the Romanovs: Three Centuries of Power and Family That Lost It

Three hundred years after an assembly of delegates elected an absent sixteen-year-old to the throne of a ruined country, the Romanov dynasty ended in a railway carriage at Pskov and, sixteen months later, in a cellar in the Urals. This book explains how one family became the constitution of a state, and why nothing was left to defend the state when the family fell.Walter Selby follows eighteen sovereigns from 1613 to 1917. Among them are the boy elected out of the Time of Troubles, the tsar who broke the old Moscow order and taxed the villages to pay for it, the German princess who took the crown from her husband, the emperor who freed twenty-three million serfs and was killed by a bomb on a Petersburg canal twenty years later, and the last tsar, who went on believing that the country loved him while the capital ran out of bread.The account runs through the machinery as much as the personalities. Succession law, the guards regiments, the court household, the serf economy, the borderlands of many peoples, the war ministry, and the police files get the same attention as the marriages and the murders. Legend is separated from evidence wherever the two are usually confused, from the death of Alexander I to the night in Ekaterinburg, and where the sources disagree the disagreement is reported.The result is an unsentimental history of the longest autocracy in modern Europe, written for readers who want the record, not the romance.