This is the story of a family who settled on the throne of a principality that seemed destined to disappear, and ended up reigning over a sixth of the Earth. During the three centuries that their reign lasted, the Romanovs succeeded in enlarging the Russian Empire by an average of 50,000 square kilometers each year, or the area of France every ten years. The largest country in the world, today's Russia owes them a lot.
It all started in 1613, when a delegation of Russian nobles appeared before a teenager from a large aristocratic family to beg him to take over their beleaguered homeland. Muscovy was then in ruins and faced the combined assaults of the Swedes, Poles and Tatars. After hesitating for a long time, the young Michel finally accepts the iron staff of the Muscovite sovereigns.
It is with this initial scene that the saga of the Romanovs opens, which Simon Sebag Montefiore, a great specialist in Russian history, relates to us in a sum of almost 700 pages. Under his pen, the great story does not exclude the anecdote, nor erudition the pleasure of the storyteller. We therefore learn a lot about wars, treaties and all that relates to "grand politics", but also about the customs of the court of Moscow, the internal struggles which tear the reigning family apart or the eccentricities of the tsars and tsarinas who follow one another in the Kremlin.
Among the 20 rulers of the Romanov dynasty, figures of course stand out. That of Peter the Great first, who founded Saint Petersburg, turned his country towards Europe, but also showed himself capable of torturing to death a son suspected of having fomented a coup d'etat. That of Catherine II, then, German princess married to Peter III, who proves to be clever enough to eliminate her husband and install herself on the throne of a Russia which she will enlarge from the Ottoman Crimea and a part from Poland. That of Alexander II again, who seized Central Asia, abolished serfdom, wrote surprisingly crude love letters to his mistresses and escaped 11 assassination attempts before being killed by a bomb thrown by a group of revolutionaries.
Tsar of all the Russias was indeed a dangerous profession. The numerous murders that marked their history had made this clear to the Romanovs long before their lineage, in 1918, was extinguished under the bullets of the Bolsheviks.
The Romanovs. 1613-1918
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Calmann-Lévy, 2016, 660 p., €27.90