Nicholas II

Nicholas II, born in 1868, was the last Emperor of Russia, and his reign ended 304 years of Romanov rule in collapse, revolution and blood. His chart shows a man temperamentally unsuited to the storm he inherited. The Sun sits in Taurus, the fixed, foundational bull whose defining trait is that its opinions do not move; placed in the ninth house of philosophy, faith and authority, this is a will wedded to old-school belief, here to a near-sacred conviction in autocratic rule. He clung to that foundation while the twentieth century demanded change, resisting real power for the Duma to the bitter end. His Moon in Aries, the restless warrior-Moon that deteriorates whenever it cannot act freely, sat in the eighth house of crisis and death, a fitting signature for a life shadowed by the Khodynka disaster, the pogroms, Bloody Sunday, the Russo-Japanese War and the carnage of the First World War, catastrophes over which he presided through fault or fatal inaction. His Virgo Ascendant lent the anxious, fastidious mask of a private, well-meaning family man. He, his wife and children were executed at Yekaterinburg in 1918. A chart describes temperament; it never excuses the suffering a ruler permits or causes.