[Niuhuru]

“The children of Queen Victoria were a feckless worthless lot - the Czar, the Kaiser and the King.”

It was actually the wives of the Czar and Kaiser that were worthless; Nicholas was a lot more retiring than an autocrat should have been, so his wife stepped in and started to run things (right into the ground) and it was King George V that ended up leaving the Romanov Family to get shot to death by the Communists, interestingly after the Prime Minister offered them (the Russian Imperial Family) asylum.

George V stepped in and prevented it, mainly because at the time he wanted to disassociate himself from his German cousin the Tsarina because of the anti-German antipathy during the first World War. Some family, huh?

[Cronos]

The Czar and Czarina -- IMHO, neither was directly to blame for this. The roots of the May revolution was the century+ of autocratic rule and the repercussions of WWI.

The Kaiser Wilhelm II was also to blame for German involvement in WWI -- he was too eager to be the next Frederick the Great (but I increasingly see WWI as inevitable and good in the way it freed many nations but evil in the number of deaths)