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.

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

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.

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.

*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

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.