The success of autocracy depends mainly on the quality of the individual. ‘The secret of nobility’, wrote Karl Marx, ‘is zoology’ – breeding. In the seventeenth century, the Romanovs used brideshows – beauty contests – to select their Russian brides, but by the early nineteenth century, they were choosing wives from ‘the studfarm of Europe’ – the German principalities, thereby joining the wider family of European royalty. But breeding politicians is not a science. How many families produce one outstanding leader, let alone twenty generations of monarchs, mostly selected by the lottery of biology and the tricks of palace intrigue, with the acumen to be an autocrat? Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfil the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that, in a monarchy, was filled so randomly. Yet each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and generalissimus, high priest and ‘Little Father’, and to pull this off, they needed all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the ‘personal gift of grace’, the ‘virtue of legality’ and the ‘authority of the eternal yesterday’, in other words, magnetism, legitimacy and tradition. And after all that, they had to be efficient and wise too. Fearsome respect was essential: in politics, ridicule is almost as dangerous as defeat.
The Romanovs did produce two political geniuses – the ‘Greats’, Peter and Catherine – and several of talent and magnetism. After Emperor Paul’s brutal murder in 1801, all the monarchs were dutiful and hard-working, and most were charismatic, intelligent and competent, yet the position was so daunting for the normal mortal that no one sought the throne any more: it was a burden that had ceased to be enjoyable. ‘How can a single man manage to govern [Russia] and correct its abuses?’ asked the future Alexander I. ‘This would be impossible not only for a man of ordinary abilities like me but even for a genius . . .’ He fantasized about running off to live on a farm by the Rhine. His successors were all terrified of the crown and avoided it if they could; yet when they were handed the throne, they had fight to stay alive.
Peter the Great understood that autocracy required tireless checking and threatening. Such were – and are – the perils of ruling this colossal state while presiding over a personal despotism without clear rules or limits, that it is often futile to accuse Russian rulers of paranoia: extreme vigilance, backed by sudden violence, was and is their natural and essential state. If anything, they suffer from Emperor Domitian’s witty complaint (shortly before his own assassination) that ‘the lot of princes is most unhappy since when they denounced a conspiracy, no one believed them until they had been assassinated.’ But fear alone was not enough: even after killing millions, Stalin grumbled that still, no one obeyed him. Autocracy ‘is not as easy as you think’, said the supremely intelligent Catherine: ‘unlimited power’ was a chimera.
The decision of individuals often redirected Russia, though rarely in the way intended. To paraphrase the Prussian field-marshal Helmuth von Moltke, political ‘plans rarely survive the first contact with the enemy’. Accidents, friction, personalities and luck, all bounded by the practicalities of guns and butter, are the real landscape of politics. As the Romanovs’ greatest minister Potemkin reflected, the politician of any state must not just react to contingencies, he must ‘improve on events’. Or, as Bismarck put it, ‘the statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.’ So often the last Romanovs found themselves forlornly and obstinately trying to defy the march of history.
The believers in Russian autocracy were convinced that only an all-powerful individual blessed by God could project the effulgent majesty necessary to direct and overawe this multinational empire and manage the intricate interests of such a vast state. At the same time, the sovereign had to personify the sacred mission of Orthodox Christianity and give meaning to the special place of the Russian nation in world history. Since no man or woman could fulfil such duties alone, the art of delegation was an essential skill. The most tyrannical of the Romanovs, Peter the Great, was superb at finding and appointing talented retainers from all over Europe regardless of class or race, and it is no accident that Catherine the Great promoted not only Potemkin but also Suvorov, the outstanding commander of the Romanov era. Stalin, himself an adept chooser of subordinates, reflected that this was Catherine’s superlative gift. The tsars sought ministers with the aptitude to rule and yet the autocrat was always expected to rule in his or her own right: a Romanov could never appoint a masterful Richelieu or Bismarck. Emperors had to be above politics – and be astute politicians too. If power was wisely delegated and broad advice considered, even a moderately gifted ruler could achieve much, though modern autocracy demanded as delicate a handling of complex issues as democratic politics today.
The tsar’s contract with the people was peculiar to a primitive Russia of peasants and nobles, but it does bear some similarity to that of the twenty-first century Kremlin – glory abroad and security at home in return for the rule of one man and his court and their near-limitless enrichment. The contract had four components – religious, imperial, national and military. In the twentieth century, the last tsar still saw himself as the patrimonial lord of a personal estate – blessed by divine sanction. This had evolved: during the seventeenth century, patriarchs (the prelates of the Orthodox Church) could challenge the supremacy of tsars. After Peter the Great had dissolved the patriarchate, the dynasty could present itself as almost a theocracy. The autocracy was consecrated at the moment of anointment during coronations that presented the tsars as transcendent links between God and man. Only in Russia did the state, made up of dreary petty functionaries, become almost sacred in itself. But this also developed over time. Though much is made of the legacy of Byzantine emperors and Genghizid khans, there was nothing special in the sixteenth century about the status of tsars, who drew their charisma from the medieval royal Christology much like other European monarchs. But, unlike the rest of Europe, Russia did not develop independent assemblies and civil institutions, so its medieval status lasted much longer – right into the twentieth century, by which time it looked weirdly obsolete even in comparison to the court of the German kaisers. This mystical mission, which justified Romanov rule right up until 1917, explains much about the intransigent convictions of the last tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra.
The autocracy was legitimized by its ever-expanding multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire, yet the later emperors regarded themselves as the leaders first of the Russian nation but then of the entire Slavic community. The more they embraced Russian nationalism, the more they excluded (and often persecuted) their huge non-Russian populations, such as Poles, Georgians, Finns, and especially Jews. As the Jewish dairyman Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof joked, ‘God bless the tsar and keep him . . . far away from us.’ This contradiction between empire and nation was the source of many difficulties. The court of the Romanovs was a mixture of family estate office, Orthodox crusading order and military headquarters – characteristics that, in very different ways, explain some of the zeal and aggression of the Romanov successor-regimes, the Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation.
Even in the pre-industrial age, the tsar’s schedule was overfilled with holy ceremonies and military reviews, not to speak of factional strife and family rows, leaving precious little time to think deeply about how to solve complex problems. It was a punishing job for a born politician to hold for five years, let alone a lifetime – and many tsars ruled for over twenty-five years. Given that most elected leaders in our democracies tend to be close to madness before ten years in office have elapsed, it is hardly surprising that tsars who reigned for many decades became exhausted and deluded. The tsar’s ability to make the right decisions was also limited by the information he was given by his entourage: all the monarchs claimed they were enveloped in lies, yet the longer they ruled, the more they believed what they wished to hear. ‘Take care not to be Caesarofied, dyed in the purple,’ warned Marcus Aurelius, but it was easie
r said than done. The demands intensified as centuries passed. It was harder to be the director of an empire of trains, telephones and dreadnoughts than of horses, cannon and blunderbusses. Although this is a study of personal power, too much emphasis on the personal obscures the sweep of historical forces, the potency of ideas and the impact of steel, dynamite and steam. Technical advances intensified the challenges for a medieval autocracy.
When one reads of the chaotic drift and capricious decadence of the weak tsars of the late seventeenth century and the hedonistic empresses of the eighteenth, the historian (and the reader of this book) has to ask: how was Russia so successful when it seemed to be so poorly ruled by such grotesques? Yet, even when a child or an idiot was on the throne the autocracy could still function. ‘God is in heaven and the tsar is far away,’ said the peasants and in their remote villages they cared little and knew less of what was happening in Petersburg – as long as the centre held. And the centre did hold because the Romanov dynasty was always the apex and façade of a political system of family and personal connections, working sometimes in rivalry, oftentimes in cooperation, to govern the realm as junior partners to the throne. The system was flexible. Whenever a tsar married, the bride’s family joined the core of power, and tsars promoted talented favourites, victorious generals and competent foreigners, particularly Tatar princelings, Baltic Germans and Scottish Jacobites, who refreshed this sanctum of connections, providing the social base that helped make Russia such a successful pre-modern empire.
Its heart was the alliance between the Romanovs and the nobility who needed royal support to control their estates. Serfdom was the foundation of this partnership. The ideal of autocracy was in practice a deal whereby the Romanovs enjoyed absolute power and delivered imperial glory while the nobility ruled their estates unchallenged. The crown was the greatest of the landowners so that the monarchy never became the plaything of the nobility as happened in England and France. Yet the noble network of interrelated clans served in government, at court and above all in the classic dynastic-aristocratic army which rarely challenged the tsars and instead became an effective machine of imperial expansion and state cohesion, binding gentry and peasantry under the potent ideology of tsar, God and nation. Since the Romanovs came to power in a desperate civil war, the Time of Troubles (1603–13), the regime was on a military footing from the start. Constant wars against Poles, Swedes, Ottomans, British, French, Germans meant that the autocracy developed as a command centre, mobilizing its nobility and constantly recruiting Western technology. Crown and nobility milked the resources of the serfs, who paid taxes, provided grain and served as soldiers, much cheaper to put in the field than those in other parts of Europe. The Romanovs’ success in unifying the country, and the deep fear of any further mayhem, meant that even if individual tsars might be liquidated, the monarchy was generally secure, always supported by their nobility – with rare exceptions in 1730, 1825 and 1916/17. For most of the time, the Romanovs and their retainers could cooperate in the sacred, prestigious and profitable enterprise of repelling foreign aggression and building an empire. Hence this book is a story not just of the Romanovs but of other families too, Golitsyns, Tolstoys and Orlovs.
The nexus for this alliance was the court, an entrepôt of prizes, a club of glamour and majesty, where supposedly lightweight empresses, such as Anna and Elizaveta, proved especially adept at finessing the relationship with their swaggering magnates. This partnership thrived until the Crimean War in the 1850s when the old regime somehow had to be converted into a viable modern state. The struggle abroad required the Romanov empire to compete in a relentless geopolitical tournament of power with Britain, Germany, Japan and America, whose wealth and technology far outstripped those of Russia. Russia’s potential could be unlocked only by reforming peasant landownership, by breakneck industrialization based on Western credit and by broadening political participation and dismantling the corrupt, repressive autocracy, something the last two Romanovs, Alexander III and Nicholas II, were ideologically incapable of doing. They faced a conundrum: how to maintain their vast borders, while projecting a power proportionate to their imperial pretensions from a backward society. If they failed abroad, they lost their legitimacy at home. The more they failed at home, the less they could afford to play the empire abroad. If they bluffed and were exposed, they either had to retreat humiliatingly, or fight and risk revolutionary catastrophe.
It is unlikely that even Peter or Catherine could have solved the predicaments of revolution and world war faced by Nicholas II in the early twentieth century, but it was unfortunate that the Romanov who faced the darkest crises was the least capable and most narrow-minded, as well as the unluckiest. Nicholas was both a poor judge of men and unwilling to delegate. While he could not fill the role of autocrat himself, he used his power to make sure no one else did either.
The very success of the old ways until the 1850s made it all the harder to change. Just as the radical and murderous culture of the Soviet Union can be understood only through Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology, so the often bizarre, daft and self-defeating trajectory of the last Romanovs can be understood only through their ideology: sacred autocracy. This ultimately distorted the monarchy, becoming an end in itself, an obstacle to the running of a modern state: the impossible conundrum here was to attract able politicians and to widen participation in the regime without losing its outdated pillars, nobility and church – what Trotsky called the world of ‘icons and cockroaches’.
After all, the epochs of the Great Dictators of the 1920s and 1930s, and the new autocracies of the early twenty-first century, show that there is nothing incompatible about modernity and authoritarianism – even in today’s world of the internet and twenty-four-hour news. It was the character of tsarist monarchy and Russian society that made it unworkable. The solutions were not as simple as they now appear with the aid of hindsight, magnified by smug Western superiority. As the reformer Alexander II learned, ‘a king’s lot’, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, was ‘to do good and be damned’. Western historians scold the last two tsars for failing to institute immediate democracy. This could be a delusion: such radical surgery might simply have killed the patient much earlier.
The fate of the Romanov family was unbearably cruel and is often presented as inevitable, but it is worth remembering that such was the strength of the monarchy that Nicholas II ruled for twenty-two years – his first ten moderately successfully – and he survived defeat, revolutionary ferment and three years of world war. The February Revolution of 1917 destroyed the monarchy but the family were not doomed until October when they fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks, seven months after the abdication. Even then, Lenin contemplated different scenarios before presiding over that atrocious crime: the slaughter of parents and innocent children. Nothing in history is inevitable.
The massacre marks the end of the dynasty and our narrative but not the end of the story. Today’s Russia throbs with the reverberations of its history. The very bones of the Romanovs are the subject of intense political and religious controversy while their imperial interests – from Ukraine to the Baltics, Caucasus to Crimea, Syria and Jerusalem to the Far East – continue to define Russia and the world as we know it. Blood-spattered, gold-plated, diamond-studded, swash-buckled, bodiceripping and star-crossed, the rise and fall of the Romanovs remains as fascinating as it is relevant, as human as it is strategic, a chronicle of fathers and sons, megalomaniacs, monsters and saints.1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND SOURCES
This book is not meant to be a full history of Russia nor an economic, diplomatic or military survey, nor a full biography of Peter the Great or Nicholas II, nor an anatomy of Revolution, nor a genealogical study. Other historians have covered these subjects much better than I. Only two great historians, one American, one British, have written on the entire dynasty: both have done so brilliantly. Professor Bruce Lincoln, expert on the Great Reforms and much else, wrote the magisterial The Romanovs: Autocrats of All t
he Russias in which he divides his narrative into alternating domestic and foreign policy chapters. The late Professor Lindsey Hughes wrote The Romanovs: Ruling Russia 1613–1917, a masterful, scholarly analysis. I recommend both, but this is the first Romanov history to blend together the personal and political into a single narrative, using archives and published works.
Some of the world’s outstanding scholars have read and commented on this entire book or the section on their speciality: Dr Sergei Bogatyrev, scholar of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century monarchy, author of The Sovereign and his Counsellers on Ivan the Terrible, now writing a history of the Rurikids, read and corrected the seventeenth-century section from Michael to Peter the Great. Simon Dixon, Professor of Russian History at University College London, author of Catherine the Great, checked the eighteenth-century section from Peter the Great to Paul. Professor Dominic Lieven, author of Russia against Napoleon and more recently Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia, commented on the nineteenth-and twentieth-century section from Alexander I to Nicholas II. Professor Geoffrey Hosking, author of Russia and the Russians and Russia: People and Empire, read and corrected the entire book as did Professor Robert Service, author of the History of Modern Russia. Dr John Casey of my old college Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, also brought his meticulous stylistic and editorial eye to my manuscript. I hope that the advice of this galaxy of scholarship has helped me avoid mistakes, but any that survive are my own responsibility.
I have drawn on much neglected material on all the tsars’ reigns, mostly primary documents, some unpublished, many published in historical journals in the nineteenth century. I have also used many secondary works throughout, so the book is overall a work of synthesis.
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