
Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia (18 November 1856–5 January 1929) was a Russian nobleman and general who served as commander-in-chief of the Imperial Russian Army from 1914 to 21 August 1915, preceding Czar Nicholas II.
Biography[]
Nicholas Nikolaevich Romanov was born in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire in 1856, the son of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia and Duchess Alexandra of Oldenburg; he was the paternal grandson of Czar Nicholas I of Russia and the first cousin once removed of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Grand Duke Nicholas was commissioned into the Imperial Russian Army in 1873, and he served on his father's staff during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 before becoming commander of the Guard Hussar Regiment in 1884. He also served as inspector-general of the cavalry from 1895 to 1905, and, during the 1905 Russian Revolution, he threatened suicide unless Czar Nicholas II agreed to Sergei Witte's proposed reforms.

Grand Duke Nicholas in 1914
Grand Duke Nicholas went on to command the St. Petersburg Military District from 1905 to 1914 and was appointed commander-in-chief of the Imperial Russian Army at the start of World War I, winning the support of the Polish nationalist "National Democracy" movement by promising the reunification of Poland under Russian rule. His plan for the war was to invade Germany through East Prussia and Austria-Hungary through Eastern Galicia, securing those flanks before conquering Silesia. However, his advance was blocked by the Battle of the Vistula River and the Battle of Lodz in 1914, and he presided over the deportation of 500,000 Jews and 250,000 Germans and several pogroms during the Great Retreat of 1915. As a result of this failure, Czar Nicholas II assumed direct command over the Imperial Russian Army, and Grand Duke Nicholas was transferred to command the Caucasus front. He was more successful against the Ottoman Turks, taking Erzerum, Trebizond, and Erzincan in 1916. Following the February Revolution of 1917, Grand Duke Nicholas was held under house arrest in the Crimea, and he was proclaimed Emperor of Russia by the White movement in the Russian Far East before the Bolsheviks crushed those holdouts. Grand Duke Nicholas proceeded to go into exile in Genoa and Paris, and he became head of the Russian All-Military Union in 1924. The Soviets infiltrated the All-Military Union with the objective of kidnapping Nicholas and preventing monarchist terrorist attacks, but they failed to bring Nicholas back to Russia, and Nicholas died of natural causes in 1929 in the French Riviera.