Nicholas and Alexandra photographed in 1894.
For the past 70 years, scholars in both the former Soviet Union and the West have painted a portrait of Russia's last, and perhaps most tragic tsar, in grey monotones.
He has been variously described as Nicholas the Bloody, from whom all Russia's ills sprang at the beginning of the 20th century, by conservative Soviet experts to an indecisive and weak monarch, incapable of holding so much as a personal opinion, by American and English historians.
Now, with access to hidden and previously closed archive material in both Moscow and St Petersburg and last year's excellent biography of the last tsar by Russian expert Edvard Radzhinsky, historians have been forced to think again.
The latest scholarly and incredibly readable work on Nicholas -- Nicholas II Emperor of all the Russias -- by English scholar Dominic Lieven, finally sets the record straight with an informed and balanced judgement of this, most unfairly maligned monarch.
Here is the first fully rounded portrait of the family man, the father of the haemophiliac heir, the protector of Rasputin and the infamous murder at Ekaterinburg in 1918.
It also considers Nicholas as a political leader and emperor and presents a view of him very different to the one previously held in the West.
To say that this book is more sympathetic than most to Nicholas does not mean that it is an attempt to whitewash the monarch or to deny that he was by personality and temperament in many ways ill-suited to the task which fate called upon him to perform. Nor does the book try to absolve the last Romanov ruler for making a number of important errors during his reign.
Nicholas, the book argues, was not stupid. On the contrary, his problem tended to be that he could understand many points of view and wavered between them.
What the book does is attack the trivialization of Nicholas and his reign and attempts to understand Nicholas's personality but also the system of government over which he presided and the empire over which he ruled. Russia during the last decades of the empire was a fascinating and vibrant, if not happy society. Unless one understands its problems and the political context in which Nicholas operated his ideas and actions are bound to seem stupid, trivial and absurd to the Western observer.
The dangers Russia faced were colossal and responses to problems let alone solutions were unique. Russian high politics during these traumatic years coupled with the war would have been enough to destroy any man who sat on the throne.