DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Skillful telling of the Romanovs tale
Romanovs: 1613-1918
Simon Montefiore, 2016
I'm rereading Simon Montefiore's extraordinary history, Romanovs: 1613-1918 (2016), the best account of a royal dynasty I've ever read. Montifore writes with the skill of a great novelist. His story of the Romanovs is a fantastic tale of ruthless struggles for power and grotesque savagery at the court of the Tsars and in Russia as a whole. The Romanovs make the gangster like ways of the English Plantagenets and Tudors seem tame in comparison. In addition, the Romanovs were weird in unusual ways, for example in their custom of using "bride shows" to select marital partners for Tsars, in their love of dwarfs which may reached its apogee in the court of Peter the Great , and in the combination of intense religiosity with alcoholism and the alcoholic revels of several Tsars.
Montefiore begins his history with a superb 10 page reflection on Tsarist Russia that is easier to assimilate than the wild and crazy dramas of various Romanov Tsars with so many wives, mistresses, children, ministers, courtiers, boon companions, and mortal enemies, especially Poland, Sweden and the Ottoman empire. He asserts that "the Romanovs were actually the most spectacularly successful empire- builders since the Mongols. The Russian empire grew by fifty five square miles per day ( after 1613) .. or 20,000 square miles a year" for more than 300 years. "By the late nineteenth century they ruled one sixth of the earth's surface ...."
Montifiore asserts that " ... whatever else one believes about Russia, its culture, its soul, its essence have always been exceptional, a singular nature which one family aspired to personify." And: The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently from the grave., barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered, here are fashion mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian menages a trois and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadores and brilliant statesmen ... a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty."
Montifiore emphasizes the impossible challenge of autocracy, which required political genius when many of the twenty Romanov sovereigns lacked rudimentary leadership skills. "It was a dangerous job, Six of the last twelve Tsars were murdered .. " Rarely was a chalice so rich and so poisonous." Emperors had to balance the interest of powerful families, and keep the support of the army, nobility and administration. "If they lost all three, they were likely fo be deposed, and in an autocracy, that usually meant death, Montifiore states. Czars also had to command "sacred reverence" among the peasantry, who saw them as "Little Fathers." The anger of peasants was often directed at powerful ministers rather than the Tsar, who might save himself by giving up a minister to be hanged, quartered and then dismembered and the remaining body parts fed to dogs.
Ambitious persons could advance through the military, or the security services, or through religious service, " to ease divine access for the imperial soul," or through amorous sexual activities. "In return, the Tsars could shower these servitors with cash, serfs and titles. Tsars who turned their back on the court's brokering arrangement or who performed dramatic reversals of foreign policy against the wishes of their potentates ... were liable to be murdered ... " Tsars were far more likely to be deposed and killed by disaffected courtiers among the nobility than by a popular uprising or peasant revolt, Montifiore asserts.
An autocratic tsar was never completely safe. "Peter the Great understood that autocracy required tireless checking and threatening. Staying in power required constant vigilance on several fronts: "extreme vigilance backed by sudden violence was and is their natural and essential state." Montifiore quotes the supremely intelligent Catherine the Great: "autocracy is not as easy as you think." Bizarrely, Peter the Great kept tabs on his ministers and retainers through night long drinking bouts where drunkeness was required and brutally enforced, a practice which Stalin copied.
Montifiore offers a daunting job description: "The believers in Russian autocracy were convinced that only an all powerful individual blessed by God could project the effulgent majesty necessary to direct and overawe this multinational empire and manage the intricate interests of such a vast state. At the same time, the sovereign had to personify the sacred mission of Orthodox Christianity and give meaning to the special place of the Russian nation in world history. " Romanovs is the story of what happens when absolute power over a vast empire is imbued with grandiosity and given to mere mortals, most of whom had limited abilities compensated for by rich fantasy lives permeated by religiosity and dreams of military glory divorced from ethics.
-- Dee Wilson