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

The nexus for this alliance was the court, an entrepôt of prizes, a club of glamour and majesty, where supposedly lightweight empresses, such as Anna and Elizaveta, proved especially adept at finessing the relationship with their swaggering magnates. This partnership thrived until the Crimean War in the 1850s when the old regime somehow had to be converted into a viable modern state. The struggle abroad required the Romanov empire to compete in a relentless geopolitical tournament of power with Britain, Germany, Japan and America, whose wealth and technology far outstripped those of Russia. Russia's potential could be unlocked only by reforming peasant landownership, by breakneck industrialization based on Western credit and by broadening political participation and dismantling the corrupt, repressive autocracy, something the last two Romanovs, Alexander III and Nicholas II, were ideologically incapable of doing. They faced a conundrum: how to maintain their vast borders, while projecting a power proportionate to their imperial pretensions from a backward society. If they failed abroad, they lost their legitimacy at home. The more they failed at home, the less they could afford to play the empire abroad. If they bluffed and were exposed, they either had to retreat humiliatingly, or fight and risk revolutionary catastrophe.

It is unlikely that even Peter or Catherine could have solved the predicaments of revolution and world war faced by Nicholas II in the early twentieth century, but it was unfortunate that the Romanov who faced the darkest crises was the least capable and most narrow-minded, as well as the unluckiest. Nicholas was both a poor judge of men and unwilling to delegate. While he could not fill the role of autocrat himself, he used his power to make sure no one else did either.

The very success of the old ways until the 1850s made it all the harder to change. Just as the radical and murderous culture of the Soviet Union can be understood only through Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology, so the often bizarre, daft and self-defeating trajectory of the last Romanovs can be understood only through their ideology: sacred autocracy. This ultimately distorted the monarchy, becoming an end in itself, an obstacle to the running of a modern state: the impossible conundrum here was to attract able politicians and to widen participation in the regime without losing its outdated pillars, nobility and church— what Trotsky called the world of "icons and cockroaches."

After all, the epochs of the Great Dictators of the 1920s and 1930s, and the new autocracies of the early twenty-first century, show that there is nothing incompatible about modernity and authoritarianism— even in today's world of the internet and twenty-four-hour news. It was the character of tsarist monarchy and Russian society that made it unworkable. The solutions were not as simple as they now appear with the aid of hindsight, magnified by smug Western superiority. As the reformer Alexander II learned, "a king's lot," in the words of Marcus Aurelius, was "to do good and be damned." Western historians scold the last two tsars for failing to institute immediate democracy. This could be a delusion: such radical surgery might simply have killed the patient much earlier.

The fate of the Romanov family was unbearably cruel and is often presented as inevitable, but it is worth remembering that such was the strength of the monarchy that Nicholas II ruled for twenty-two years— his first ten moderately successfully— and he survived defeat, revolutionary ferment and three years of world war. The February Revolution of 1917 destroyed the monarchy but the family were not doomed until October when they fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks, seven months after the abdication. Even then, Lenin contemplated different scenarios before presiding over that atrocious crime: the slaughter of parents and innocent children. Nothing in history is inevitable.

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.