The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Review)
When Russia invaded Ukraine back in February, I decided to read The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I thought a better understanding of Russia might give better context to the war, and Montefiore certainly provided it.
The Romanovs ruled Russia as a family of Czars—the Russian equivalent of Rome’s Caesars—for three hundred years. And while they were overthrown during the Russian revolution, their influence is still permeating today. Montefiore argues that the history of the Romanovs is a study of the dangers of absolute power. Being a czar meant balancing majesty and power while managing relationships with endless clans across a staggering amount of land.
Catherine the Great observed that this absolute power is a chimera; it may be hoped for by the person wanting the power but it did not exist in the way the czar actual hoped. More specifically, once a Romanov became a czar, that ruler struggled to stay alive.
In many ways, the struggle of absolute power still seems true today with Vladimir Putin. The czars’ lives were often head-shakingly outrageous, so despite the length of the book, it moved at a brisk pace. I learned a great deal about Russia and wish that I had read this book before reading The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. I think this book will provide better context for future Russian books, and Montefiore’s book certainly helped provide context in the current Russian attack against Ukraine. I recommend this book for anyone who finds these subject interesting.
Here are a few points I found memorable:
Under Czar Aleksey Mikhaylovich, the second Romanov, the serf system emerged. Peasants were tied to the land, and the nobility’s power was measured by the number of serfs. As Montefiore described it, this serfdom set “a Russian pattern of civility to those above, tyranny to those below.”
Czar Aleksey also brought Ukraine under Russian control in 1667 by entering into the Thirteen Year War with Poland. This conflict brought the Dnieper Cossacks, a semi-independent group of Slavics living north of the Black Sea in modern Ukraine. The Truce of Andrusovo ended the war with Poland and secured Ukraine as an independent state under the Russian Empire. All of this occurred in after an uprising against Poland led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a Ukrainian leader who hated Catholics and Jews. He oversaw the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews before eventually steering the Cossacks to an independent Ukraine aligned with the Russian Empire.
Peter the Great would seem outlandish if he was a character in a novel, let alone a real man. His height at 6’8” and disregard for convention was striking. His “Jolly Company, the All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters” sounds like its name rather than the council of leaders who fought alongside the czar. Their drunken debauchery defies the senses. As Montefiore described Peter, “he saw himself more as a warlord than a czar,” which makes his gallery of rogues more understandable. In the same vein as Peter’s Jolly Company was the dwarf wedding he held in St. Petersburg. The mock ceremony involved 72 dwarfs, the Tsar, and his royal court. It served as a parody of the czars’ Bride-Shows, which paraded young ladies for the czars to select their wives.
Despite Peter’s lack of formal education, he knew the deficits he faced and the technological shortfalls his country faced. Peter and his company thus took a tour of Europe to understand modern technology and armaments—the first Russian ruler to leave the nation. From 1697-98, he traveled all the way to England with many stops along the way.
Montefiore explained how Peter the Great implemented civil service for all and rewarded serfs with the prospect of achieving nobility through service. This plan may have embedded a service mindset in Russia but for the existing nobility’s skirting of the rule. Once Peter died, the ruling class exempted themselves from service. Relatedly, Montefiore used the rise of Prince Aleksander Menshikov to explain a related curse of Russia: the oligarchy. Despite Peter’s creation of a broader nobility, a select group of families still held the most power and wealth. Menshikov hoarded power after Peter’s death, and soon owned 300,000 serfs, 3,000 villages, and significant portions of Ukraine. Montifiore likened him to a shark devouring all he could: “Menshikov could survive only by consuming more to safeguard what he already had…The dilemma of Russian power then and now, when the retirement of a leader is impossible without insurance that he will not be prosecuted, nor his fortune confiscated.”
When Anna Ivanovna became empress of Russia, the Russian Supreme Privy Council attempted to curtail her powers and leave Anna as a mere figurehead. Anna signed their terms as she quickly curried favor with the guards charged to protect her. With their physical backing, she tore up the ascension document and declared the power was hers. The sequence seemed like something from Game of Thrones, albeit less gory. Anna’s cruelty, however, was wholly in the vein of Game of Thrones. She delighted in forcing Russian elites to join her Court of Fools, once forcing Prince Mikhail Golitsyn to dress as a chicken and spend his days clucking like a fowl, which included laying a pretend egg when guests arrived.
Catherine the Great had a political savvy that few politicians today understand: the limits on one’s power. She observed that “one must do things in such a way that people think they themselves want it to be done this way.” Catherine further understood that, “My orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders that could be carried out. I take advice; I consult; and when I am convinced of general approval, I issue my orders and have the pleasure of observing…blind obedience. And that is the foundation of unlimited power.”
It is interesting how affecting the French Revolution was for Europe. In the biography of King George III, the French Revolution seemed to affect the country’s psyche more than the American Revolution. So too was the effect in Russia. When Catherine the Great died, her son took pains to eliminate any hint of uprising or signs of Francophile leanings. Czar Paul I embraced an absolute monarchy as a reaction to the French uprising.
Paul’s response to the French Revolution led to an emphasis on royal proceedings, complete with elaborate bowing and royal costumes. Paul’s alignment with Napoleon and Paul’s generally erratic nature led to his murder. And the effect of the French Revolution continued after Czar Paul’s murder, because his son, Czar Alexander, tilted in a near-180 by removing costumes and de-emphasizing the trappings of royalty.
Montefiore’s account of Napoleon and his miscalculation of Moscow was helpful to better understand both Napoleon and the events that led to Moscow becoming a pyrrhic victory for France. Czar Alexander seemed ill-equipped to oppose Napoleon, yet the vagaries of power proved otherwise. Alexander’s correspondence repeatedly noted Napoleon’s greatness and seemed to acknowledge Napoleon’s superiority as a leader. But Alexander was not an unskilled leader and played his hand with savvy.
When the Decembrists rebelled against Russia following the death of Czar Alexander, Emperor Nicholas I took power over his older brother, Constantine. Nicholas launched broad investigations to shore up his power, and the voluminous report that emerged stayed on his desk for the rest of his life. The rebellion prompted advisor and historian, Nikolay Karamzin to observe, “One of the worst political evils of our time is the absence of fear.” These words became a guide for Nicholas, who viewed the rebellion as an outgrowth of western liberalism.
Empower Nicholas I demonstrated the danger of a great power with great resources adopting a posture of isolationism. While his power and wealth were expansive, isolating from Europe led his nation to lag behind in technology like railways and weaponry. Further, an isolated power allows many smaller entities to grow in suspicion toward the unknown entity. This the rest of Europe grew in opposition to Russia and led to a more combative position between Russia and the west.
Nicholas I’s belief in autocracy while Europe moved toward republicanism caused him to remove all references in history books of Rome and Greece as republics. Censorship grew as discontentedness in Russia grew. This era is also when Nicholas sentenced Dostoyevsky to death only to spare him as the firing squad raised its rifles. Dostoyevsky instead served in a Siberian labor camp.
After Napoleon III defeated Russia, Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov observed a line that seems applicable today as Russia attacks Ukraine: “Russia does not sulk; Russia is collecting herself.”
It is interesting that Russia’s and United States’ emancipation events are so close in time. First, Czar Alexander freed the serfs through proclamation. Months later, Abraham Lincoln gave his emancipation proclamation. During the Crimean War, the United States had backed Russia. Alexander then leant his military to the Union with a presence in New York and San Francisco.
As Russia transitioned from Czar Alexander II to Czar Alexander III, it becomes clearer how embedded autocracy is into the fabric of the nation. After Alexander II’s assassination, his son reacted strongly by abandoning any movement toward representative government and liberal reforms. Alexander III further entrenched the idea of sole power in his own hands.
Russia’s history of expansion is remarkable in light of Ukraine. The efforts to expand in all directions is a constant over the history of the Romanov dynasty. Even with revolution building from within during Czar Nicholas II’s reign, expansion into the Far East occupied his attention.
Because of Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, I had an inkling of the family relationship between King George of England, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Czar Nicholas. But Montefiore showed how closely related the power players of WWI were.
The contrast between the excess of the early czars compared to the dignity and grace of the Czar Nicolas as they awaited execution makes for quite the juxtaposition.
The book’s epilogue includes a great observation: “Marx wrote that ‘history repeats itself—first as tragedy, second as farce.’ This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated but it borrows, steals, echoes, and commandeers the past to create a hybrid—something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.”
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin observed that the Russians need a czar. For centuries, they had been under one person and that’s what they knew. Lenin believed the people needed a czar, and Stalin drew the same conclusion. This assessment makes Putin’s stranglehold on power much more interesting.
It would be foolish to pretend that one book provides an adequate foundation to understand a nation. Yet I think Simon Sebag Montefiore provided some helpful lenses to view Russia today with a bit more understanding. As I mentioned before, the changing characters and outlandish nature of the czars makes a lengthy book move quite quickly. I will favorably look for other books by Montefiore in the future and am glad I took the time to read, The Romanovs: 1613-1918.
