The Romanovs 1613-1918

Review by Choice Review

Sebag Montefiore, a prominent historian of Russia, has produced a masterful volume on the history of the Romanovs. Using newly archived material made available after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Montefiore traces 20 tsars over a 304-year period, from Ivan the Terrible to the dissolution of the monarchy under Nicholas II in the middle of WW I. Sebag Montefiore makes it clear that not all Romanovs were abjectly cruel or incompetent to rule. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great brought Russia up to Western standards, and after the brutal murder of Paul I (1801), all other emperors were forced to pay close attention to class and country. The author spends a great deal of time after Paul's murder detailing Russia and Alexander I in the time of Napoleon. Further, Sebag Montefiore explains the difficulties faced by Alexander's son, Nicholas I, from the dark days of the Decembrist Revolt to the epoch of the Crimean War. Turning points include Alexander II's efforts to emancipate the serfs and the struggle Nicholas II had with the 1905 Revolution, the Balkan Wars, and WW I. The author's detailed, energetic text shows an enormous amount of serious study of a complex dynasty still in question to the present day. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, faculty, specialists. --Andrew Mark Mayer, College of Staten Island

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

THE STORY of the Romanov dynasty began in 1613 with Michael Romanov, chosen as Russia's czar in the Time of Troubles, and ended in 1918 with Alexei Romanov, shot alongside his parents and sisters in the basement of a house in the Urals. During the three turbulent centuries that separated these two "fragile, innocent and ailing" boys, the dynasty produced 20 monarchs and several regents, including two rulers of genius - Peter and Catherine, the "Greats." The czars wielded absolute power and led lives that were truly extraordinary, larger than other lives, consecrated by the mystical mission, the sacred compact between the ruler and Russia - the compact whose roots went deep into the medieval land of peasants and rituals, of myth and religion, of Byzantine icons and golden eagles, yet which survived, virtually unchanged, into the 20 th century, until swept away by the revolution. In his mammoth 744-page opus, "The Romanovs," Simon Sebag Montefiore, the eminent biographer of Joseph Stalin and Grigory Potemkin, covers the entire dynasty, from its rise to its apogee to its fall - an enterprise that has been accomplished only twice before, for reasons that become apparent just pages into the volume: It takes true historical daring to tackle such an immense subject. The Romanovs inhabited a world of turmoil and excess, "a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands,... barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy," and more and more. Endless visions of horror, splendor and absurdity - chopped-off heads soaked in vodka and courtiers traveling with their own portable gardens, children roasted and eaten in pogroms and wedding palaces carved out of ice, courtiers made to dress as chickens and sit clucking for hours and carriages pulled by bears - crowd one another so closely that the sheer concentration of history can become overwhelming. So dense is the material, in fact, that a single page bears the accounts of Czar Alexei's courtship and marriage, a conspiracy involving accusations of sorcery, the birth of Peter the Great, the Cossack uprising of Stenka Razin complete with Razin's gruesome execution, and a governmental reshuffle thrown into a footnote; and such pages are far from rare. (The footnotes, incidentally, contain some of the liveliest details, so readers are well advised not to skip them.) The backbone of the narrative, the theme that underlies the wealth of information, is the nature of autocracy, with its daily power struggles, succession troubles, assassination attempts, plots and rebellions. Montefiore describes his work as "a study of character and the distorting effect of absolute power on personality," "a family story of love, marriage, adultery and children" made "extraordinary because power both sweetens and contaminates the traditional familial chemistry." Other themes run through the book as well - the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities and the role of chance in history among them - but the author's investigation into the nature of power, "that mysterious, invisible alchemy of personality, fear and authority," remains his foremost concern. His insights tend to be pithy and sharp. "The vanishing of royal children at the hands of power-hungry relatives has a fitting way of destroying the very power they seek," he says of the murky death of Ivan the Terrible's youngest son, Dmitri. "As an autocrat becomes older, the struggle for influence intensifies, which in turn makes the sovereign more suspicious and therefore more dangerous," he comments on the reign of Anna, while the assassination of Paul elicits an aside: "A fortress is only as safe as the men who guard it." Coming from the notable historian of Stalin, such aphorisms carry much weight. One may wish for more of them, as well as more overall context, more grounding of the events in the general cultural and economic climate, which is touched upon infrequently and briefly. But, perhaps inevitably in a study so concentrated, Montefiore's approach favors facts over analysis and atmosphere. The facts themselves, many of them results of original research, are fascinating enough to speak for themselves, although there are occasional dry patches. Wars tend to become chronological lists of commanders replaced, troops moved, fortresses taken and lost, as the same players - Sweden, Poland, the Ottomans, later Prussia, France, Britain - jostle for prominence on the great chessboard of Europe and later the world. Discussions of interior policy at times resemble a relentless parade of back-stabbing courtiers rewarded, dismissed, executed, pardoned, with complex plots and alliances made doubly obscure by complicated family connections, until one can sympathize with the loutish Alexander III, who was prone to shouting, "As for the ministers, the Devil take them." Montefiore's novelistic gift of drawing vivid characters with a few choice words never fails him - a greedy favorite is likened to the "shark that can clean its gills only by eating more," while an official is described as "snoozing astride foreign policy like a somnolent, sickly sloth" ; but, given the encyclopedic nature of the work, minor personalities come and go abruptly, and their individual time on the stage is simply too brief to make them distinguishable. The main portraits, on the other hand, are invariably memorable. Here is the red-bearded giant Alexei habitually tossing trussed-up boyars into a freezing river as punishment for their oversleeping his dawn church services; or Peter the Great having a beautiful ex-lover beheaded, then lifting her bloodied head, kissing it on the lips and lecturing the crowd on the windpipe and arteries; or the "Russian Venus" Elizaveta banning her ladies from wearing her favorite color, pink, then punishing a beauty who dared to wear a pink rose in her hair by having her tongue ripped out at a scaffold; or Catherine the Great, in the midst of a predawn revolution that would make her the ruler of Russia, commandeering a French hairdresser to fix her hair ("always important in a coup," notes the author with a rare flash of humor). The rulers' characters are further enriched by generous quotations from primary sources, including their own letters and diaries. (Peter is forceful and blunt: "Time is death." Catherine is cautious and manipulative: "One must do things in such a way that people think they themselves want it to be done this way.") When the story moves into the 19th century, the age of the three Alexanders and the two Nicholases, the narrative slows down somewhat, taken over by military maneuvers and royal love affairs; yet there is always plenty of interest to keep one's attention, until, at the turn of the 20th century, the drama intensifies once again as the story reaches the dark sweep of its spellbinding last chapters. GIVEN THE PROFUSION of scandalous events and characters like Nicholas II and Rasputin who have passed from history into myth, it can be a challenge to keep the tone objective, and here Montefiore succeeds with seeming ease, offering a scholar's well-balanced perspective on some of the more notorious episodes. He dispels the myth of Catherine the Great as the "nymphomaniac of legend," downplays the possibility that Alexander I faked his own death and casually drops a number of bombshells that remain, appropriately, unexploded; for instance, Catherine, wife of Peter III, claimed that their heir, the future Paul I, born in 1754, was in actuality her lover's son, prompting a single matter-of-fact comment: "which would make the entire dynasty down to 1917 Saltykov, not Romanov." The account remains even-keeled throughout, and the last years of the dynasty especially are treated with a restraint and objectivity for which one is grateful. Overall, while not the easiest introduction to the subject, this monumental work is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in Russian history and the doomed dynasty of Romanovs, "blood-spattered, gold-plated, diamond-studded, swash-buckled, bodice-ripping and star-crossed." OLGA GRUSHIN'S latest novel, "Forty Rooms," was published in February.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 16, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The Romanov family of Russia, along with the Bourbons of France and Spain, the Hapsburgs of Austria (and other assorted territories), and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, were a clan of great consequence not only in their homeland but also as movers on the European stage. This greatly impressive history of the Romanov family by distinguished and best-selling historian Montefiore (Jerusalem, 2011; Young Stalin, 2007) is at once comprehensive and dynamic. From the teenage Mikhail Romanov's election by the boyar class to the position of czar, which drew Russia out of the chaotic Time of Troubles, to the horrible 1918 execution of the imperial family as an excessive byproduct of the Bolshevik revolution which brought down the czarist regime, Montefiore lets each sovereign exhibit, in telling detail, his or her distinctive qualities while he judiciously weighs their strengths and weaknesses against the turbulence that has been the hallmark of czarist Russian history. The chapters on Peter the Great and Nicholas II stand out as particularly discerning in this major work.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Montefiore (Jerusalem: The Biography), a popular novelist and historian of Russia, describes this extensive account of the rise and fall of the Romanov dynasty as a "blood-spattered, gold-plated, diamond-studded, swash-buckled, bodice-ripping, and star-crossed... chronicle[s] of fathers and sons, megalomaniacs, monsters, and saints." But it also reveals the author's imaginative gift for storytelling and research acumen. From the Romanov dynasty's inauspicious beginnings in a remote monastery to its violent end in a provincial basement, the family held the Russian crown for just over three centuries, dramatically expanding Russia's borders and laying the groundwork for what would become the U.S.S.R. and the modern Russian Federation. Montefiore addresses questions of great import as well as more prosaic but equally illuminating details of life in the Romanov regime, examining, for instance, how Catherine the Great went from being "a regicidal, uxoricidal German usurper" to becoming one of Russia's most successful rulers and "the darling of the philosophes." Echoes of history resonate through the pages and shed light on the ruthless and autocratic tendencies that have remained salient elements of Russian politics. Montefiore's compassionate and incisive portraits of the Romanov rulers and their retinues, his liberal usage of contemporary diaries and correspondence, and his flair for the dramatic produce a narrative that effortlessly holds the reader's interest and attention despite its imposing length. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Historian Montefiore (humanities, Univ. of Buckingham; Jerusalem: The Biography) delivers an impressive telling of the Romanov autocratic dynasty in Russia. Covering all Russian rulers between 1613 and 1918, as well as spouses, lovers, confidantes, statesmen, other world leaders, and major conflicts during that time period, this massive volume fills in gaps of Romanov history. There is more of a focus on rulers such as Peter the Great (r. 1682-1721) and Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96) because of their long and accomplished reigns. The book is divided into a prolog, three separate acts, and an epilog. Each "act" begins with a list of characters and a visual family tree to help readers keep track of the multitude of names and titles. Montefiore concludes with a lengthy section of notes (plus footnotes throughout) and a useful index. VERDICT Finishing this hefty read will take effort, but the reward is worth the time. Fans of Russian and world history, those who enjoyed the author's previous works, and anyone interested in royal intrigue and betrayal will find great pleasure here. [See Prepub Alert, 11/9/15.]-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A lively work illustrating the personalities, sensuality, and steely wills of the long line of Russian rulers. Master British biographer Montefiore (Jerusalem: The Biography, 2011, etc.) presents a staggeringly ambitious work of scholarship and temerity: taking on the Romanov rulers over their 300-year reign. He begins with the medieval Romanov boy aristocrat who was crowned Michael I of Muscovy in 1613Ivan the Terrible hailed from the Rurikids dynasty and ruled in the mid-16th centuryto the last czar, Michael II, the brother of Alexander II, who reigned for one day on March 1, 1917, before being forced by the Bolsheviks to abdicate like his older brother. Sticking close to personal records and primary archives, the author gives each of these 20-some rulers (and their spouses) roughly the same space, yet inevitably the last long-reigning czar, Nicolas II, becomes the most compelling and fully fleshed, especially as his wife, Alexandra, ultimately shared his throne, politics, and tragic fate during the Russian Revolution. In his masterly biographical portraits, Montefiore emphasizes what binds each of these Russian rulers, male or female: namely, the sense of an entitlement to "sacred autocracy" and of a "mystical mission" without being encumbered by the tempering "independent assemblies and civil institutions" that developed in Western nation-states. The author tosses in plenty of detail to fully bring to life each ruler. One of the most intriguing is the "freakishly tall," high-strung, hard-drinking, brilliantly industrious Peter the Great, who achieved an apogee of rule by military success and sheer drive, leaving his crown's succession to his beloved wife, the capable former Lithuanian laundress. Also leaping from the page is Catherine the Great, the enlightened ruler who happened to come to power by the murder of the legitimate successor. The violence of jealously guarding power knows no bounds in this spirited account of sycophants and bedfellows. A magisterial portrayal of these "megalomaniacs, monsters and saints" as eminently human and fallible. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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ACT I THE RISE SCENE 1 The Brideshows CAST THE LAST OF THE RURIKID TSARS IVAN THE TERRIBLE 1547-84 Anastasia Romanovna Zakharina-Yurieva, his first tsarina Ivan Ivanovich, their eldest son and heir, murdered by his father FYODOR I, their second son, tsar 1584-98 Dmitri Ivanovich, Ivan the Terrible's last son, mysteriously killed. Identity assumed by three impostors, the False Dmitris THE TIME OF TROUBLES: tsars and pretenders BORIS GODUNOV, tsar 1598-1605 THE FALSE DMITRI, tsar 1605-6 VASILY SHUISKY, tsar 1606-10 Second False Dmitri, known as the "Brigand of Tushino" Ivan Dmitrievich, the "Baby Brigand" Marina Mniszech, daughter of a Polish nobleman, wife of the First False Dmitri, Second False Dmitri and Ivan Zarutsky, mother of the Baby Brigand, known as "Marinka the Witch" Warlords Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, hero of the resistance Kuzma Minin, merchant of Nizhny Novgorod, leader of the resistance Prince Dmitri Trubetskoi, aristocrat and leader of Cossacks Foreign invaders King Sigismund III of Poland Prince Władysław of Poland, later king Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden THE FIRST OF THE ROMANOVS Nikita Romanovich Zakharin-Yuriev, brother of Anastasia, first wife of Ivan the Terrible His son Fyodor Nikitich Romanov, later the priest Filaret Ksenia Shestova, later the Nun Martha, Fyodor's wife Their son, MICHAEL, the first Romanov tsar, 1613-45 Ivan Romanov, Fyodor's brother, Michael's uncle, boyar Anna Khlopova, Michael's first fiancée Maria Dolgorukaya, his first wife Eudoxia Streshneva, his second wife Irina, tsarevna, daughter of Michael and Eudoxia ALEXEI, son and heir of Michael and Eudoxia, tsar 1645-76 COURTIERS: ministers etc. Fyodor Sheremetev, Romanov cousin, boyar and chief minister Mikhail Saltykov, Romanov cousin, royal cupbearer and armsbearer Prince Ivan Cherkassky, Romanov cousin of Circassian descent, boyar Prince Dmitri Cherkassky, Romanov cousin of Circassian descent, boyar Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, patriotic warlord, later boyar and chief commander Prince Dmitri Trubetskoi, aristocrat and Cossack warlord, candidate for tsar Michael was in no rush to proceed to Moscow, but Moscow was desperate for him to arrive. In the civil war, the contestants for supremacy--aristocratic magnates, foreign kings, Cossack chieftains, impostors and adventurers--had fought their way towards Moscow, hungry to seize the crown. But Michael Romanov and the Nun Martha were unenthusiastic. There has never been a more miserable, whining and melancholic procession to a throne. But the plight of Russia early in 1613 was dire, its trauma dystopian. The territory between Kostroma and Moscow was dangerous; Michael would pass through villages where dead bodies lay strewn in the streets. Russia was far smaller than the Russian Federation today; its border with Sweden in the north was close to Novgorod, that with Poland-Lithuania close to Smolensk, much of Siberia in the east was unconquered, and most of the south was still the territory of the khanate of the Tatars. But it was still a vast territory with around 14 million people, compared to about 4 million in England at the time. Yet Russia had almost disintegrated; famine and war had culled its population; the Poles were still hunting the boy-tsar; Swedish and Polish-Lithuanian armies were massing to advance into Russia; Cossack warlords ruled swathes of the south, harbouring pretenders to the throne; there was no money, the crown jewels had been looted; the Kremlin palaces were ruined. The transformation of Michael's life must have been convulsive: the court of a tsar had to be reconstructed, courtier by courtier, silver spoon by silver spoon, diamond by diamond. He and his mother were undoubtedly terrified of what awaited them in the capital and they had every reason to be anxious. Yet now this teenager of an untitled noble family, whose father was lost in a foreign prison, found greatness thrust upon him, a greatness that he owed, above all, to the family's first patron, Ivan the Terrible. Thirty years after his death, Ivan still cast his dread shadow over Russia and the boy Michael. Ivan had expanded the Russian empire--and almost destroyed it from within. He had first boosted its splendour and then poisoned it--a fifty-year reign of triumph and madness. But his first and favourite wife, the mother of his first brood of sons, was a Romanov--and the founder of the family's fortunes. Ivan himself was the scion of a royal family descended from Rurik, a semi-mythical Scandinavian prince who, in 862, was invited by Slavs and other local tribes to rule them, becoming the founder of the first Russian dynasty. In 988, Rurik's descendant Vladimir, grand prince of Rus, converted to Orthodoxy in Crimea under the authority of the Byzantine emperor and patriarch. His loose confederation of principalities, known as Kievan Rus, bound together by the Rurik dynasty, would ultimately extend almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But between 1238 and 1240 it was shattered by the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan and his family who, during their two centuries of Russian dominion, allowed Rurikid princes to rule small principalities as vassals. The Mongols' view of a single universal emperor under God and their brutally arbitrary judicial decisions may have contributed to the Russian idea of autocracy. There was much mingling and marriage with the Mongols; many famous Russian families were descended from them. Gradually the Russian princes started to challenge Mongol authority: Ivan III the Great, grand prince of Moscow, had collected many of the Russian cities, particularly the republic of Great Novgorod in the north and Rostov in the south, under the Muscovite crown and in 1480 he decisively confronted the Mongol khans. After the fall of Byzantium to the Islamic Ottomans, he claimed the mantle of leadership of Orthodoxy. Ivan married the last Byzantine emperor's niece, Sophia Paleologue, which allowed him to present himself as heir to the emperors. Ivan the Great started to style himself "Caesar," which was russianized into "Tsar," his new imperial status allowing his monkish propagandists to assert that he was regathering the territories of Rus. His son Vasily III continued his work, but Vasily's son predeceased him so it was his grandson Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible as he became, who succeeded to the throne as a toddler. His mother may have been poisoned and the child was traumatized when the rivalries of courtiers erupted into violence, growing up to be as magnetic, dynamic and imaginative as he was volatile and unpredictable. At his coronation in 1547, when he was sixteen, Ivan was the first grand prince to be crowned tsar. The young autocrat had already launched his ritual search for a wife. In a tradition that derived from both of the precursors of tsardom--Mongol khans and the Byzantine emperors--he called a brideshow. Every choice of royal bride raised new clans to power and destroyed others. The brideshow was designed to diminish such turbulence by virtue of the tsar's deliberate choice of a girl from the middle gentry. Five hundred virgins were summoned from throughout his realm for this Renaissance beauty-contest, which was won by a girl named Anastasia Romanovna Zakharina-Yurieva, the great-aunt of the boy Michael. The daughter of the minor branch of a clan that was already at court, Anastasia was ideal, thanks to her combining a safe distance from influential potentates with a comforting familiarity. Ivan knew her already since her uncle had been one of his guardians. She was descended from Andrei Kobyla, whom the grand prince had promoted to the rank of boyar in 1346-7, but her branch of the family stemmed from his fourth son, the boyar Fyodor, who was called Koshka--"the Cat." Each generation was known by the name of the male in the generation before, so the Cat's children were dubbed the Koshkins, an appropriate designation given the Romanov family's feline gifts for survival. Anastasia's great-grandfather, Zakhar, and her grandfather, Yuri, were boyars, but her father Roman died young. However, he gave his name to the Romanovichi, who would become known as the Romanovs. Soon after the coronation, on 2 February 1547, Ivan married Anastasia. The marriage was a success. She gave him six children of whom two male heirs survived, Ivan and Fyodor, and she had the gift of being able to calm his manic temperament. Yet he still exhausted her with his unpredictable frenzies and constant travels. At first his reign prospered: he marched south-eastwards on a Christian Orthodox crusade to defeat the Islamic Tatars, the descendants of Genghis Khan who were now divided into smaller khanates. First he conquered the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan--triumphs he celebrated by building St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square; he despatched merchant adventurers and Cossack buccaneers to begin the conquest of vast, rich Siberia; he brought in European experts and merchants to modernize Muscovy and fought the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania to control the rich cities of the Baltic. But it was to be a long war which undermined the sanity of the tsar and the loyalty of his overmighty grandees, many of whom had their own links to the Poles. At the same time, he was often at war with the other regional power, the khanate of the Crimean Tatars to the south. In 1553, Ivan fell ill. His wife's brother Nikita Romanovich tried to persuade the courtiers to swear allegiance to the tsar's baby son--but they refused, because they favoured his adult cousin, Prince Vladimir of Staritsa. The tsar recovered but emerged fixated on the treachery of his nobles and the independent allegiances of Prince Vladimir and the other magnates. In 1560, Anastasia died at the age of twenty-nine. Ivan was distraught, convinced she had been poisoned by hostile grandees. She may indeed have been poisoned, but she may just as easily have died of a disease or well-intentioned medicine. Either way, the defections and intrigues of his own magnates now sent Ivan into a spiral of violence: he suddenly withdrew from Moscow to a provincial stronghold whence he divided the realm between his private fief, the Separateness--Oprichnina--and the rest of the country. He unleashed a fearsome corps of black-clad upstart henchmen, the oprichniki, who astride black horses decorated with brooms and dog's heads, to symbolize incorruptibility and ferocious loyalty, launched a reign of terror. As Ivan lurched between spasms of killing, praying and fornication, no one was safe. His instability was exacerbated by the fragility of his dynasty: only his son Ivan seemed likely to survive to adulthood since the youngest Fyodor was not strong. It was essential to marry again--which became an obsession like that of his contemporary Henry VIII. While he sought foreign brides, a princess from the dynasty ruling Sweden and Poland in the hope of winning the Polish throne, and an Englishwoman, possibly even Elizabeth I herself, Ivan worked his way through as many as eight wives, three of whom may have been poisoned, and some of whom may have been murdered on his own orders. When his second wife, a Tatar princess, died in 1569, another suspected victim of poisoning, he went berserk, purging his own ministers, cutting off noses and genitals, then descending with a posse of dog-headed oprichniki on to the cities of Tver and Novgorod, killing virtually their entire populations, treating victims with boiling then frozen water, hanging them from hooks inserted through their ribs, roping women and children together and pushing them under the ice. Taking advantage of Ivan's demented distractions, the Tatar khan captured and burned Moscow. After the oprichniki had done his bidding, Ivan reunited the tsardom but then abdicated and appointed a Tatar khan's son, converted to Christianity, as grand prince of Russia before taking back the throne. There was some method in the madness: Ivan's cruelties broke the power of the territorial magnates--even though they were garnished with the personal sadism of his diabolical idiosyncrasy. Anastasia's brother Nikita Romanovich remained the uncle of the heirs to the throne, but the Romanovs were no safer than anyone else from the tsar. In 1575, at least one Romanov was killed and Nikita's lands ravaged. At a brideshow in September 1580, Ivan chose a new wife, Maria Nagaya, who gave him the son, Dmitri, that he craved. Yet, in 1581, in a rage he killed his own eldest son by Anastasia, Ivan, driving his iron-tipped staff into the boy's head, the awful climax of his reign. He had already debased Russia, but now he condemned it to chaos for the heirs to the throne were his other son by Anastasia, the weak and simple-minded Fyodor--and the baby Dmitri. On Ivan the Terrible's death in 1584, Nikita Romanovich helped ensure the succession of his nephew Fyodor I. But Nikita died soon afterwards and his influence was inherited by his son Fyodor Nikitich Romanov, future father of Michael. Tsar Fyodor left the ruling to his able minister Boris Godunov, who had risen as one of Ivan's oprichniki and now consolidated his power by marrying his sister to the tsar. The last Rurikid heir was Ivan's youngest son, the eight-year-old Dmitri, who now vanished from the scene. He officially died from a knife wound to the throat, self-inflicted during an epileptic fit. This would have been such a freak accident it may actually have happened, but inevitably many believed he had either been assassinated by Godunov--or been spirited away to safety. When Tsar Fyodor died childless in 1598, the Muscovite line of the Rurikid dynasty was extinct. There were two candidates for the throne--Fyodor's minister and brother-in-law Boris Godunov, and Fyodor Romanov, eldest nephew of the late Tsarina Anastasia, and son of Nikita Romanovich, who was known as the best-dressed boyar at court. Fyodor Romanov married Ksenia Shestova, but of their six children, including four sons, only one daughter and one son survived: the future Tsar Michael was born in 1596 and was probably raised in a mansion near Red Square on Varvarka Street. He was showered with gifts but his childhood was not stable for long. Godunov was elected tsar by an Assembly of the Land, so he was the nearest thing to a legitimate ruler after the extinction of the rightful dynasty, and he was initially backed by Fyodor Romanov. Godunov was gifted, but luck is essential in politics and he was unlucky. His enduring achievement took place on his eastern borders, where his Cossack adventurers managed to conquer the khanate of Sibr, opening up the vastness of Siberia. But Russia herself suffered famine and disease, while Boris's own illness undermined his tenuous authority. Fyodor Romanov, whose intrigues and escapes displayed all the agility of his cat-like ancestors, helped spread the fatal rumours that Ivan the Terrible's late son Dmitri had escaped and was still alive. A showdown was nearing, and the Romanovs brought military retainers into Moscow. When Michael Romanov was only five, his world was destroyed. In 1600, Godunov pounced on Fyodor and his four brothers, who were accused of treason and sorcery; their servants testified under torture to their practice of witchcraft and stashes of "poisonous herbs." Tsar Boris burned down one of their palaces, confiscated their estates and exiled them to the Arctic. To ensure that Fyodor Romanov could never be tsar, he was forced to take holy orders, under a new priestly name Filaret, while his wife became the Nun Martha. Michael was sent to live with his aunt, the wife of his uncle Alexander Romanov, in the remote village of Belozersk. He remained there for fifteen frightening months before he and his aunt were allowed to move to a Romanov estate fifty miles from Moscow. Three of the five Romanov brothers were liquidated or died mysteriously. "Tsar Boris got rid of us all," Filaret remembered later. "He had me tonsured, killed three of my brothers, ordering them strangled. I now only had one brother Ivan left." Godunov could not kill all of the Romanovs, with their special connections to the Rurikid tsars, not after the murky demise of Tsarevich Dmitri. The vanishing of royal children at the hands of power-hungry relatives has a fitting way of destroying the very power they seek. Excerpted from The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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