Excerpt from The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The decision of individuals often redirected Russia, though rarely in the way intended. To paraphrase the Prussian field-marshal Helmuth von Moltke, political "plans rarely survive the first contact with the enemy." Accidents, friction, personalities and luck, all bounded by the practicalities of guns and butter, are the real landscape of politics. As the Romanovs' greatest minister Potemkin reflected, the politician of any state must not just react to contingencies, he must "improve on events." Or, as Bismarck put it, "the statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past." So often the last Romanovs found themselves forlornly and obstinately trying to defy the march of history.

The believers in Russian autocracy were convinced that only an all-powerful individual blessed by God could project the effulgent majesty necessary to direct and overawe this multinational empire and manage the intricate interests of such a vast state. At the same time, the sovereign had to personify the sacred mission of Orthodox Christianity and give meaning to the special place of the Russian nation in world history. Since no man or woman could fulfil such duties alone, the art of delegation was an essential skill. The most tyrannical of the Romanovs, Peter the Great, was superb at finding and appointing talented retainers from all over Europe regardless of class or race, and it is no accident that Catherine the Great promoted not only Potemkin but also Suvorov, the outstanding commander of the Romanov era. Stalin, himself an adept chooser of subordinates, reflected that this was Catherine's superlative gift. The tsars sought ministers with the aptitude to rule and yet the autocrat was always expected to rule in his or her own right: a Romanov could never appoint a masterful Richelieu or Bismarck. Emperors had to be above politics— and be astute politicians too. If power was wisely delegated and broad advice considered, even a moderately gifted ruler could achieve much, though modern autocracy demanded as delicate a handling of complex issues as democratic politics today.

The tsar's contract with the people was peculiar to a primitive Russia of peasants and nobles, but it does bear some similarity to that of the twenty-first century Kremlin— glory abroad and security at home in return for the rule of one man and his court and their near-limitless enrichment. The contract had four components— religious, imperial, national and military. In the twentieth century, the last tsar still saw himself as the patrimonial lord of a personal estate— blessed by divine sanction. This had evolved: during the seventeenth century, patriarchs (the prelates of the Orthodox Church) could challenge the supremacy of tsars. After Peter the Great had dissolved the patriarchate, the dynasty could present itself as almost a theocracy. The autocracy was consecrated at the moment of anointment during coronations that presented the tsars as transcendent links between God and man. Only in Russia did the state, made up of dreary petty functionaries, become almost sacred in itself. But this also developed over time. Though much is made of the legacy of Byzantine emperors and Genghizid khans, there was nothing special in the sixteenth century about the status of tsars, who drew their charisma from the medieval royal Christology much like other European monarchs. But, unlike the rest of Europe, Russia did not develop independent assemblies and civil institutions, so its medieval status lasted much longer— right into the twentieth century, by which time it looked weirdly obsolete even in comparison to the court of the German kaisers. This mystical mission, which justified Romanov rule right up until 1917, explains much about the intransigent convictions of the last tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra.

The autocracy was legitimized by its ever-expanding multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire, yet the later emperors regarded themselves as the leaders first of the Russian nation but then of the entire Slavic community. The more they embraced Russian nationalism, the more they excluded (and often persecuted) their huge non-Russian populations, such as Poles, Georgians, Finns, and especially Jews. As the Jewish dairyman Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof joked, "God bless the tsar and keep him.?.?. far away from us." This contradiction between empire and nation was the source of many difficulties. The court of the Romanovs was a mixture of family estate office, Orthodox crusading order and military headquarters— characteristics that, in very different ways, explain some of the zeal and aggression of the Romanov successor-regimes, the Soviet Union and today's Russian Federation.

Excerpted from The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Copyright © 2016 by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.