My review of:
The Romanovs 1613 – 1918
by Simon Sebag Montefiore,
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2017, 692pp, £10.99
Simon Sebag Montefiore, the history writer and academic, has written what will probably become the definitive volume on the Romanovs as tsars (caesars or emperors) of Russia from 1613 to 1918. As a biographer of Catherine the Great and Stalin, a journalist following the fall of the Soviet Union, and the son of a Lithuanian mother whose Jewish family fled tsarist Russia, Montefiore was well-placed to provide an insightful, detailed narrative on Russian history’s premier family. Interestingly, Montefiore starts each chapter with a list of the ‘Cast’ of historical figures, which perhaps draws on his background as a historical novelist.
The advent of the first Romanov tsar, Michael I (reigned 1613 to 1645) is regarded as the salvation of Russia from disintegration, famine, and foreign occupation, after the so-called Time of Troubles (1598 to 1613) following the death of Tsar Ivan the Terrible (reigned 1547 to 1584). Dark happenings at the beginning of Michael’s reign, however, besmirch its otherwise good record. One of the ways in which Romanov rule was secured was by the cruel killing of a child-pretender, his mother and step-father. Ivan Dmitriyevich, a four year-old called the Baby Brigand after his brigand-like father known as the Second False Dmitri, was hanged from the Kremlin walls. His mother, Marinka Mniszech, known as Marinka the Witch, was starved to death; and her husband, the Cossack ataman Ivan Zarutsky, was impaled through his rectum on a spike in Red Square.
Many such savage acts were to be repeated during the Romanovs’ 300 year-long reign. Tsar Peter ‘the Great’ (reigned 1682-1725), had his understandably rebellious son Alexei tortured, who soon died, just as Ivan the Terrible killed his own son who had protested at his father’s violence and misrule. Peter himself would participate in the executions and tortures of officers who rose up against his insanely debauched despotism. Catherine ‘the Great’ (reigned 1762 to 1796) obtained her throne by conniving in the murder of her husband, Tsar Peter III, and protected it through the murder of Tsar Ivan VI, who had been imprisoned since childhood. Her grandson Tsar Alexander I (reigned 1801 to 1825) would in turn be complicit in the murder of his father Tsar Paul I, who was also typically Romanov in his cruelty.
These crimes highlight a dark strain in the Russian collective psyche: that the ends justify the means, in particular the means employed to ‘save’ Russia from the threat (real or perceived) of anarchy. The bitter memory of the Time of Troubles has been used as the justification and/or the excuse for autocracy to be imposed upon Russians. Stalin acknowledged this explicitly and modelled himself consciously on Ivan the Terrible, even commissioning the famous film of the same name by Sergei Eisenstein. Even today, Ivan the Terrible, Lenin, and Stalin all command substantial levels of approval in opinion polls of past Russian leaders, despite – or maybe even because of – being among the worst mass murderers in Russian and European history. Not all Russian autocrats have been Romanovs, but all Romanov tsars were autocrats.
Another motif which runs through Romanov history and Montefiore’s account is the court’s incredible love of wealth. Not only many of the tsars, but a huge network of grand dukes and leading noble families lived lives of extraordinary decadence and avarice. When Catherine ‘the Great’ and Prince Potemkin, her equally extravagant consort, toured southern Russia in 1761, they:
“embarked on a flotilla of seven luxurious barges, each with its own orchestra, library and drawing room, painted in gold and scarlet, decorated in gold and silk, manned by 3,000 oarsmen, crew and guards and serviced by eighty boats. The dining barge seated seventy and Catherine’s Dnieper had a boudoir with twin beds for her and Mr Redcoat.”
Mr Redcoat was one of the long list of lovers (some decades younger than herself) whom she took at the same time as being secretly married to Potemkin, who had an even longer list of mistresses, including three of his nieces.
Tsar Alexei I (reigned 1645 to 1676), son of Michael I, kept thousands of hunting falcons for his personal pleasure and a huge staff to manage them. Alexei established the legal code which enshrined serfdom, in which the vast majority of the population lived in near slavery until the 20th century. It was the taxes, labour and conscription extracted from the serfs which was the one of the main bases of the power and wealth of the tsar and the nobility. Montefiore explains how the institution of serfdom was part of a sort of contract between the tsar and the nobility. Once Tsar Alexander II broke that bond in 1862, the system of tsarist rule started to break down under the growing weights of liberal demands, industrial poverty, military defeats and socialist rebellion.
As typified by Catherine ‘the Great’ and Potemkin, the Romanovs’ material indulgence was usually accompanied by sexual indulgence. Adultery, often with multiple lovers, was the norm rather than the exception among the tsars and his sons the grand dukes, even despite the strong influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in national life. Montefiore doesn’t fail to record this ‘erotomania’ (one of a number of flamboyantly descriptive terms he employs) wherever it reared its ugly head, as well as recording the crude letters of Prussian king Frederick the Great pouring scorn on it. Montefiore can be criticised of sensationalism for paying too much attention to the sins of the imperial court. He is, however, the master of detail on every aspect of the Romanovs in a book which stretches to almost 700 pages.
Montefiore points out how the Romanov dynasty started in one house called Ipatiev (the Ipatiev monastery in northern Muscovy) and ended in another house called Ipatiev (in Ekaterinburg where the last de facto tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Urals Soviet). However, Montefiore misses two other ironies. The first Romanov tsar was named Michael I and the last Romanov tsar (at least de jure) was Michael II (Nicholas II’s younger brother); and Romanov rule was partly secured by one monk (Patriarch Filaret, whose co-rule with his son Michael I strengthened the monarchy) and partly destroyed by another monk (Rasputin, whose influence on Nicholas II and his tsarina Alexandra weakened the monarchy).
The book’s Epilogue ends with an insightful description of the rule of Vladimir Putin:
“Putinism blend[s] Romanov authoritarianism, Orthodox sanctity, Russian nationalism, crony capitalism, Soviet bureaucracy, and the fixtures of democracy, elections and parliaments.”
Montefiore nails the similarity of Putinism to the Romanov court:
“its spirit [is] a cult of authority and the entitlement to get rich in state service.”
It should be noted that the record of the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were far more deadly and oppressive than that of the Romanovs. Unlike them, Tsars Michael I and Alexander II were genuinely concerned to improve the welfare of their people; and many in the Romanov court were sincerely devout Christians. Nothing can justify the Bolshevik massacre of Nicholas II, his wife and their beautiful children, the satanic fury of which is blood-curdling to read in Montefiore’s account. Yet Montefiore’s fascinating and beautifully illustrated epic left me decidedly unsympathetic in general to the Romanov family, at times even angered on behalf of the millions of peasants and other innocent people who paid, often with their lives, for its gilded yet corrupted existence.