8Aboard the imperial yacht Standart
Gulf of Finland
June 1914
Tsar Nicholas II always looked forward to enjoying the annual family vacation aboard the imperial yacht Standart; they would sail to various ports of call in Finland. “No business, only family,” he always dictated to his staff. However, late on the afternoon of June 28, he received a telegram that shocked him. In Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, had been assassinated by a radical student who was a member of a Bosnian Serb underground group. Nicholas feared that Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary would soon use this act as a pretext to declare war on Serbia.
Emperor Franz Joseph in fact would make demands on Serbia so untenable that they amounted to a declaration of war. When
