Simon Sebag Montefiore - The Romanovs: 1613-1918

Catherine the Great and Potemkin

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Young Stalin

Jerusalem: The Biography

Titans of History

FICTION

Sashenka

One Night in Winter

The

ROMANOVS

16131918

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

To My Darling Daughter

Lily Bathsheba

IN MEMORIAM

Stephen Sebag-Montefiore

19262014

Isabel de Madariaga

19192014

CONTENTS

Section One

Section Two

Section Three

Section Four

Heavy is the cap of Monomakh
Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov

The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself
Seneca, Epistle 113

I t was hard to be a tsar. Russia is not an easy country to rule. Twenty sovereigns of the Romanov dynasty reigned for 304 years, from 1613 until tsardoms destruction by the Revolution in 1917. Their ascent started in the reign of Ivan the Terrible and ended in the time of Rasputin. Romantic chroniclers of the tragedy of the last tsar like to suggest that the family was cursed, but the Romanovs were actually the most spectacularly successful empire-builders since the Mongols. The Russian empire, it is estimated, grew by fifty-five square miles (142 square kilometres) per day after the Romanovs came to the throne in 1613, or 20,000 square miles a year. By the late nineteenth century, they ruled one sixth of the earths surface and they were still expanding. Empire-building was in a Romanovs blood.

In some ways, this book is a study of character and the distorting effect of absolute power on personality. It is partly a family story of love, marriage, adultery and children, but it is not like other such stories royal families are always extraordinary because power both sweetens and contaminates the traditional familial chemistry: the allure and corruption of power so often trump the loyalty and affection of blood. This is a history of the monarchs, their families and retinues, but it is also a portrait of absolutism in Russia and 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. The Romanovs have become the very definition not only of dynasty and magnificence but also of despotism, a parable of the folly and arrogance of absolute power. No other dynasty except the Caesars has such a place in the popular imagination and culture, and both deliver universal lessons about how personal power works, then and now. It is no coincidence that the title tsar derives from Caesar just as the Russian for emperor is simply the Latin imperator.

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 dead, 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 mnages 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 conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty.

Out of context, these excesses seem so overblown and outlandish that ascetic academic historians find themselves bashfully toning down the truth. After all, the legends of the Romanovs the juice of Hollywood movies and TV drama series are as potent and popular as the facts. That is why the teller of this story has to be wary of melodrama, mythology and teleology the danger of writing history backwards and cautious of methodology. Scepticism is essential; scholarship demands constant verification and analysis. But one of the benefits of narrative history is that each reign appears in context to give a portrait of the evolution of Russia, its autocracy and its soul. And in these larger-than-life characters misshapen by autocracy, a distorted mirror appears, which reflects the tropes of all human character right back at us.

If the challenge of ruling Russia has always been daunting, the role of autocrat could only be truly exercised by a genius and there are very few of those in most families. The price of failure was death. In Russia the government is autocracy tempered by strangulation, quipped the French woman of letters Madame de Stal. It was a dangerous job. Six of the last twelve tsars were murdered two by throttling, one by dagger, one by dynamite, two by bullet. In the final catastrophe in 1918, eighteen Romanovs were killed. Rarely was a chalice so rich and so poisonous. I particularly examine each succession, always the best test of a regimes stability. It is ironic that now, two centuries after the Romanovs finally agreed a law of succession, Russian presidents still effectively nominate their successors just as Peter the Great did. Whether a smooth handover or desperate transition, these moments of extreme tension, when existential necessity demands that every reserve of ingenuity be deployed, every intrigue explored, reveal the fundamentals of power.

The essence of tsardom was the projection of majesty and strength. Yet this had to be combined with what Otto von Bismarck, rival and ally of the Romanovs, called the art of the possible, the attainable, the art of the next best. For the Romanovs, the craft of survival was based on the balancing of clans, interests and personalities of both a minuscule court and a gigantic empire. Emperors needed to keep the support of their army, nobility and their administration. If they lost all three, they were likely to be deposed and, in an autocracy, that usually meant death. As well as playing the lethal game of politics, the sovereigns had to exude visceral, almost feral authority. An effective tsar could be harsh provided he was consistently harsh. Rulers are often killed not for brutality but for inconsistency. And tsars had to inspire trust and respect among their courtiers but sacred reverence among the peasantry, 90 per cent of their subjects, who saw them as Little Fathers. They were expected to be severe to their officials but benign to their peasant children: the tsar is good, peasants said, the nobles are wicked.

Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality. It flows hydraulically to and from the source, but its currents constantly change; its entire flow can be redirected, even reversed. In an autocracy, the power is always in flux, as changeable as the moods, relationships and circumstances personal and political of one man and his sprawling, teeming domains. All courts work in similar ways. In the twenty-first century, the new autocracies in Russia and China have much in common with that of the tsars, run by tiny, opaque cliques, amassing vast wealth, while linked together through hierarchical clientpatron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler. In this book, my aim is to follow the invisible, mysterious alchemy of power to answer the essential question of politics, laconically expressed by that maestro of powerplay, Lenin: