Peter the Great shaving noblemen’s beards, Catherine the Great’s stable of lovers, saintly Nicholas and Alexandra shot, stabbed, and dissolved in acid: no dynasty since the Caesars has attracted so much prurient interest or accumulated such delicious mythologizing. Pushkin, Potemkin, Rasputin: how many stories about them are true? Did Anastasia really escape the Bolshevik assassins? What about Catherine the Great and that horse?
In narrating the history of the Romanovs, from the boy Michael’s reluctant crowning in 1613 to the boy Alexis’s bloody demise in 1918, Simon Sebag Montefiore has no shortage of material.1 Using imperial correspondence never available before, he gives us a portrait of royalty’s intimate life ranging from the pathological to the uplifting. Moment by moment, mortal danger, obsessive sex, and worries about children compete for a ruler’s attention. One tsar is blown to bits by a terrorist bomb, another tortures his son and heir to death, a third is overthrown by his son in a coup d’état, and a fourth is murdered by his wife. Pretenders—a false Simon, a false Peter, two false Dmitris—vie for the throne and meet gruesome deaths. Impalement through the rear end recurs. As one wit observed, it was either Rex or rectum. Of course, the only reason failed claimants were illegitimate is that those who succeeded were called tsars.
The only reason failed claimants were illegitimate is that those who succeeded were called tsars.
Consider Russia’s greatest tsar, Peter I. The common
