Dan Snow's History Hit - The Romanovs

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

The Romanov family were the first imperial dynasty to rule Russia, reigning from the early seventeenth century until the Russian Revolution of 1917. Including such illustrious names as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Alexander I, they oversaw dramatic changes to the fabric of Russian society and culture. Through conquest and expansion, they carved out a Russian Empire and propelled their nation into great power status. The myth and memory of the Romanovs still permeate Russian identity and history today.Dan catches up with Orlando Figes, distinguished historian and an expert on Romanov Russia whose acclaimed books, including A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891 - 1924, help to shed light on this crucial portion of Russian history.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Talking about a little family, a little family business you may have heard of in this episode. They're called the Romanovs. They were, as you know, the last imperial dynasty to rule Russia. They were the figureheads from the early 17th century until the Russian Revolution of 1917, when they were forced from office, summoned into exile, any that remained in Russia were murdered. The family features a pretty extraordinary cast of characters. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander, well, a couple of Alexanders, Nicholas II. They presided over astonishing change in Russia,

both enormous imperial expansion across Asia, but also huge changes to the fabric and the culture of Russia itself. On the podcast, I've got Orlando Feige. He's the author of many wonderful books about Russian history. One that fired me up about history when I read it as a teenager, A People's Tragedy, The Russian Revolution. It tells us about the fall of the Romanovs and the catastrophe that engulfed Russia at the same time. Orlando talks to me all about how the Romanovs shaped Russian history, were shaped in turn by it, and how the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 affected the way that he looks at Russian history. All you need to know about one of history's most extraordinary families, folks,

right here. Enjoy. Orlando, thanks very much for coming back cleared the tower. Orlando, thanks very much for coming back on the podcast. You're very welcome. Where did these pesky Romanovs come from? Were they famous before they became Tsars? Not really, no. They came from, well, I wouldn't quite say obscurity, but they were sort of people who hadn't offended anybody else during Russia's civil wars that followed on the death

of Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible, and embroiled Russia in all sorts of chaos, famine, foreign intervention. And by the time that the Poles had been expelled from Russia in the great sort of national uprising of 1612. They were looking for a new dynasty. The Rurikid dynasty had effectively died out with Ivan IV, and they needed someone to bring the country together. The Romanovs had kept their powder dry. They weren't a particularly distinguished family, but they had, because of their mediocrity, probably, not been involved in any of the infighting between the boyars.

And so they were the sort of least offensive candidate. Mikhail Romanov, the founder of the dynasty, was the son of the Patriarch Filaret, who had some popularity with the Cossacks. Now, the Cossacks were terribly important in this dynastic change because they were the only really effective fighting force that Russia had, other than sort of peasant rebel armies or volunteer armies like those that had mustered to expel the Poles. So being popular with the Cossacks was a big advantage for the Romanovs, and they also had a rather obscure, but nonetheless at the time considered quite important, dynastic link back to the descendants of Ivan IV. So some sort of argument for continuity could be made by selecting Mikhail Romanov. And is Mikhail's grandson, Peter, known as Peter the Great, is he the pivotal early Romanov? Is he basically the reason that the Romanovs become this sort of illustrious dynasty who sit atop the Russian Empire for three centuries? That's a very interesting question. I hadn't really quite thought about it in that way,

because I think historians tend to think of the state of Russia not in dynastic terms. I mean, dynasties can be changed. But the importance of Peter is in consolidating a sense of statehood, and indeed a new style of statecraft that hadn't existed in Russia before. I mean, before Peter the Great, going all the way back arguably to the Mongols, you could say that Russia was a patrimonial state. In other words, the notion of the state was embodied almost entirely in the person of the Tsar. The Russian word for state, gasudarstvo, comes directly from the word gasudar, meaning the lord or sovereign. And so earlier tsars had ruled the dynasty and Russia as a whole, as if it was part of its private property, its household property, like a large estate, and it would give out parts of its estate

to servitors to serve in the bureaucracy or in the army. But when Peter comes along, he wants a more European style of absolutist rule, I guess. And so he establishes chancellories to run government in the sense of a sort of impersonal bureaucracy, which would have a sense of the interests of the state or the Commonwealth. And that was an idea that he had picked up from German Cameralist thinkers and shifted the notion of power really quite dramatically away from the person of the Tsar, the head of the dynasty at that moment, towards the idea of the Tsar being the overall head of a state that had its own interests of the people at heart, the Commonwealth, this notion of a separation, if you like, between the Tsar and the state developed.

But the interesting thing about that is that in the popular consciousness in the 18th and 19th century, popular consciousness in the 18th and 19th century, and arguably right through until the 20th, the Russian popular imagination still tended to see the Tsar as the head of the country in a way that linked them back to the patrimonial tradition. They still tended to see the Tsar as a human god, really, whose power was sacred, and who was a protector, a benevolent protector of the people against the boyars, against the bureaucrats. So what the popular consciousness wanted was a Tsar who ruled apart from the state that Peter had established. And indeed, there was a good deal of popular resistance to Peter's notion of the state, but which would rule in a patrimonial and paternal way to safeguard the interests of the people. And that was always really a subversive

element in Russian history, that popular notion of the benevolent Tsar, because rebels could pretend to be the Tsar in order to overthrow a monarch deemed not to be ruling in the interests of the people. If a Tsar came along and was seen as a Tsar tormentor, or cheater was the Russian word for this concept, then he couldn't be the real Tsar in popular folklore. So along could come a pretender, usually a Cossack who was using this myth of being the real Tsar to gather an army and supporters. And this Cossack would begin to sort of claim he was the real Tsar, especially if a Tsar had been murdered. This was often the case in Russia, unfortunately. And no, he hadn't been murdered. The Tsar still existed. It is I. And on that basis, many pretended Tsars, I mean, historians have counted about 30 of them in the 17th century and about 15 to 20 of them in the 18th century.

And they could, as they did in this time of troubles I mentioned before, they could mobilize quite significant social movements, protest movements, to try and unseat the Tsar and put on their ideal Tsar, this Tsar who would be the paternal sacred figure. As Bakunin, the famous anarchist, put it in the 19th century, the Russian Tsar is sort of the embodiment of all the hopes and ideals of the Russian people. He is a Russian Christ. And so a Tsar could easily become a revolutionary. The sacred status, the ideals invested in any of the Tsars in the popular imagination before 1917, that sacred status could be then reattributed to Lenin and Stalin. And indeed, today, one could argue Putin too. Crikey. I think in the West, we don't really talk enough about one of the greatest imperial

acquisitions of all time is the building of modern Russia, the Russian Empire, the building of modern Russia. It's going along at the same time as European empire building in India and North America, the French, the British, the Dutch. And yet we don't talk about this astonishing and arguably the most successful because it endures to this day. The Russian Empire largely endures, the largest country on earth. What is the relationship of the Tsars? Are they like the king electors of Hanover, Frederick the Great and his father and grandfather? Is it an aggressively top-down movement or is this expansion kind of going on because of crumbling frontiers, because of individuals like equivalents of Cecil Rhodes in 19th century Southern Africa pushing at the frontiers and just accumulating more territory? It begins with Ivan IV and the sort of colonization, you could call it, of Siberia, which begins under Ermak in Russian myth in the 1580s. And Ermak was really just a Cossack who was a mercenary and was out in what we would now call the Urals, but then was considered the

Siberian part of Asia. And he was there to defend industrialists like the Stroganovs moving into an area where the Tsar gave them a license to colonize in the hope that they might find gold. But mostly the drive east by Cossacks and other industrialists and entrepreneurs was for fur. I mean, that was the gold of the early modern period, that these furs that they could collect as tribute from the Siberian tribes could be sold for huge quantities of money in the markets of Moscow, or indeed exported to Europe, where most ermine were worn by aristocrats and servitors at courts around Europe, were of Russian origin or Siberian origin. So that was the sort of commercial drive east, but it was only much more gradually followed by any sort of state structure or indeed by the church building monasteries,

and trying to, rather weakly compared with the sort of missionary element of empires in Europe, the Russian church was not particularly interested in that. They were more inclined just to collect lands and give their blessing to those who colonized the East. But once the state got involved, of course, and started sending out its explorers, the most important, like Bering, for example, who discovered the Bering Straits. That was in the 18th century. But before that, there were many explorers, again, many of them Cossacks, who would effectively build fortresses in Siberia and

claim it as theirs and then fight off tribes that might attack or try and divide and rule between the tribes and take tribute wherever possible from those it could enslave. So that was the process. I wouldn't say it makes out for a very aggressive state. But I think, as you say, the problem is the openness of Russia's borders, especially in the East. There's no real physical divide between what we would now call European Russia and Asiatic Russia. The Urals are really just a series of high hills with gaps between them. So the Eurasian steppe, on the western end of which sits old Russia, was subjected to transhumance over the centuries. The sort of Tatar or Turkic-speaking element in Russian culture,

which began with the Mongols in the 13th century, continued through most of Russia's history. So there you get the sort of Napoleonic phrase, you know, scratch a Russian and you'll find a Mongol. So it's this openness of the borders, which I think becomes part of this Russian state imperial practice of expanding into what they would have thought of as a vacuum in order to protect the centre. Because the borders are so friable, are so porous, the state as a centralising military power from the 16th century, attacked by, you know, all sorts of tribes on the Eurasian steppe or the Crimean Tatars in the south, let alone the European powers

in the west, the state as a centralizing military power feels the need to occupy the borderlands in order to defend itself. And that's gradually how it expands. But of course, because its expansion is so rapid, I mean, from the 16th century until 1917, the Russian Empire expanded literally 50 square kilometers every day, a massive expansion. appearance of Russia on the European scene in the 18th century and culminating in its defeat of Napoleon in 1812 to 15, the Western powers assumed and thought it was naturally aggressive. It was naturally an expansionist aggrandizing empire. Now, you can have that view. It's a perfectly tenable view. Or you can have the view that its expansion or colonization of this Eurasian steppe is internally driven by its own insecurity. And maybe you can come to a view that would coordinate or navigate between those two polarities. And I would probably say that at

times there have been periods when Russia has attempted to expand aggressively. We're living through one now. And there are other times when Russia has simply been the dominant power in a territory where it's filled through churches and Cossacks and colonists and settlers of all sorts, without necessarily having what we would now think of as a sort of imperial project of colonisation. We listen to Dan Snow's history. Talk about the Romanovs. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Coming back to Peter the Great, we associate him with the building of St. Petersburg, and we associate Catherine, we've all talked about Catherine the Great, with the conquest of southern Ukraine in the Crimea. How much real power did the Romanovs wield? A lot of that story is about the problems that the court and its bureaucracy, the German as of a state, had in really exercising

influence and power in the provinces. I mean, Russia is a very large place. Its literate nobility capable of performing such functions is small. There was always this tension, really, between the need for centralization because decisions had to be taken at the center I mean as Catherine the Great put it in her treaties on the Russian state Russia is too big a country to be anything but an autocracy because you have to make executive decisions quickly it takes months to get a letter to a provincial centre. To get one to Siberia in the 18th century would take up to two years. So you cannot rely on consultation.

You have to take executive decisions. But at the same time, the power of the state is almost non-existent from the viewpoint of a provincial town, let alone a village. So they have to put in charge servitors, the pamiyeshiki, the landowners who were given access to land in exchange for performing the bureaucratic functions of the state. But that was effectively to give the pamiyeshiki a sort of almost status of ownership over their serfs. They had judicial powers over their serfs. Serfdom having been introduced in the middle of the 17th century, precisely because the landowners found it so difficult to tie the peasants to the land. And then beneath the level

of gentry administration, which might incorporate a rural area of, you know, a small English county. Beneath that level, there are just villages which are effectively self-governing, but under the jurisdiction of the gentry's magistrates, who would come and collect taxes off them, who would come and enforce conscription because the Russian serf had to pay double tax. They had to pay taxes to their owner, the landlord, but they also had to pay taxes to the state in the form mostly of conscription. So the state as a military centralizing force was very dependent on these intermediaries, particularly the landowners, to enforce its power. And it never quite trusted them enough to do it out of what we would call noblesse oblige.

I mean, that was the great project of Catherine the Great when in the 1760s, she emancipated the nobility. Peter the Great had effectively conscripted the nobility to serve as civil servants or military servitors. Catherine said, we can't use compulsion to try and disseminate the power of the state. We have to use the conscientious voluntary service of an ability that has a sense of serving the public good. But of course, within a system of serfdom, that was very difficult to achieve, In a system of serfdom, that was very difficult to achieve because those very same landowners who were being asked by Catherine to effectively have a sense of commonwealth in their jurisdiction over the localities, at the same time owned serfs who they ruthlessly exploited to the point of effecting corporal punishment.

Rape of serf women was not uncommon. So the abuse of the serfs by these people who were supposed to be Catherine's provincial administrators, I mean, this was a hopeless situation. And it was not until all too late, unfortunately, and I'm talking now about the middle of the 19th century, that the Russian monarchy really properly began to consider the issue of how to administer the countryside, this vast area where the state was so weak. And that was only after serfdom was abolished in 1861. So you can see that the real contradiction in terms of administering this vastness of Russia, of making the power of the state effective in getting the subjects to do what they were supposed to do, the real sort of elephant in the room, if you like, was serfdom. Well, that's Alexander II who gets to be a serf, but let's come to him just quickly. Just give me

a brief, who are some czars that we need to think about that are important? We got Peter, we talked about, who reforms the state, who builds St. Petersburg, etc. Would it be Catherine? Who else do you like to draw people's attention to, who we should know more about? Well, if you go into that room in the Kremlin where Putin entertains his guests at that ridiculously long table. There are four statues of Tsars. So from Putin's point of view, they are the most important and they are Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the 18th century emperors who extended the boundaries of Russia most, Peter by reconquering the Baltic lands from the Swedes in the Great Northern War, and Catherine the Great in extending Russian power onto the Black Sea coast and annexing Crimea in the 1780s. He also has in that room a statue of Alexander I, who reigned from 1801 to 1825, and who was, if you like, in the Russian story of their own history, the great saviour of Russia,

because he defeated Napoleon and drove Napoleon back to Paris, and so could claim for Russia this messianic role that Russian mythology assigns to itself as the saviour of Europe, the saviour of humanity indeed, if you believe that Russia is the true seat of Christian orthodoxy. But the fourth Tsar, and I think he's terribly important to consider, because in many ways he's most like Putin, is Nicholas I, who followed on Alexander I's death in 1825 and reigned until 1855, when he died in the middle of the Crimean War. And Nicholas I is, I think, a role model, firstly, because he was a stalwart defender of what he saw as conservative Russian principles. He was the founder of the Holy Alliance, which was to combat all forms of secular nationalism and liberal movements in Europe.

He believed strongly in defending the orthodox abroad. In other words, here we get the beginnings of this idea that Putin takes up that Russia is bigger than its geographic borders. It is defined as a sort of civilizational empire incorporating all those orthodox communities. In Nicholas I's case, he had in mind the Balkan Slavs and indeed the orthodox he wanted to defend in Jerusalem, the Holy Land dispute with the Catholics being the direct cause of the Crimean War. And that war was, I think, the other element that Putin sees as a great positive element of Nicholas I, that in defense of Russia's spiritual principles, in the defense of the Orthodox, Nicholas I was prepared to stand up against the whole of Europe, as indeed he did. I mean, I don't think he was

counting on Europe intervening in the Crimean War. He thought he could bully the Turks into submission to give him what he wanted in the Holy Lands before the Western powers intervened. But in 1854, the French and the British landed an expeditionary force in the Crimea and destroyed the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, and then imposed a humiliating peace on Russia, which was for the Westernist intelligentsia, for the liberals of Russia, a great catastrophe because he isolated Russia from the West. But for Russia's nationalists, like Putin, I believe, he was a great hero because despite his defeat, he had stood up for the true moral principles that Russia's civilization represented.

He had, moreover, taken on the West and exposed its hypocrisy, the idea that it really was interested in defending the Turks. Nonsense. It was after a good old Russian bashing in order to help British and French interests in the Near East. That's at least how the Russians saw it. So this resentment of the West, because of its double standards and hypocrisy, this has all become part of Putin's rhetoric. And it's rooted, I think, also in his vision of what Nicholas I represents as an important chapter in Russia's self-awakening, in Russia's coming to a position where it's prepared to differentiate itself from the West and fight for its own interests. Well, you brought us up to the present day. I mean, when you set out to write this book, the full scale invasion of 2022 had not taken place.

Did that change your thinking at all? Did contemporary events change you as a historian? Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, the inspiration for the story of Russia came from, well, I mean, since 2014 and the beginning of this dreadful Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been, I think, a growing disconnect between the way the Russians see their history, or at least how the Putin regime tells the Russians how they should see their history, and how we in the West have written the history of Russia. So thinking about writing a sort of accessible, short survey of Russian history from the earliest times, which is what I set out to do, it seemed obvious to me that the important thing to bring out was

how the Russians see their own history and what are the mythologies and ideologies, the values they invest in certain chapters of that history. Because only when we begin to see that and understand where they're coming from, can we begin to deal with this growing sort of imperialist aggression from Russia. It might seem now, wow, Orlando, you've written a book which is, you know, right on the button. But actually, the way that this was going was clear from 2012, when I think Putin began all this rhetoric about the Russian world. And then the invasion of Crimea was making it pretty clear that he was going to swallow up Ukraine because he didn't believe in its right to exist. And sure enough, I mean, in 2016, the scene with which I opened the book is then another indicator, and I'm referring to the unveiling of this hideous monument to the Grand Prince

Vladimir, the 10th century ruler of Kievan Rus, who converted Rus to Christianity. And this was unveiled to great fanfare in Moscow in front of the Kremlin with speeches from Putin and the patriarch Kirill saying how this was the foundation of the modern Russian state, that you could draw a direct line from the foundation of Kievan Rus to the Russian Empire, to the Soviet Union, to the Russian Federation. And this was all one people, all one nation, and that therefore Ukraine was no more than a region, a borderland of Russia, of greater Russia. That was already, it seemed to me, clear in 2016. And so when I set out to write this book, I thought, well, that's where I have to start,

because we really need to understand what the ideology of Putin's historiography is. It's not new. It goes back to the historiography of the 19th century. But it's very different from the way we would write the history of Russia today. Well, thank you very much for giving us that tour through the Tsar. We didn't, of course, talk about the most famous Romanov moment, which was their demise. My exciting secret is that my wife is descended from the Romanovs, so therefore my kids are as well. Michael Mikhailovich of Russia was Tsar Nicholas I's grandson. And if you remember, he married morganatically, so he was kicked out of Russia. And the best thing, he married Morganatically, so he was kicked out of Russia.

Indeed. And it was the best thing that ever happened to him. So he ended up living in London and Cannes and survived the revolution. Oh, good, good, good. Yeah, well, you've married well, may I say. Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I want Romanov blood in my children's veins.

I'm a bit nervous about it. Well, you're fine, you're fine. They might invite you back to become Tsar one day. I wouldn't take up that offer. I really wouldn't. My daughter could well be the Tsar that they're looking for. That's all I can say. Orlando, thank you for this.

And tell us what the book's called. It's called The Story of Russia. There you go. Simple as that. We only scratched the surface, obviously, but Orlando Fyfe, thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. You're welcome. It was a pleasure.