Book Review: The Romanovs 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
A tome of three hundred years of Russian history
Hi friends,
I haven’t covered a lot of Russian history here on the podcast, admittedly because it’s a blind spot of mine. It’s a culture and a history that seems so different from the histories of North America and Western Europe that I grew up with, but is also deeply intertwined with them. Every time I delve into it, I have the unsettling feeling that I’m doing it wrong.
But back in 2023 I really wanted to cover Rasputin, so I dove in with some trepidation, trying to read as much as I could about him and the world around him before I wrote anything down. Reading about the collapse of the Romanov dynasty left me curious about this royal family that seemed somehow mystical and stalwart, impressive and terrifying. When I stumbled across The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore, I picked it up immediately.
I went in with hopes that were probably a little too high. It was nominated for the Goodreads Best of History & Biography award in 2016 and came in second. It has pages upon pages of blurbs lauding it as “compelling” and “exquisite” and “essential.” The Book Marks reviews classify it as a Rave. Also, not for nothing, the cover is gorgeous. I love a bit of gold foil to make a history book pop.
Having read it for nearly a month now (and just barely finishing it), I can say that it sure is a tome of a book. A cattier reviewer might say something like it’s best use is as a doorstop. The paperback version does weigh in at a whopping 784 pages—I’m (mostly1) glad I read it on Kindle because I don’t think my post-gymnastics wrists could handle it.
But that sounds too negative and I don’t mean to be—it’s a good book. I just don’t know if it deserves the rave reviews. I suppose it depends most on what you’re looking for when you pick it up.
Montefiore, in his introduction, explicitly says that he has decided to cover three centuries of the history of one family to look at how absolute power corrupts absolutely. And he does. He shows us how the Romanovs were victims of power and abused their power, how they took everything they could hold and more. Especially later in the book he does an excellent job depicting how the tsars, despite holding theoretically absolute power, were nearly as much in thrall to the people they ruled as the people were to them. There are despots who terrify their own family into assassinations. There are the hopes and desires of liberals who want change and the realities of their strength to exact those changes on a power-hungry—and sometimes physically starving—nobility and populace.
But you have to wade against the current of the first 25% of the book to get there.
His coverage of the early Romanov rulers is…confusing. Frustratingly, the book does not answer the very first question its summary poses:
The Romanovs ruled a sixth of the world’s surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire?
I couldn’t tell you. No idea, based on this book. My instincts are to refute the claim implicit in the question: one family simply didn’t “turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire.”
(And what does “greatest empire” even mean? It’s not the physically largest—that award goes to the British Empire closely followed by the Mongol Empire. Nor was it the most populous—that was the Qing Dynasty. Russia was powerful but never the most powerful. That leaves great as good. Can an autocratic empire that systematically degrades and dehumanizes large swaths of its people ever be “great”?)
My issue with this first part of the book is how Montefiore bounces around. The story isn’t linear, but who or when he’s bouncing between is not clear. He’s so enthralled by the violence and horror of men like Ivan the Terrible and his Romanov successors that he doesn’t talk much about politics or culture until Catherine the Great. She came to the throne through the death/murder of her husband Peter in 1762, which means that there’s 150 years of history (1613-1762) that Montefiore only describes in sensationalist prurient detail—fully half the time period that the book covers, but it only makes up about 25% of the pages. I almost gave upon because it felt like I was reading a particularly salacious TMZ or Us Weekly, not a popular history book.
And this is coming from someone who openly loves the gossip of history, who studies gender and sex and sexuality in history! Montefiore spends too much time on orgies and murders and nearly none on anything happening outside of the Romanov bedrooms pre-1760. It could have been a good study of how absolute power corrupts personalities, but because he pays so little attention to politics or culture or anyone besides who the Romanovs are sleeping with, it’s hard to remember that these people have political roles and aren’t just stars in an HBO show. Without the reminder that there’s a country to be ruled in here, responsibilities that are being shirked, the sex and violence actually feel less scandalous.
But, if you can get through that first quarter (or just skip over it), his writing suddenly becomes clear, concise, and fascinating. He balances the romantic escapades of Catherine with the push and pull between her Enlightened hopes and her autocratic tendencies. Politics, social issues, other members of the court, their allies and enemies—all these begin to come into focus as the eighteenth century fades into the nineteenth. Part of this is probably an issue of documentation (there’s simply more records that survive, so we know more) and a changing world (travel becomes easier around the same time so the world “expands” and international affairs come into better focus). But it also feels like Catherine the Great is who Montefiore actually wanted to write about. Maybe that’s what he tried to do and his editors or agent told him there are already too many Catherine the Great biographies. If so, they should have let him write the book he originally proposed. Because around halfway through Act II: The Apogee, the book gets great.
He structures the story of the dynasty as acts in a fictional story. There’s “The Prologue: Two Boys in a Time of Troubles” followed by “Act I: The Rise,” “Act II: The Apogee,” and “Act III: The Decline.” Each act contains scenes, which mostly cover one tsar each. Though it is a limiting structure—it seems to force certain people into the roles that a fictional arc demands—Montefiore does lift people out of the tropes or characters you’d think they’d play. This structure adds dramatic tension to the story, warning us that we’re struggling toward a peak and then sliding into destruction. All historical books structure their tales with arcs, and historians are (un)consciously bound by the popular genres of their times; I like that Montefiore seems aware of the structural impact of writing this book in the 2010s and acknowledges it.
Like I said at the top, I didn’t know a ton about the Romanovs going into this book. I knew a little about their fall, the desperate but weak grip Tsar Nicholas II held onto the old ways in a changing world. I now know more about the second half of the dynasty than I’ll probably ever find useful. If I cover more Russians on the podcast, this is a book I’ll certainly come back to.
I have to praise Montefiore’s coverage of the wars Russia got into with the Ottomans, over Poland, and Napoleon. My eyes normally glaze over the second discussion of military movements come up (I don’t care who flanked who, I have ungratefully whined since 2001) but Montefiore kept the personal in perspective, making the battles interesting. For me, the wars mattered here because they’re not just numbers of troops but real people whose careers rise and fall with successful or failure.
The book especially shines when he’s writing about the friends-to-enemies relationship of Napoleon and Alexander I. His coverage of Tilsit made me actually remember the name Tilsit, which I’ve never been able to do before. He evokes wistful and vivid imagery of this friendship that was doomed to fall apart.
Some of the reviews of this book call it a bit difficult to get through for all the facts, and I would agree with that. Three centuries of history is a lot to shove into one book, even if it is nearly 800 pages. Sometimes it feels like a constant onslaught of facts, and the pace is so quick that it can feel like there isn’t time to unpack what has just happened before we’re off to the next. But the facts that Montefiore is telling us! He had access to documents and archives that had never before been made public, so the information he includes is not only fascinating—a lot of it is straight up new.
That does make it fall into a bit of a strange category though. I wouldn’t recommend this book as “introductory” even though it is positioned as an overview of the Romanovs. It’s too intense, too franctic, too quick to be truly introductory. If you go into this book knowing nothing about Russian history, you’re going to be lost. But I also don’t know if it’s good for someone who has read a lot of Russian history because much of the book is, well, I don’t want to say shallow, exactly. Again, putting 300 years into one book means that it has to skim the surface. A fact here, a fact there—they’re like invitations into deeper research, but Montefiore doesn’t take us there.
I would not recommend this book for academic readers simply because, despite the fact that Montefiore is uncovering new information, the citations—at least in the Kindle version—leave a lot to be desired. (See my own footnote below for more on this.)
Maybe this book is perfect for folks whose imaginations have been captured by one of the big personalities of the Romanov family—Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, Anastasia—and are ready to learn more, but don’t want an academic book. It’s for people who like sex and intrigue, politics and war—but not at the same time. If that’s you, The Romanovs: 1613-1918 might be the perfect long winter read.
I will say I’m only mostly glad I read on Kindle because there seems to be serious issues with the digitization of the book, especially in early chapters. I think some of the jumping around I was frustrated by was caused by digitization mistakes—at one point in Act I Scene 4/page 88, there’s an entire paragraph inserted into the middle of another paragraph. I had to read the section three times before I realized there was a major copy/paste error. On top of that, they’ve used both footnotes and endnotes which might work in a physical book, but on Kindle is incredibly confusing because “footnotes” always end up as chapter endnotes. Meanwhile, there are dozens of notes just…missing in the text. A lot of quoted material isn’t cited for pages at a time and I don’t know if that’s slopiness on Montefiore’s part or on the publisher’s part. And then because they’ve combined footnotes and endnotes, the in-text citation are baffling. For example, in chapter one the textual notes that should link to sources go “1…1…2…2…3 3 [twice in the same sentence?]…4…4…5…6…5…6…7…8…7…8…9…10…11…9…12…13…14…15…10…16…11…12…13…18…19…20” The textual reference to endnote 17 is missing entirely, though there is certainly an endote 17 when you get to the endnotes. Since I didn’t read a physical copy I don’t know if citations were achieved more successfully in that version. But it’s definitely something to be aware of if you care about that sort of thing.