0 ne of the world's preeminent historians, Marc Ferro is a leading member of the Annales School of France and a recognized authority on early twentieth-century European his- tory. For well over two decades, in volumes such as The February Revo- lution of 1917 and October 1917, he has demonstrated an unsurpassed skill in capturing the social and politi cal forces that led to the Russian Rev- olution. Now Ferro turns his consid- erable talents to the biography of one of the pivotal figures of that era. Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. For this important new biography, Ferro has searched extensively in Russian archives to illuminate Nicholas's character. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a reluctant leader, a young man forced by the death of his father into a role for which he was ill-equipped. A conformist and tradi- tionalist, Nicholas admired the order, ritual, and ceremony identified with the intangible grandeur of autocracy, and he hated everything that might shake that autocracy-the intelli- gentsia, the Jews, the religious sects. His reign, as Ferro documents, was one of continual trouble: a humiliat- ing war with Japan; the 1905 revolu tion that forced Nicholas to accept a constitutional assembly, the Duma: the international crisis of 1914, lead- ing to World War I; and finally the Revolution of 1917, forcing his abdi- cation. Throughout, we see a Tsar who was utterly opposed to change and to the ferment of ideas that stirred his country, who felt it was his duty to preserve intact the powers God had entrusted in him