The book:
The Romanovs: 1613 to 1918 is the history of the great dynasty, from Mikhail Romanov and his grandson, Peter the Great, through to Tsar Nicolas II, executed along with his children by the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution of 1917. This epic piece of world history, meticulously researched by Simon Sebag Montefiore, the award-winning author of Jerusalem and Young Stalin, draws on new archive material to provide a fresh and enthralling story of the brutal Russian empire.
In the Romanovs we have a cast of characters a playwright could only dream of, including Catherine the Great, Alexander I and Napoleon, and Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen. Violence, decadence and conspiracy abound throughout Montefiore’s coverage of twenty Tsars and Tsarinas. There is genius and a lot of madness, but nonetheless this family built an empire that, at one point, covered a sixth of the world’s surface.
Written with Montefiore’s established literary flair, The Romanovs is both a story of triumph and tragedy, love and death, the meeting of personality and of power, and an essential portrait of the empire that influenced the world and still defines Russia today.
What the Guardian thought:
Montefiore doesn’t do minimalist history. This is the grand sweep, beginning with the first, accidental, Romanov, Mikhail. Tsarinas were picked at bride shows, spectacles adorned with pageant and poisoning. Many a death in court came about through suspicious circumstances. The reluctant Mikhail “cried so much of the death of his two baby sons that the doctors diagnosed a deluge of tears in his stomach, liver and spleen, which deprived his organs of natural warmth and chilled his blood”.
He was followed by 30 years of Alexei, a young monk, who would wake at 4am to pray. At Easter he would pray standing for six hours, prostrating himself more than a thousand times. Alexei sought to cleanse Muscovites of their many vices. He tried to ban drinking, smoking, the playing of mandolins and dwarf dancing. Of greater concern was the corruption at court. The local city chief was cudgelled to “such a pulp that his brains splattered over his face… finally a monk came and chopped the remnants of the head off the trunk”.
So, via assorted monsters, to Peter I, a man who had his son tortured to death and had 200 rebels hanged, their bodies left to rot all winter. Peter drove the creation of his new city by sheer will. “No detail, from public buildings to road grids, was too small,” the author notes. “He produced a number of rule books, including [a] guide to civilised behaviour. Anyone who spat, talked with their mouth full or vomited was likely to receive a whack from the tsarist cane.”
The story ends, as it should, with the hapless Nicholas II, a man with a childlike view of the world, who would see his children lined up for execution alongside him. Montefiore describes how this turn-of-the-century era of indulgence was accompanied by a wild foreboding. “The poets, playboys, dilettantes and aesthetes sensed the coming apocalypse and reacted in a doom-laden carnival of reckless if morbid hedonism, seeking the essence of salvation, art and freedom in opium, Satanism and the transformative orgasm.”
The butchery was transferred to the masters of a new system. Is it any wonder that Russians continue to struggle with the present, given the past?
John Kampfner - Read the full review
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