The Romanovs, 1613-1918 Quotes

“Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“One of those who cooked for Rasputin during the Great War was a chef at Petrograd’s luxurious Astoria Hotel who went on, after the Revolution, to cook for Lenin and Stalin. He was Spiridon Putin, grandfather of President Vladimir Putin.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“it is curious that each of Russia’s Times of Troubles – 1610–13, 1917–18 and 1991 –99 – ended with a new version of the old autocracy, eased by the habits and traditions of its fallen predecessor, and justified by the urgent need to restore order, radically modernize and regain Russia’s place as a great power.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“In the twenty-first century, the new autocracies in Russia and China have much in common with that of the tsars, run by tiny, opaque cliques, amassing vast wealth, while linked together through hierarchical client–patron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler. In”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“An effective tsar could be harsh provided he was consistently harsh. Rulers are often killed not for brutality but for inconsistency. And tsars had to inspire trust and respect among their courtiers but sacred reverence among the peasantry, 90 per cent of their subjects, who saw them as “Little Fathers.” They were expected to be severe to their officials but benign to their peasant “children”: “the tsar is good,” peasants said, “the nobles are wicked.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“In Russia the government is autocracy tempered by strangulation,” quipped the French woman of letters Madame de Staël. It was a dangerous job. Six of the last twelve tsars were murdered—two by throttling, one by dagger, one by dynamite, two by bullet. In the final catastrophe in 1918, eighteen Romanovs were killed. Rarely was a chalice so rich and so poisonous. I”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“At Peter’s court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“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,”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“—Cualquier intento de cambiar la vida por medio de la violencia está condenado al fracaso. Esta es nuestra oportunidad histórica.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Los Románov

“Households were supposedly run according to the joyless Domostroi, household rules written by a sixteenth-century monk, which specified that “disobedient wives should be severely whipped” while virtuous wives should be thrashed “from time to time but nicely in secret, avoiding blows from the fist that cause bruises.” Royal women were secluded in the terem, not unlike an Islamic harem. Heavily veiled, they watched church services through a grille; their carriages were hung with taffeta curtains so that they could not look out or be seen; and when they walked in church processions, they were concealed from public gaze by screens borne by servants. In the Terem Palace, they sewed all day, and would kneel before the Red Corner of icons when entering or leaving a room.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Even in this age of religious fervour, foreigners were amazed by the ritualistic piety of the Russians and their severe code of behaviour. Russian men wore long beards, as sacred tribute to God, and long robes, kaftans, with pleated sleeves that hung almost to the floor, on their heads sable or black-fox hats. Musical instruments and smoking were banned and noblewomen, whether virgins or wives, were restricted to their family terem, the separate living quarters of Muscovite women, where they were veiled and hidden”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“When a minister impertinently threatened to resign, he seized him by the collar and shouted, ‘Shut up! When I choose to kick you out, you will hear of it in no uncertain terms!’ Politicians were ‘scoundrels’, on whose reports he would write comments like ‘what a beast!’ He often shouted, ‘as for the ministers, the devil take them’. His foreign minister Nikolai Giers was a ‘dummy’ who, he said, acted as his ‘clerk’. He tried to find a way around the ministers, and, as he struggled to absorb complex issues, he asked his three henchmen, Cherevin, Vorontsov and head of the court chancellery, General Otto Richter, to form an all-powerful triumvirate, reducing ministerial reports to short digests.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“In the midst of Our great grief,’ announced Alexander III, ‘the voice of God bids Us to stand staunchly for government relying on God’s design with faith in the truth of autocratic power.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“The war could not be won – but could it be ended with honour?”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Its heart was the alliance between the Romanovs and the nobility who needed royal support to control their estates. Serfdom was the foundation of this partnership. The ideal of autocracy was in practice a deal whereby the Romanovs enjoyed absolute power and delivered imperial glory while the nobility ruled their estates unchallenged. The”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“The Russian empire, it is estimated, grew by fifty-five square miles (142 square kilometres) per day after the Romanovs came to the throne in 1613, or 20,000 square miles a year. By the late nineteenth century, they ruled one sixth of the earth’s surface—and they were still expanding. Empire-building was in a Romanov’s blood.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Los Romanov han desaparecido, pero los apuros de la autocracia rusa siguen vivos.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“La Rusia de hoy es la heredera de ambos, una fusión de estalinismo imperial y de autoritarismo digital del siglo XXI, atrofiada y distorsionada por su propio capricho personal, por su continuo desgobierno, por su esclerosis económica y por su propio capricho personal, por su continuo desgobierno, por su esclerosis económica y por su corrupción propia del país de Brobdignang, por mucho que se cubra con la capa de la modernidad.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“Marx escribió que la historia se repite, primero como tragedia luego como farsa. La frase es muy ingeniosa, pero dista mucho de ser verdad. La historia no se repite nunca, pero toma prestadas unas cosas, roba otras, guarda resonancias de otras y se incauta del pasado para crear un híbrido, algo único, a partir de ingredientes del pasado y del presente.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918

“«La única base sólida para un estado grande es el egoísmo, no el romanticismo».”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Los Románov

“But by November his passion had eased. “The desire to marry lasted until breakfast,” he wrote on the 19th, “and then went away…”12”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“You need to work and have everything prepared ahead of time,” he once wrote, “because wasted time, like death, cannot be reversed.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“«Hay que hacer las cosas de forma que el pueblo piense que quiere que se hagan así».”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Los Románov

“I’d never have married’, said Alexei to the sobbing Natalya, ‘if I’d known our time was to be so short,”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Let us have Misha Romanov,”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“La guerra, explicaba Napoleón, no era «un arte difícil», sino «una cuestión de ocultar el miedo el mayor tiempo posible. Solo de ese modo se logra intimidar al enemigo y el éxito está fuera de dudas».”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Los Románov