As we know from the stupendous BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's epic novel, War And Peace, the Russians are very good at war, not so pie-hot when it comes to peace.
Military parades, manoeuvres and a good scrap are what they like best - and as Simon Sebag Montefiore says in this panoramic study, to Tsar Nicholas II even World War I, in which Russia fielded more than 1.2 million men, was nothing more than 'a bracing national rite'.
Torture, castration, rampant sex, murders galore and dwarf tossing. Were Russia's Tsars the nastiest royals in history?
Russians are very good at war, not so pie-hot when it comes to peace
Romanovs couldn't be bothered with democracy and elections
Much of Montefiore's book is sheer Hammer Horror
By Roger Lewis for the Daily Mail
29 January 2016
BOOK OF THE WEEK
THE ROMANOVS: 1613-1918
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25)
BBC's War and Peace
As we know from the stupendous BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's epic novel, War And Peace, the Russians are very good at war, not so pie-hot when it comes to peace.
Military parades, manoeuvres and a good scrap are what they like best - and as Simon Sebag Montefiore says in this panoramic study, to Tsar Nicholas II even World War I, in which Russia fielded more than 1.2 million men, was nothing more than 'a bracing national rite'.
Tsar Alexei, who came to the throne in 1645, was a religious maniac who awoke at 4am to pray
His ancestor, Nicholas I, devoted his time to designing uniforms, the gold-epauletted black jackets and shiny boots. When he visited Queen Victoria in 1844, he 'refused the decadent comforts of a soft democratic bed and insisted on sleeping on a steel cot', which he had brought with him from a barracks.
Nicholas's brother, Alexander I, so relished his confrontations with Napoleon that, despite the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino being the 'most gorgeously dressed abattoirs in history', he still wanted to form an alliance with the French and invade British India.
What no Romanov could be bothered with were progressive absurdities such as democracy, elections and open parliaments. Indeed, Peter the Great thumped ministers in the middle of council meetings, and throughout their history the Tsars were bellicose, marauding and guiltlessly violent. They were always seeking border clashes with Poland, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire.
In 1904, the Russian fleet almost accidentally invaded Yorkshire. It entered the North Sea and got lost in the fog on the Dogger Bank. It opened fire on a trawler, 'beheading two fishermen'. In due course, the Tsar paid compensation of £65,000 'to the bereaved of Hull' - but what's more astonishing is that the fleet believed it was steaming towards Japan (it was the Russo-Japanese War).
Nicholas I, left, devoted his time to designing uniforms. Right, Peter the Great, who thumped ministers in the middle of council meetings
With Russia so vast - it covers one-sixth of the planet's surface - no wonder if they didn't know their Urals from their Caucasus. It takes a wise man to tell his Minsk from his Omsk.
Where the Romanovs did come together, however, was in their full belief that they had to be despotic.
'Our people are like children', said Peter the Great, 'who never get down to learning their alphabet unless their master forces them' - i.e. obedience can only be maintained by terror.
Much of Montefiore's book is sheer Hammer Horror - the poisonings, torture instruments and impaling. While the Romanovs lived in seeming luxury - wearing fur-lined robes and diamond-studded sable-trimmed hats - dead bodies lay strewn in the streets.
The seat of power was the 64-acre Kremlin, its ramparts dotted with gallows and gibbets, where corpses dangled till they rotted. The 14 torture chambers were working night and day, 'except Sundays'.
Few criminals or traitors were cleanly beheaded - most were buried alive or burnt at the stake. The knout, a rawhide whip with metal rings and wires, was used to cut flesh and it bit to the bone.
On the scaffold in Red Square, prisoners had their limbs dislocated and forced back into their sockets, they were branded with white-hot irons, dismembered and quartered alive, and their innards fed to dogs.
Sometimes, severed heads were preserved in jars and placed in the Chamber of Curiosities, which is still open to the public.
For 304 years, until the dynasty came to an end in 1917, the Romanovs were a line of 'megalomaniacs, monsters and saints'. Twelve Tsars were murdered - including two by throttling, one by a stabbing, one by dynamite, and two by bullets. Paul I was smashed in the face with a golden snuffbox. Alexander II had his legs blown off by an assassin's bomb.
Death by natural causes was no picnic either. Peter the Great died of a gangrenous bladder; his widow, who ruled on alone, was carried off by 'fevers, asthma, coughs, nosebleeds and swollen limbs' and their son had the smallpox. Croaking of 'haemorrhoidal colic', however, was anything but natural: it was the euphemism for political silencing.
The Romanovs, a house that grew out of the Mongol Khans and the Byzantine Emperors, inherited the splendour and savagery of the medieval Ivan the Terrible.
The word 'Tsar' is a Russian version of 'Caesar', and like Caligula and Tiberius in Ancient times, the early Romanovs went in for 'spasms of killing, praying and fornication'. They never trusted their advisers, 'cutting off noses and genitals . . . roping women and children together and pushing them under ice'.
They'd burn down other people's palaces and confiscate their estates - Montefiore makes the point that meantime in England, Henry VIII was no more docile.
Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 until 1796, left. Right, Alexander II had his legs blown off by an assassin's bomb
Life at court involved formal banquets with 70 courses - bear meat, swan stuffed with saffron, and so forth - plus vats of vodka.
The chief entertainment was dwarf-tossing. Dwarves were considered lucky mascots, and sometimes they'd leap out of cakes 'totally naked'.
One dwarf, Pedrillo, was found by the Tsarina (the Tsar's wife) in bed with a lactating goat, which was comically dressed in a negligee.
Tsar Alexei, however, who came to the throne in 1645, was a religious maniac, who awoke at 4am to pray. At Easter, he prayed for six solid hours.
High-ranking Russians who missed mass were thrown in the freezing river. He considered himself such a sacred figure, 'no one was allowed to look him in the eye, and he was greeted by his subjects with total prostration'.
The dwarves, pensioned off by Alexei, were brought back by Peter the Great, 'a terrifying circus ringmaster' who was 6 ft 8 in in height.
Because he 'personally hated him', which I suppose is as good a reason as any, Peter had his son, the Tsarevich Alexei, arrested in the Kremlin's grand dining room.
As a warm-up, the boy received 25 blows of the knout and, under torture, he finally confessed that 'I wished for my father's death'.
Peter personally visited Alexei in the torture chamber, remaining to watch for some hours. Montefiore says that Peter's son died of 'shock, blood loss or infection after knouting, which would have flayed and shredded his back to the bone'. At the funeral, Peter wept.
Keen on shipbuilding, in 1698 he visited England to study naval architecture, but what most took his fancy were wheelbarrows.
THE ROMANOVS : 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
'He had never seen a wheelbarrow, so he organised wheelbarrow races,' which churned up the lawn of his rented house in Deptford. He also used the paintings for target practice, the furniture for firewood, and the curtains to wipe his bottom
Peter's main achievement was the construction of beautiful Saint Petersburg, which was designed by Italian, German and British architects and engineers, and built by slave labour.
His granddaughter-in-law, Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 until 1796, commissioned the Hermitage for the state art collection. She and her lover, Potemkin, 'travelled with a garden, borne by serfs, which was planted wherever they stopped for the night'.
Beautiful Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) is the northernmost city in the world with a population over 1 million
Maybe they needed a lawn for a midnight wheelbarrow race.
The Tsarinas could be as cruel as the Tsars. Elizaveta, Catherine's aunt, banned ladies from wearing pink and had the tongues ripped out of anyone who broke her fashion rules. When she died, in 1761, there were 15,000 elaborate dresses in her wardrobe.
Up until the 18th century, however, Russian royal women were generally treated as if in an Islamic harem. They were heavily veiled and watched church services through a grille.
Carriages were hung with thick curtains, 'so that they could not look out or be seen'. They were concealed always behind screens, and 'make-up and mirrors were banned as demonic'.
With Catherine, however, ostentation replaced invisibility. She'd travel between St Petersburg and Moscow in a fleet of seven barges painted gold and scarlet, each with an orchestra, a library and a dining table that sat 70.
Keeping the entire populace in servitude and fearful poverty couldn't last for ever, and as the dynasty reached more modern times, rebels and revolutionaries began to make their presence felt.
Between 1905 and 1910, a total of 16,000 state officials and bureaucrats, who ran Russia for the Romanovs, were assassinated - and out of the resulting resentment grew the Bolshevik Revolution.
The fate of the last Tsar and Tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra, is a well-known tragic story, but Montefiore tells it compellingly.
The Imperial Family were dragged from the Winter Palace - which Alexandra had re-decorated with bric-a-brac from Maples in Tottenham Court Road - and taken to a cellar in Ekaterinburg, 800 miles east of Moscow. There they were executed in 'a deafening pandemonium of shots . . . a diabolical scene of upturned chairs, waving legs, blood and moans, screams, low sobs'.
Their bones were not given a funeral service until 1998. In the year 2000, Nicholas, his wife and his children were canonised.
The haemophilic Tsarevich Alexei's King Charles spaniel miraculously survived the hail of bullets. The dog was adopted by a guard, and later given to a member of the British Expeditionary Force who brought it to England. The spaniel 'lived out its life near Windsor Castle'. I'd like to hear more about that dog.
Military parades, manoeuvres and a good scrap are what they like best - and as Simon Sebag Montefiore says in this panoramic study, to Tsar Nicholas II even World War I, in which Russia fielded more than 1.2 million men, was nothing more than 'a bracing national rite'.
Torture, castration, rampant sex, murders galore and dwarf tossing. Were Russia's Tsars the nastiest royals in history?
Russians are very good at war, not so pie-hot when it comes to peace
Romanovs couldn't be bothered with democracy and elections
Much of Montefiore's book is sheer Hammer Horror
By Roger Lewis for the Daily Mail
29 January 2016
BOOK OF THE WEEK
THE ROMANOVS: 1613-1918
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25)
BBC's War and Peace
As we know from the stupendous BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's epic novel, War And Peace, the Russians are very good at war, not so pie-hot when it comes to peace.
Military parades, manoeuvres and a good scrap are what they like best - and as Simon Sebag Montefiore says in this panoramic study, to Tsar Nicholas II even World War I, in which Russia fielded more than 1.2 million men, was nothing more than 'a bracing national rite'.
Tsar Alexei, who came to the throne in 1645, was a religious maniac who awoke at 4am to pray
His ancestor, Nicholas I, devoted his time to designing uniforms, the gold-epauletted black jackets and shiny boots. When he visited Queen Victoria in 1844, he 'refused the decadent comforts of a soft democratic bed and insisted on sleeping on a steel cot', which he had brought with him from a barracks.
Nicholas's brother, Alexander I, so relished his confrontations with Napoleon that, despite the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino being the 'most gorgeously dressed abattoirs in history', he still wanted to form an alliance with the French and invade British India.
What no Romanov could be bothered with were progressive absurdities such as democracy, elections and open parliaments. Indeed, Peter the Great thumped ministers in the middle of council meetings, and throughout their history the Tsars were bellicose, marauding and guiltlessly violent. They were always seeking border clashes with Poland, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire.
In 1904, the Russian fleet almost accidentally invaded Yorkshire. It entered the North Sea and got lost in the fog on the Dogger Bank. It opened fire on a trawler, 'beheading two fishermen'. In due course, the Tsar paid compensation of £65,000 'to the bereaved of Hull' - but what's more astonishing is that the fleet believed it was steaming towards Japan (it was the Russo-Japanese War).
Nicholas I, left, devoted his time to designing uniforms. Right, Peter the Great, who thumped ministers in the middle of council meetings
With Russia so vast - it covers one-sixth of the planet's surface - no wonder if they didn't know their Urals from their Caucasus. It takes a wise man to tell his Minsk from his Omsk.
Where the Romanovs did come together, however, was in their full belief that they had to be despotic.
'Our people are like children', said Peter the Great, 'who never get down to learning their alphabet unless their master forces them' - i.e. obedience can only be maintained by terror.
Much of Montefiore's book is sheer Hammer Horror - the poisonings, torture instruments and impaling. While the Romanovs lived in seeming luxury - wearing fur-lined robes and diamond-studded sable-trimmed hats - dead bodies lay strewn in the streets.
The seat of power was the 64-acre Kremlin, its ramparts dotted with gallows and gibbets, where corpses dangled till they rotted. The 14 torture chambers were working night and day, 'except Sundays'.
Few criminals or traitors were cleanly beheaded - most were buried alive or burnt at the stake. The knout, a rawhide whip with metal rings and wires, was used to cut flesh and it bit to the bone.
On the scaffold in Red Square, prisoners had their limbs dislocated and forced back into their sockets, they were branded with white-hot irons, dismembered and quartered alive, and their innards fed to dogs.
Sometimes, severed heads were preserved in jars and placed in the Chamber of Curiosities, which is still open to the public.
For 304 years, until the dynasty came to an end in 1917, the Romanovs were a line of 'megalomaniacs, monsters and saints'. Twelve Tsars were murdered - including two by throttling, one by a stabbing, one by dynamite, and two by bullets. Paul I was smashed in the face with a golden snuffbox. Alexander II had his legs blown off by an assassin's bomb.
Death by natural causes was no picnic either. Peter the Great died of a gangrenous bladder; his widow, who ruled on alone, was carried off by 'fevers, asthma, coughs, nosebleeds and swollen limbs' and their son had the smallpox. Croaking of 'haemorrhoidal colic', however, was anything but natural: it was the euphemism for political silencing.
The Romanovs, a house that grew out of the Mongol Khans and the Byzantine Emperors, inherited the splendour and savagery of the medieval Ivan the Terrible.
The word 'Tsar' is a Russian version of 'Caesar', and like Caligula and Tiberius in Ancient times, the early Romanovs went in for 'spasms of killing, praying and fornication'. They never trusted their advisers, 'cutting off noses and genitals . . . roping women and children together and pushing them under ice'.
They'd burn down other people's palaces and confiscate their estates - Montefiore makes the point that meantime in England, Henry VIII was no more docile.
Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 until 1796, left. Right, Alexander II had his legs blown off by an assassin's bomb
Life at court involved formal banquets with 70 courses - bear meat, swan stuffed with saffron, and so forth - plus vats of vodka.
The chief entertainment was dwarf-tossing. Dwarves were considered lucky mascots, and sometimes they'd leap out of cakes 'totally naked'.
One dwarf, Pedrillo, was found by the Tsarina (the Tsar's wife) in bed with a lactating goat, which was comically dressed in a negligee.
Tsar Alexei, however, who came to the throne in 1645, was a religious maniac, who awoke at 4am to pray. At Easter, he prayed for six solid hours.
High-ranking Russians who missed mass were thrown in the freezing river. He considered himself such a sacred figure, 'no one was allowed to look him in the eye, and he was greeted by his subjects with total prostration'.
The dwarves, pensioned off by Alexei, were brought back by Peter the Great, 'a terrifying circus ringmaster' who was 6 ft 8 in in height.
Because he 'personally hated him', which I suppose is as good a reason as any, Peter had his son, the Tsarevich Alexei, arrested in the Kremlin's grand dining room.
As a warm-up, the boy received 25 blows of the knout and, under torture, he finally confessed that 'I wished for my father's death'.
Peter personally visited Alexei in the torture chamber, remaining to watch for some hours. Montefiore says that Peter's son died of 'shock, blood loss or infection after knouting, which would have flayed and shredded his back to the bone'. At the funeral, Peter wept.
Keen on shipbuilding, in 1698 he visited England to study naval architecture, but what most took his fancy were wheelbarrows.
THE ROMANOVS : 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
'He had never seen a wheelbarrow, so he organised wheelbarrow races,' which churned up the lawn of his rented house in Deptford. He also used the paintings for target practice, the furniture for firewood, and the curtains to wipe his bottom
Peter's main achievement was the construction of beautiful Saint Petersburg, which was designed by Italian, German and British architects and engineers, and built by slave labour.
His granddaughter-in-law, Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 until 1796, commissioned the Hermitage for the state art collection. She and her lover, Potemkin, 'travelled with a garden, borne by serfs, which was planted wherever they stopped for the night'.
Beautiful Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) is the northernmost city in the world with a population over 1 million
Maybe they needed a lawn for a midnight wheelbarrow race.
The Tsarinas could be as cruel as the Tsars. Elizaveta, Catherine's aunt, banned ladies from wearing pink and had the tongues ripped out of anyone who broke her fashion rules. When she died, in 1761, there were 15,000 elaborate dresses in her wardrobe.
Up until the 18th century, however, Russian royal women were generally treated as if in an Islamic harem. They were heavily veiled and watched church services through a grille.
Carriages were hung with thick curtains, 'so that they could not look out or be seen'. They were concealed always behind screens, and 'make-up and mirrors were banned as demonic'.
With Catherine, however, ostentation replaced invisibility. She'd travel between St Petersburg and Moscow in a fleet of seven barges painted gold and scarlet, each with an orchestra, a library and a dining table that sat 70.
Keeping the entire populace in servitude and fearful poverty couldn't last for ever, and as the dynasty reached more modern times, rebels and revolutionaries began to make their presence felt.
Between 1905 and 1910, a total of 16,000 state officials and bureaucrats, who ran Russia for the Romanovs, were assassinated - and out of the resulting resentment grew the Bolshevik Revolution.
The fate of the last Tsar and Tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra, is a well-known tragic story, but Montefiore tells it compellingly.
The Imperial Family were dragged from the Winter Palace - which Alexandra had re-decorated with bric-a-brac from Maples in Tottenham Court Road - and taken to a cellar in Ekaterinburg, 800 miles east of Moscow. There they were executed in 'a deafening pandemonium of shots . . . a diabolical scene of upturned chairs, waving legs, blood and moans, screams, low sobs'.
Their bones were not given a funeral service until 1998. In the year 2000, Nicholas, his wife and his children were canonised.
The haemophilic Tsarevich Alexei's King Charles spaniel miraculously survived the hail of bullets. The dog was adopted by a guard, and later given to a member of the British Expeditionary Force who brought it to England. The spaniel 'lived out its life near Windsor Castle'. I'd like to hear more about that dog.
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