cascading partial wreath, 51.5mm., 75.05gms. (Diakov 1138.1 [R3]), integral suspension loop, struck with a light matt surface, minor handling marks and scratch on reverse near the loop, extremely fine, rare, and a particularly handsome image of the last tsar!. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov was born near St. Petersburg on 18 May 1868. He was the eldest son of Tsar Alexander III, and when he succeeded his father in 1894 he had no real experience in governing. He married Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt in the same year he gained the throne, and within a few years they had four daughters and a son, Alexis, who suffered from haemophilia, a disease of the blood. It was a time of colonial expansion by European powers, and not to be outdone by rivals Tsar Nicholas encouraged Russian expansion into Manchuria, which provoked war with Japan in 1904. Russia was defeated and this led to internal strikes and riots until, in January 1905, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, the army in St. Petersburg shot into a crowd demanding radical reforms. The coming storm would alter Russian history forever. In quick succession, the renegade priest Rasputin, who exerted excessive influence over the Romanovs, was murdered by irritated nobles in late 1916, and just two months later demonstrations disrupted in the renamed capital, Petrograd. The army deserted Nicholas, who was forced to abdicate, grant a constitution, and watch the Duma (parliament) take control that had always been the right of the monarchy. The royal family were imprisoned and moved to a number of secret locations, finally being held at Yekaterinburg in the Urals. By October of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of the shaky, provisional government. Civil war erupted. In the middle of July 1918, the former tsar and his entire family were infamously executed by their captors as anti-Bolshevik forces grew nearer to Yekaterinburg. It has long been believed that the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, personally ordered the last of the Romanovs to be put to death.
