When I was a child, I found an article in a magazine about the four beautiful daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and their awful fate. In my teens I went on to learn something of Rasputin and read Robert K. Massie’s excellent Nicholas and Alexandra, and I studied Russian literature and civilisation at university. So I was naturally drawn to The Romanovs: The Story of Russia and its Empire, 1613 – 1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore, published in 2016. I loved it! Three hundred years of Russian history, all told through the lives of the Romanov Tsars, helped me understand why Russia is ruled the way it is today, in the iron grip of that dreadful Putin. The incredible cruelty – torture, dwarf-tossing, exile to Siberia, and other hideous fates – was distressing to read about, but I was absolutely fascinated by the personalities, marriages (mostly unhappy) of the Tsars and Tsarinas, their problematic relationships with their heirs, their connections with European royalty, and their mostly sad ends.
I especially enjoyed the section about Nicholas II. Rasputin is such an enigmatic and awful character from history, and yet he attained such power over the royal family. And the murder of those last Romanovs was so brutal and badly handled. While Nicholas made a very inept Tsar and his wife was a stupid and stubborn woman, they did, in the end, show dignity and courage in the face of brutality and cataclysmic change. It all forms a riveting history and an intriguing study of autocratic power, something still so relevant in Russia today.
The book is 600+ pages of densely packed history, and at times, it was hard to keep track of all the Alexanders and Peters, Pauls and Nicholases, but it was all so well written and always interesting. If you, too, enjoy Russian history, I can really recommend this book. Tell me your thoughts in a comment.
Selected links for relevant websites, books, movies, videos, and more. Some of these links lead to protected content on this website, learn more about that here.
Brian Doyle
Have read all of these books plus many many more as it’s a special interest genre, there is a superb book you may not be familiar with Empire of the Czar by The Marquise de Custine after reading I then went in search of a copy of his biography A taste for Freedom, it was an absolutely riveting story as he was an aristocratic child from the French Revolution, both very very highly recommended if your fascinated by Russian history
John
There are fine biographies of some earlier tsars too Robert Massie wrote one that I particularly liked of Catherine the Great, also an excellent one of Peter the Great. I think you might find the former in particular worth a read.
Vanessa
Hi Susannah,
I, too, loved this book, and its companion, Catherine the Great & Potemkin. 300 Years of Passion! is how I put it when I reviewed them. The scholarship, the fascinating and sometimes repellent characters, and the bringing to life of a once-forgotten (to post-Revolution Russians) chunk of Russian history is incredible. It is so utterly worth it to get your mitts on a copy of either or both!
Susannah Fullerton
Yes, I am keen to get his book on Catherine the Great. I so enjoyed the Romanovs one. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Russian hsitory.