Reviews

Another "History" book from which you may learn a lot about the Romanovs but in the end you don't really learn anything. But it flows easily and it helps pass the time like a well written, produced, directed and acted but ultimatelly shallow Prestge TV Series.

lindzlovesreading's review against another edition

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3.0

I should have guessed this was going to be dense going in. Russian history is like that, it has a molasse like quality. Change is slow. But as Montefiore points out (as is his main thesis of the book) the Russian government due to its autocracy, tyrants do come in all shapes and colours. But in saying that that Russian has a pull, its grandure, its insanity and its brutality.

The Romanovs ruled by the share force of will, over a massive complicated country. It was their benvolence of the Tsars that pushed reform such as freeing the surfs, well that or a couple of well timed revolts. Montefiore goes through each of these personalities, the book ebbs and flows with his interest, he loves the vitality and bonkerness of Peter and Katherine the Great (it was a time when you needed to present yourself with a coup if you were going to a Tsar) and Alexander II who was so close to delivering a parlimentary government it is alsmost a little painful, but you could only feel him yawning with Nicholas I and Alexander III. He only just put up with Alexander I because of Nepoleon, and though you could tell spending time with Nicolas II and Alexandra was painful, it was equally fascinating because those two were so intent on making every single wrong desicion two human beings could possibly make.

As each of thses personalities came to the thrown, they created Russia in their own image, one of luxery, conquest, manic energy, slow molasse. I spent a lot of time with these people, sometimes it was fun other times a little distatseful but never boring.

brianmagid's review against another edition

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5.0

Told myself I would finish this monumental tome before April and I did! Celebrating with a glug of vodka, some rabid scapegoating anti-semitism and a trigger happy assassination. This book is an endless river of courtiers, regents, mistresses, dates, policies enacted and discarded, repetitive wars with the same cycle of enemies, soldiers moved, fortresses taken and lost, uprisings suppressed, ministers promoted and sacked, alliances established and broken, European royal families married into, ballooning extended order of cousins, uncles, nephews, nieces, syphilitic, hemophiliac, fucking and drinking and killing and dying and all the while this invisible historical clock is ticking away on this goofy parade of dreadful power, bottoming out and dissolving in a quick-endless barrage of gunfire, a pile of mutilated bodies burnt and corroded, a historical mountain out of a molehill next to the untold mountain ranges upon mountain ranges of dead peasants, starved serfs, murdered jews, striking workers, censored writers, roving bands of cossacks, the weight of them finally tipping over the historical scale from the pounds of diamonds, palaces, dresses, speeches, insignia, sacred bullshit mission mythology that binds the enterprise known as Russia together, or did so for 304 years, and now bleeds into the present, as compellingly argued in this book's epilogue. "Russia needs a tsar," said Stalin, who made himself one, and whether that is true or not liberal democracy has never taken root in Russia, always reverting to its autocratic sacred mission. Black mirror of the west, wearing on its sleeve the atrocities they seek to bury, to hide from. Corpses piled so high they become a piece of the national identity, the numbness to death, what are seven more, the tsar and his wife and his five children? They're called innocents, especially the children, who did not deserve their fate, but since when has that mattered? Since when has morality governed nations? The Romanovs themselves did not rule with a moral compass, their compass directed them only towards the continuity of their power, the orderly progression of wealth and property and governance down through the generations, for long enough that it can be argued God is on their side, has appointed them to exploit the masses. Montefiore does not labor these points, he supplies the facts, and is reluctant to take on sweeping synthesis, until perhaps the very final pages, and even then is cautious in establishing historical narratives. It is for the reader to draw conclusions from the episodes, which taken together, for this reader, are a portrait of messy, self righteous people, some brilliant, some talented, some idiotic, some dull, most of them cruel, a few psychotic, all of them part of a march through time which all of us are caught in, began before we were born and terminating long after we're dead, our lives dust and air, our letters and diaries and diamonds and palaces standing as monuments not to our immortality but rather to the opposite, to our profound hubris, our crude, temporal matter. I loved this book.

cthonautical's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative sad tense slow-paced

4.0

crystaldg7's review against another edition

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3.0

I’m not sure how this author made over 300 years of Russian history bland as plain porridage but he achieved it.

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