The Romanovs: 1613-1918

What an amazing read, this book is both shocking and enthralling, I literally could not put it down.It's a story of power, love, glory, magnificence, and lust, it is totally accessible, and reads like a movie of a family saga, no wonder it had been compared to Game of Thrones, and the TV series the Tudors.it's a story about Russia that explains so much of what's happening today in 2016. The book travels all the way from Ivan the Terrible to the last Tzar Nicholas II, but it also continued right up to Stalin and Putin.The debauchery, the sex, the violence, and the cruelty are beyond belief. A family saga filled with ambition, glamour, sadisim, and sexual excess.Brides are poisoned, fathers tortured their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wife murder husband, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed and slaughtered. It's a most colorful collection of characters you can imagine, there's not a boring page.It's also about character and personality, some of the strongest Romanovs were women, who were portrayed so sensitively, and some of the stupidest and cruelest were women too. In one sense this book is all about power and in another it's all about character and family.So much of the story is told in moving love letters, such as between Nicholas and Alexandra.Montefiore starts the book with a teenage boy called Michael Romanov who becomes Tzar in 1613, and over 300 years later another little boy Alexei Romanov is murdered with his entire family including his sisters and their parents in 1918. It's an unfortunate and heartbreaking beginning of book.Soon we are meeting the horrifying and fascinating character Peter the Great who tortures his own son to death, but who makes Russia a great modern power.Montefiore brings him to life, I can't forget the scene where Peter had his beautiful mistress be-headed, then lifts up the gorgeous head by the hair , kisses the lips and then gives the crowd a lesson on the anatomy of the neck, head, and windpipe.Then there is his wife Catherine I whom he found of a promiscuous peasant girl and made into Russia's first empress in her own right.Then we meet the cruel empress Anna, one who collected a bizarre circus of freaks including the handless, the hunchback, and the legless, arranged dwarf tossing and dwarf fighting tournaments, the dwarfs amused her by going to bed with lactating goats in a night dress.When she died she was succeeded by a regent who lived in a lesbian threesome.She was overthrown by the lovely beautiful empress Elizabeth, who enjoyed multiple simultaneous lovers while exercising a tyrant of fashion of haute couture over her court, she is very much a heroine for all readers of vogue or Pret-a-Porte, a prototype fashionista.She brought a German princess to Russia who became Catherine the Great, Montefiore gives a brilliant portrayal of Catherine the Great a woman of intellectual brilliance and personal charm, he shows exactly how she lived her famous love life. As she got older she took younger and younger lovers, but the real love of her life was prince Potemkin known as Serenissimus, a totally fascinating and brilliant character ( Angelina Jolie had apparently bought some rights to Montefiore's earlier book Catherine and Potemkin , I hope she plays her)To reach power Catherine's husband was murdered. Of the twelve Tzars 6 were murdered, being a Romanov was a dangerous job.My favorite latest Tzar was Alexander II, his love affair with his mistress princess katya is both romantic and tragic but their love letters are quite something. Be warned they are highly explicit, surely the sexiest letters ever written by a head of state, they are totally hot stuff even by the standards of the 21st century sextingThe book ends with the amazing account of Nicholas, Alexandera ( I haven't realized how crazy she was ) and Rasputin.What a tragic family, but they brought so much of their troubles upon themselves.The portrayal of Rasputin is totally unforgettable he was a mystic and a fony, but either way the climax comes with his murder, a totally thrilling scene.Then comes the revolution and the terrible story of the slaughter of the entire family by the vile BolshevismI was dazzled by the crazy magnificence of this family, but I also cried at the heartbreaking scenes, I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, written beautifully , it's narrative is magical and gripping. As you can tell I strongly recommend this book .

If the Romanovs did anything good for Russia and its people, Montefiore finds very little of it. They were brutal mass-murderers and imperialists who believed peasants were their rightful property and Jews and Poles were vermin. Czar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, ordered thousands of his subjects massacred, and then complained that just ruined the day for himself and his family.Montefiore writes:> ... 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 ménages à 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.Montefiore finds two great emperors -- Peter the Great and Catherine the Great -- but even they spent their time building empires and monuments to themselves, rather than making the people better. Peter the Great was a scientist, engineer, soldier and general; he enjoyed traveling to Europe and enlisting as a craftsman to learn to make things by hand and he applied those skills to his military adventures. He ordered an ex-lover executed for infanticide – murdering her own babies.> On 14 March 1719, Mary appeared gorgeous on the scaffold in a white silk dress with black ribbons, but she expected a pardon, particularly when Peter mounted the gibbet. He kissed her but then said quietly: “I can’t violate the law to save your life. Endure your punishment courageously and address your prayers to God with a heart full of faith.” She fainted, and he nodded at the executioner, who brought down his sword. Peter lifted up the beautiful head and began to lecture the crowd on anatomy, pointing out the sliced vertebrae, open windpipe and dripping arteries, before kissing the bloody lips and dropping the head.He kept the head on display afterward.I found myself despising the Romanovs so much that I eagerly looked forward to the ending, where the entire family would be slaughtered in a basement by the Communists. The last Czar, Nicholas the II, wasn't the worst of the bunch, but he was the most incompetent, and he was a narcissist too, convinced that the people would never rise up against him because he was their czar, chosen by God, and they loved him – even while the people were, in fact, rising up against him. But when the finale came, it was unsatisfying, because several of the victims were children, because the murder was particularly savage, and conducted without trial, and well after Nicholas had already abdicated the throne and shown no interest in taking it back. The czars were terrible rulers, but the Communists were worse.Montefiore notes that the spirit of the czars lives on today, "... 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 client–patron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler." The same could be said of the US now, for the last three years. Before reading "The Romanovs," I wondered how people as manifestly incompetent as Trump and his supporters could seize and hold power. What we see in the Romanovs is that some people are great at seizing power, but incompetent at everything else. And once they've seized power, other people will find it to their advantage to keep things as they are. Trump, like the Romanovs, will go down quickly when he goes -- it'll be days, not months or years. But I don't know whether Trump will go down in 2020, or whether he and his cronies have put in place an autocracy that will last a generation or more.As for the book itself: The author is clearly passionate and expert about his subject matter, but it's a confusing book, filled with lots of Russian names (duh) that are hard to keep track of. Montefiore gets lost in detail, particularly in telling about wars and battles and internal Kremlin conflicts. It's an excellent book, but I wish maybe there were less of it.