by James Millar
The law on dynastic succession was revised by the Emperor Paul I (ruled 1796-1801) after he was denied his rightful succession by his mother, Catherine II (“the Great,” ruled 1762-1796). Catherine, born Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, had married Karl-Peter (the future Peter III) in 1745. After instigating a palace coup that ousted Peter (and later consenting to his murder), Catherine assumed the throne herself. When Paul ascended the throne on her death, he promulgated a law of succession in 1796 that established succession by male primogeniture and female succession only by substitution (that is, only in the absence of male Romanovs). This law endured until the end of the empire and continues today as the regulating statute for expatriate members of the Romanov family living abroad.
Romanov rulers in the nineteenth century were best known for their defense of the autocratic system and resistance to liberal constitutionalism and other social reforms. Paul’s sons Alexander I (ruled 1801-1825), the principal victor over Napoleon Bonaparte, and Nicholas I (ruled 1825-1855) each resisted substantive reform and established censorship and other limitations on Russian society aimed at stemming the rise of the radical intelligentsia. Nicholas I’s son, Alexander II (the “Tsar-Liberator,” ruled 1855-1881) inherited the consequences of the Russian defeat in the Crimean War and instituted the Great Reforms, the centerpiece of which was the emancipation of Russia’s serfs. Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881, and his successors on the throne, Alexander III (ruled 1881-1894) and Nicholas II (ruled 1894-1917), adopted many reactionary policies against revolutionaries and sought to defend and extend the autocratic form of monarchy unique to Russia at the time.
The anachronism of autocracy, the mystical-religious leanings of Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, and, perhaps most important, the string of defeats in World War I, forced Nicholas II to abdicate in February 1917. Having first abdicated in favor of his son Alexei, Nicholas II edited his abdication decree so as to pass the throne instead on to his younger brother, Mikhail-an action that in point of fact lay beyond a tsar’s power according to the Pauline Law of Succession of 1796. In any event, Mikhail turned down the throne, ending more than three hundred years of Romanov rule in Russia. Nicholas and his family were immediately placed under house arrest in their palace at Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, but in July they were sent into exile to Tobolsk. With the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, Nicholas and his family were sent to Ekaterinburg, where Bolshevik control was firmer and where, under the threat of a White Army advance, they were executed on the night of July 17, 1918. On days surrounding this, executions of other Romanovs and their relatives (including morganatic spouses) were carried out. In 1981, Nicholas II, his wife and children, and all the other Romanovs who were executed by the Bolsheviks were glorified as saints (or more properly, royal martyrs) by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.
After the abdication of Nicholas and the Bolshevik coup, many Romanovs fled Russia and established themselves in Western Europe and America. Kirill Vladimirovich, Nicholas II’s first cousin, proclaimed himself to be “Emperor of All the Russias” in 1924; nearly all surviving grand dukes recognized his claim to the succession, as did that part of the Russian Orthodox Church that had
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fled revolutionary Russia and had set itself up first in Yugoslavia, then in Germany, and finally in the United States. Kirill’s son Vladimir assumed the headship of the dynasty (but not the title “emperor”) on his father’s death in 1938, though his claim was less universally accepted. Today the Romanov dynasty properly consists only of Leonida Georgievna, Vladimir’s widow; his daughter Maria; and her son Georgy, and Princess Ekaterina Ioan-novna. The question of the identity of Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia Nikolayevna, the youngest daughter of Nicholas II, was finally and definitively put to rest with the results of a DNA comparison of Anderson with surviving Romanov relatives. Other lines of descent in the Romanov family exist as well, but are disqualified from the succession due to the prevalence of morganatic marriages in these lines, something that is prohibited by the Pauline Law of Succession. The question of who the rightful tsar would be in the event of a restoration remains hotly contested in monarchist circles in emigration and in Russia. See also: ALEXANDER I; ALEXANDER II; ALEXANDER III; ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; ANNA IVANOVNA; CATHERINE I; CATHERINE II; ELIZABETH; FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; IVAN V; IVAN VI; NICHOLAS I; NICHOLAS II; PAUL I; PETER I; PETER II; PETER III; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH; SOPHIA; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunning, Chester S. L. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Klyuchevsky, Vasilii O. (1970). The Rise of the Romanovs, tr. Liliana Archibald. London: Macmillan. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1981). The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias. New York: The Dial Press. Nazarov, V. D. (1993). “The Genealogy of the Koshkins-Zakharyns-Romanovs and the Legend about the Foundation of the Georgievskiy Monastery.” Historical Genealogy 1:22-31. Orchard, G. Edward. (1989). “The Election of Michael Romanov.” The Slavonic and East European Review 67:378-402.
RUSSELL E. MARTIN
Grigory Romanov was born on February 9, 1923, to Russian working-class parents. He served in the Red Army during World War II. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1944, and received a night-school diploma in ship building in 1953. Romanov almost immediately went to work within the Leningrad party apparatus, climbing through the ranks from factory, to ward, to city, and ultimately to oblast-level positions. He served as first secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee from 1970 to 1983, and was known for encouraging production and scientific associations, as well as the forging of links between such groups to implement new technologies. As a result, Leningrad achieved enviable production levels under Romanov. He was named a candidate member of the Politburo in 1973, and was promoted to full membership in 1976. Romanov advanced to the CPSU Central Committee Secretariat in June 1983, with responsibility for the defense industry. Though mentioned as a candidate for the office of general secretary, his many years spent outside the Moscow left Romanov unable to build allies in the Politburo.
Once Gorbachev had claimed the general secretary post in March 1985, he began purging his rivals from the top leadership, and Romanov was among them. Despite his innovations in Leningrad, Romanov was a conservative, not inclined to alter the complacency-and corruption-of the Brezhnev era. Romanov was formally relieved of his duties on July 1, 1986. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; POLITBURO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Medish, Vadim. (1983). “A Romanov in the Kremlin?” Problems of Communism 32(6): 65-66. Mitchell, R. Judson. (1990). Getting to the Top in the USSR. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Ruble, Blair A. (1983). “Romanov’s Leningrad.” Problems of Communism 32(6): 36-48.
ANN E. ROBERTSON
ROMANOV, GRIGORY VASILIEVICH
(b. 1923), first secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee during the Brezhnev years.
ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH
(1596-1645), tsar of Russia from 1613 to 1645 and first ruler of the Romanov Dynasty.
Born in 1596, Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov was the son of Fyodor Nikitich Romanov and his wife
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Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov, the first Romanov tsar. © HULTON ARCHIVE Ksenia Ivanovna Shestova. His family had long served as boyars in the court of the Muscovite rulers. The Romanovs, while still known as the Yurievs, were thrust into the center of power and politics in 1547, when Anastasia Romanovna Yurieva, Mikhail’s great aunt, married Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”). This union produced Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, the last of the old Riurikovich rulers of Russia, who died in 1598 without heirs. The extinction of the tsarist line left the succession in question, but the throne finally went to Boris Godunov, a prominent figure in Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich’s court.
FROM GODUNOV TO
THE ROMANOV DYNASTY
The reign of Boris Godunov was a difficult time for the Romanov clan. Many members were exiled and forcibly tonsured (required to become monks or nuns) by the new tsar, including Mikhail’s father and mother, who took the monastic names Filaret and Marfa, respectively. The young Mikhail, then only nine years old, similarly was exiled, at first in rather harsh conditions at Beloozero, then in somewhat better circumstances on the family’s own estates, in both cases living with relatives.
Fortunes changed definitively for the better for Mikhail only after 1605, with the unexpected death of Tsar Boris and the brief reign of the First False Dmitry. Mikhail was reunited with his mother, and took up residence in Moscow before moving in 1612 to the Ipatev Monastery near Kostroma, where his mother’s family had estates. In the next year, an Assembly of the Land (Zemsky Sobor) was summoned to elect a new tsar for the throne that, by then, had lain vacant for three years. After having ruled out any foreign candidates (the younger brother of the Swedish king, Karl Phillipp, had enjoyed some support among segments of the boyar elite), the assembly began to discuss native candidates. At length, the assembly elected Mikhail to be tsar, and with this election the three hundred year reign of the House of Romanov began.
WHY MIKHAIL ROMANOV?
Historians have long speculated on the reasons the election might have fallen on Mikhail in 1613. Some have pointed to his youth (he was only sixteen years old at the time); or to his inexperience in political matters; or to his supposed weak will and poor health. These rationales suggest that perhaps the electors in the Assembly of the Land saw in him someone who could easily be manipulated to suit their own clan interests. Others have pointed to the role of the Cossacks, who, according to contemporary sources, rushed into the assembly and demanded, at the point of a pike, that Mikhail be recognized as the “God-annointed tsar.” The fact that the Romanovs appear in some later accounts to have maintained their good name and enjoyed some popularity even through the darkest and most violent phases of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, may also have worked to their advantage in 1613. It must be acknowledged, however, that some of these sources were compiled after 1613, and thus may reflect Romanov self-interest.
Some sources have claimed that Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, as death approached in 1598, nominated Fyodor Nikitich, Mikhail’s father, to succeed him on the throne-a nomination that was, evidently, ignored after the tsar’s death. One fact, often overlooked in treatments of Mikhail’s life and reign, is that the Romanov boyar clan-Mikhail’s ancestors-
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were remarkably successful during the decades after the 1547 marriage of Anastasia Yurieva and Ivan the Terrible at forging numerous marriage alliances between their kin and members of most of the other important boyar clans at court. These marriages linked the Romanovs directly with a sizeable portion of the boyar elite. This web of kinship to which the Romanovs belonged, plus the other factors mentioned, may have made the young Mikhail a viable and highly desirable candidate for the throne, since electing him would tend to secure the high ranks and privileged positions of the boyars, most of whom were already Mikhail’s relatives.
EARLY CHALLENGES
For whatever reason he was elected, Mikhail’s early years on the throne were nonetheless rocky. Novgorod and Pskov still lay under Swedish occupation until a final peace was concluded and a military withdrawal obtained by the Treaty of Stolbovo (1617). Mikhail’s father still languished in a Polish prison, released only in 1619, after peace with Poland was finally concluded at the Treaty of Deulino (1618). Rivals for the throne still roamed the countryside, particularly in the south-some proclaiming themselves to be yet another Tsarevich Dmitry. Zarutsky’s band of Cossacks proved to be still a menace, supporting the widow of the First False Dmitry.
The security and legitimacy of the new dynasty were hardly fixed by the election in 1613. Matters improved with the return of Mikhail’s father in 1619. Having been forcibly tonsured a monk earlier, he had been proclaimed patriarch by the Second False Dmitry; and on his return to Moscow he was formally and officially installed in that office. From then to his death in 1633, Filaret ruled in all respects jointly with his son, and had even been given the unique title of Great Sovereign. The competent governance of Filaret and, after his death, of other Romanov relatives, plus the absence of successional squabbles, gradually produced the stability that, by the end of Mikhail’s reign, helped to firmly establish Romanov dynasticism in Russia and the peaceful succession of Mikhail’s son, Alexei, to the throne. as were his mother’s relatives, Mikhail and Boris Saltykov, the former of whom was among the chief figures of the court. The Saltykov brothers appear to have had another candidate in mind for Mikhail, and so they conspired to ruin the match by poisoning Maria, causing her to have a fit of vomiting. Maria and her family were immediately dispatched to Tobolsk, in Siberia, as punishment for their presumed conspiracy to conceal a serious illness from the tsar (one that, it was believed, might have implications for the reproductive capacity of the new bride).
Further efforts to marry Mikhail off to a foreign bride ensued and matches were proposed (with the daughter of the grand duke of Lithuania, the daughter of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and with the sister of the elector of Brandenburg), but all failed. An investigation of the Khlopov affair was opened up in 1623, and shortly thereafter the truth of the Saltykov conspiracy was discovered and the two brothers were disgraced and sent into exile. Even so, no serious reconsideration of the Khlopov match ever materialized, for Mikhail’s mother remained adamantly opposed to the match.
In 1624 Mikhail married Maria Dolgorukova, possibly the young girl that had been the original choice of the Saltykovs, but she died within a few months of the wedding. Mikhail next married (in 1626) Evdokya Streshneva, with whom he had six daughters and three sons, including his heir, Alexei. In the last year of his life he attempted to marry off one of his daughters, Irina, to Prince Waldemar, the natural son of the king of Denmark, Christian IV. Waldemar’s refusal to convert to Orthodoxy doomed the marriage project, but the controversy stimulated a fertile theological and political debate about baptism and the confessional lines between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy. Mikhail died on July 12, 1645, on his name-day (St. Mikhail Malein, not, as is often assumed and asserted, St. Mikhail the Archangel). See also: ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND; COSSACKS; DMITRY, FALSE; FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH; IVAN IV; ROMANOV DYNASTY; SIBERIA; STOLBOVO, TREATY OF; TIME OF TROUBLES
ENSURING THE DYNASTIC SUCCESSION
Mikhail Romanov’s family life was full of intrigue and failures. In 1616, Mikhail picked Maria Ivanovna Khlopova from several prospective brides, and he seems genuinely to have felt fondness for her. His mother, however, was dead set against the match,
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bain, R. Nisbet. (1905). The First Romanovs, 1613-1725: A History of Muscovite Civilization and the Rise of Modern Russia Under Peter the Great and His Forerunners. New York: E. P. Dutton. Dunning, Chester S. L. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov
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Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Klyuchevsky, Vasilii O. (1970). The Rise of the Romanovs, tr. Liliana Archibald. London: Macmillan St. Martin’s. Orchard, G. Edward. (1989). “The Election of Michael Romanov.” Slavonic and East European Review 67: 378-402. Platonov, S. F. (1985). The Time of Troubles, tr. John T. Alexander. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
RUSSELL E. MARTIN
ROMANTICISM
Unlike the Enlightenment, a cultural movement that was imported into Russia from the West and thus, in the words of the poet Alexander Pushkin, “moored on the banks of the conquered Neva” (referring to the river that flows through St. Petersburg), Romanticism had a more indigenous quality, building on the earlier cultural tradition of senti-mentalism. The awakening of the heart experienced by Russian society in the second half of the eight
eenth century resulted in an oversensitive, reflective personality-a type that persisted in the next generation and evolved into the superfluous man epitomized by Pushkin in the character of Eugene Onegin in the poem of the same name, and by Mikhail Lermontov in Pechorin, the protagonist of A Hero of Our Time. The full-fledged Romantic type was born in Russia during the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), which witnessed Napoleon’s invasion and subsequent fall and the Russian army’s triumphant entry into Paris. These cataclysmic events powerfully enhanced, in the conscience of a sensitive generation, a fatalistic conception of change to which both kingdoms and persons are subject-a conception shared by Alexander. At the same time, an idea of freedom and happiness “within ourselves”-notwithstanding the doom of external reality-was put forward with unprecedented strength. The Alexandrine age saw an extraordinary burst of creativity, especially in literature.
WESTERN INFLUENCES
Russian Romanticism was strongly influenced by cultural developments in the West. Vasily Zhukov-sky’s masterly translations and adaptations from German poetry are representative of the transitional 1800s and early 1810s. Later, British literary influence became dominant. “It seems that, in the present age, a poet cannot but echo Byron, as well as a novelist cannot but echo W. Scott, notwithstanding the magnitude and even originality of talent,” wrote the poet and critic Peter Vyazemsky in 1827. More philosophical authors such as Vladimir F. Odoyevsky persistently looked to German thought for inspiration; Schelling was particularly important. The evolution of French literature was also keenly followed: Victor Hugo (but hardly the dreamy Lamartine) aroused much sympathy in the Russian Romantics. A seminal event was the sojourn in St. Petersburg and Moscow of the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. However, the study of European models only convinced Russian authors and critics that Romanticism necessarily implied originality. “Conditioned by the desire to realize the creative originality of the human soul,” Romanticism owes its formation “not just to every individual nation, but, what is more, to every individual author,” wrote Nikolai Polevoy, a leading figure in the Russian Romantic movement. Characteristically, Pushkin struggled to dispel the image of Russian Byron, while Lermontov explicitly declared his non-Byronism.
