Russia was ruled by Tsars. The House of Romanov held office from 1613 to 1917.
Tsar Alexander II of Russia 1855 to 1881
Nicholas II of Russia 1894 to 1917
He was the last Romanov to rule.
Tsars ex Wiki
Tsar (/zɑːr, sɑːr/ or /tsɑːr/; also spelled czar, tzar, or csar; Bulgarian: цар, romanized: tsar; Serbian: цар / car; Russian: царь, romanized: tsar) was a title used by Slavic monarchs. The term is derived from the Latin word caesar,[2] which was intended to mean emperor in the European medieval sense of the term—a ruler with the same rank as a Roman emperor, holding it by the approval of another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official (the Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch)—but was usually considered by Western Europeans to be equivalent to "king".[3][4] It lends its name to a system of government, tsarist autocracy or tsarism.Tsar and its variants were the official titles in the First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018), Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396), the Kingdom of Bulgaria (1908–1946), the Serbian Empire (1346–1371), and the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721). The first ruler to adopt the title tsar was Simeon I of Bulgaria.[5] Simeon II, the last tsar of Bulgaria, is the last person to hold this title.
House of Romanov ex Wiki
The House of Romanov[b] (also transliterated as Romanoff; Russian: Романовы, romanized: Romanovy, IPA: [rɐˈmanəvɨ]) was the reigning imperial house of Russia from 1613 to 1917. They achieved prominence after Anastasia Romanovna married Ivan the Terrible, the first crowned tsar of all Russia. Nicholas II and his immediate family were executed in 1918, but there are still living descendants.The house consisted of boyars in Russia (the highest rank in the Russian nobility at the time) under the reigning Rurik dynasty, which became extinct upon the death of Feodor I in 1598. The Time of Troubles, caused by the resulting succession crisis, saw several pretenders and imposters lay claim to the Russian throne during the Polish occupation. On 21 February 1613, the Zemsky Sobor elected Michael Romanov as tsar, establishing the Romanovs as Russia's second reigning dynasty.
Michael's grandson, Peter I, who took the title of emperor and proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, transformed the country into a great power through a series of wars and reforms. The direct male line of the Romanovs ended when Elizabeth died childless in 1762. As a result, her nephew Peter III, an agnatic member of the House of Holstein-Gottorp (a cadet branch of the German House of Oldenburg that reigned in Denmark), ascended to the throne and adopted his Romanov mother’s house name.[1] Officially known as members of the House of Romanov, descendants after Elizabeth are sometimes referred to as Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov.[2]
The abdication of Nicholas II on 15 March [O.S. 2 March] 1917 as a result of the February Revolution ended 304 years of Romanov rule and led to the establishment of the Russian Republic under the Russian Provisional Government in the lead-up to the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. In 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas II and his family. Of the House of Romanov's 65 members, 47 survivors went into exile abroad.[3] In 1924, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, the senior surviving male-line descendant of Alexander II of Russia by primogeniture, claimed the headship of the defunct Imperial House of Russia.