The Romanovs

In 1914 the Romanov Family had just competed the celebration of its 300th year on the Russian Throne. It had been a turbulent and often bizarre 3 centuries. Geniuses and degenerates had worn the crown by turns, with strong women succeeding weak men. There had been royal murders and assassinations, questions about whether a Tsar who was presumably dead and buried had actually died at all, and enough sexual irregularity to make it uncertain whether the Romanovs of the 20th Century were even related to the founders of the dynasty.

By fits and starts. Russia changed from a remote and exotic Eastern Kingdom into one of Europe's dominating powers-still only half modern still not entirely European, but an Empire of immerse wealth reaching from Poland to the Pacific Ocean.

By 1914 the Romanovs had be stable and respectable for 5 generations. The reigning Tsar, Nicholas II, was far more virtuous man than his predecessors, but unfortunately he was far weaker than the best of them. The 1st Romanov Tsar was Micheal, crowned in 1613 when he was 16. He was given the crown only because Russia's previous royal family died out; and with 15 years of nothing but leaderless disorder, the country's most powerful factions were desperate for stability; and no better choice was available. Micheal's blood was not quite royal, but close enough, his Aunt Anastasia, his father's sister, had been the beloved 1st wife of Ivan The Terrible, and the mother of the last Tsar in Ivan's line.

The grief over her death is suppose to be the reason he turned into a homicidal maniac of inconceivable savagery. After this the Romanovs didn't burst onto the European scene until almost a century later, when Peter the Great became Tsar. He was a gigantic figure in every way; more than 6 1/2 feet tall, immensely strong, infinitely energetic, violent, a reformer of everything. But was a very ruthless tyrant.

He had become so determined to force Russia into the modern Western World, that he moved its capital from Moscow to some swampy piece of wilderness on the coast of the Baltic Sea. He built a magnificent new city that was laced with canals and became known as the Venice of the North. He name it St. Petersburg, because that was more Western than the Russian equivalent, Petrograd. There was nothing that he wasn't determined to change, and when his ministers weren't quick enough in doing wdhat he wanted, he would lash even the most exalted of them with his stick. He forced the mean of Russia to shave their beards and adopt Western dress; He modernized the government and the military. He conquered and developed seaports not only on the Baltic but on the Black Sea, beginning the long process of pushing the Ottoman Turks southward, back toward their capital of Constantinople. By the time of his death in 1725, he had transformed Russia into a major player among the nations of the world.

As a young man Peter had married a woman from the Russian nobility, but he soon found her tedious and eventually sent her to a convent. He replace her with a mistress, a Lutheran girl named Marta who begun her life as a humbly born orphan in Latvia. She had became a prisoner when an invading Russia army captured her hometown. She was give to a man who happened to be close to Peter, and was then taken back to St. Petersburg, where she was discovered by Tsar. Marta and Peter had 12 children together(only 2, both of them daughters, survived to adulthood), and she came to be the one person in whom he had complete confidence. She was christened in the Orthodox faith and give the name Catherine, and was married to Peter in 1712, when she was 28 and he 50. Peter had her crowned his Empress consort in 1724(Peter was the 1st Tsar to call himself Emperor), and upon Peter's death she was proclaimed Empress Catherine I in her own right. Her career has to be considered among the more remarkable in history.

The story becomes fuzzy in the years following Catherine's death. The Romanovs become extinct in the male line(Peter had his heir, a son by his 1st wife, but tortured him until he died), and in time the crown went ta an obscure German Princeling whose mother had been Peter's and Catherine's daughter. This new Tsar, Peter III, was nothing but a drunk, a fool and sexually impotent, and an ardent admirer of Russia's enemy Frederick the Great of Prussia. The only reason he matters in history, is because before becoming Tsar, he had married a 15 year old German Princess-another Catherine, as it happened-who quickly succeeded him on the throne.(Plotters from the army, in collusion with this 2nd Catherine, murdered him less than a year after his coronation). She became Catherine the Great, the 2nd monumental figure of the Romanov Era. She was a physically tiny woman whose appetites and ambitions equaled those of Peter the Great. She became more Russian than the Russians, and during her 34 year reign, the empire expanded tremendously and again was prodded along the road to modernization. Just like Peter the Great, she reached out to the West.

She corresponded with such enlightened giants as Voltaire and Diderot. She brung John Paul Jones from the New World to take command of her Black Sea Fleet and use it against the Turks. It was with Catherine that the Russians began to aspire seriously to the road of patron of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. And under Catherine, they 1st dreamed of driving the Turks out of Constantinople. Like Peter the Great and many of her other descendants, Catherine was a perplexing mixture of reformer and tyrant. She was a woman of intellect and cultivation. She also had many lovers before her husband passed and it was questioned whether or not her son was actually son of Peter III.

Now Catherine had no confidence in her son Paul, in fact, she despised him. So she took charge of raising Paul's sons, especially the eldest, Alexander. She carefully supervised his preparation for the throne. When Catherine died, Paul succeeded, but was murdered just as his father Peter III-assuming he was his father. He was then succeeded, as Catherine had planned, by the tall, handsome, and intelligent young Alexander I.

In what would become a Romanov pattern, Tsar Alexander began his reign as a reformer of whom great things where expected. his 1st 15 years on the throne were turbulent in the extreme, with Napoleon marching his enemies up and down Europe and finally occupying and burning Moscow. It fell to Alexander to save Russia and his dynasty, and he succeeded brilliantly. In the end he out waited and outwitted the French Emperor. At one point he even pretended to consider offering his sister to Napolean, though in fact giving a Romanov Princess to such an upstart was unthinkable. But Napolean took an Austrian bride(it seems the mighty Hapsburgs turned out to be more submissive than Alexander) and was driven into exile. Shortly after, Alexander restored the old order.

Intriguing questions hang over the death of Alexander. In 1825, childless and at the peak of his power, he was suddenly reported to have died in a town where he had been staying far from the capital. When his coffin arrived in St. Petersburg, his brothers refused to open it, even though rumors where flying around that he didn't die at all. Everyone was saying that he had withdrawn to a monastery in Siberia to spend the rest of his life in contemplation. But nothing was ever proven if he did or not.

But towards the end of the 20th century, his coffin was finally opened and it was empty. And since Alexander had no kids, the throne was passed to his brother Constantine, but he turned it down, so it was then passed onto a much younger brother Nicholas I. He would prove to be a worthless ruler, he had no ephemeral reforming instincts, was a reactionary in all ways from the start. When he died in 1855, he was known as the man who had frozen Russia for 30 years. Now his son Alexander II was also conservative but more intelligent and therefore able to understand the need for change. He began his career as a reformer and even something of an idealist, abolishing the serfdom that had long been the shame of Russia. Gradually he too went in the direction of reaction and repression, taking such severe measures against a movement of young reformers that some became bomb-throwing radicals. In the last few years of his life in the throne, they were repeated attempts on his life, but Alexander never completely abandoned his efforts to move Russia closer if not quite into the modern world. In 1881, shortly after he had approved the creation of a parliament like body that was to be allowed to advise on legislation without actually passing laws, a young pole threw a bomb and blew him apart.

Barely alive, he was taken back to the palace where he died, horribly in the presence of his family, including his eldest son who then became Alexander III, and the latter's eldest son, 13 year old Nicholas. He was the 3rd Tsar to be murdered in 6 generations. He dedicated himself to reversing as many of his father's reformers as possible(a restoration of serfdom was not among the possibilities), refusing any innovations that might reduce the power of the Romanovs, and he clamped down in an almost totalitarian fashion on every form of dissent. Newspapers were not even allowed to print the word constitution.

Alexander III's son Nicholas was unlike his father in almost every respect; physically slight, something of a playboy in his youth, though in fairly innocent ways, and utterly lacking in self-confidence. He was given the same tutor as his father, Constantine Pobedonostsev, known as the High Priest of Social Stagnation. Nicholas learned that it was not only the Tsar's right but his sacred duty to be a strong father to all the Russians, to yield power to no one. But Nicholas has absolutely no wish to succeed the throne. But there had been no cause for worry on that score for Nicholas, who in 1894 was in his mid 20's and marrying Princess Alex of Hesse-Darmstadt, to which his parents weren't pleased. But his father Alexander III was not yet 50 and was a fountain of vitality. And would seem he would rule another 20 years or more, so Nicholas was never prepared to take the throne and all responsibilities that went with it.

But Alexander's III's health went into a swift decline-the problem was diagnosed as nephritis and soon died. his heir Nicholas went into total panic, he was never taught a prepared to be Tsar. He knew nothing of how to rule or make decisions. And in his own words "I have no ides how to even talk to the minister".