What Was the Romanov Dynasty’s Role in Russian History?
The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia from 21 February 1613 (3 March new style), when the 16-year-old Michael Fyodorovich Romanov was elected tsar by the Zemsky Sobor, to 15 March 1917, when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in Pskov in favour of his brother Grand Duke Michael (who refused the crown the following day). The Romanovs presided over the transformation of the Muscovite tsardom into the Russian Empire, the expansion of Russia from a regional Eastern European state to the largest contiguous empire in the world, and the development of a distinctive Russian culture that produced some of the great literature, music, and visual art of the modern era. The dynasty ended in the 304th year of its rule, in the aftermath of the February Revolution, and the Romanov family was executed in Yekaterinburg in July 1918 (see Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1997).
The founding of the dynasty
The Romanovs were a minor boyar family, with no direct claim to the throne. The family had been prominent in the service of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century; Anastasia Romanovna, the first wife of Ivan the Terrible, was the niece of the metropolitan of Moscow, and the Romanovs had been among the noble families that the Tsar had elevated. The Romanovs had been excluded from the succession by the reign of Boris Godunov, and the family had been politically marginal during the Time of Troubles. The election of Michael Romanov in 1613 was a compromise, designed to end the dynastic crisis of 1598-1613, and the choice was confirmed by the oaths of allegiance of the major political groupings, including the Cossacks, the boyars, and the provincial assemblies.
The early Romanovs — Michael (1613-1645), Alexis (1645-1676), Fyodor III (1676-1682), and the regency of Sophia (1682-1689) — were a period of consolidation. The Russian state, weakened by the Time of Troubles, was rebuilt by Patriarch Filaret (Michael’s father) and by the new government. The Russian territory was extended eastward to the Pacific by the middle of the seventeenth century; the Russian agricultural base was reorganised; the Russian serfdom system was consolidated. The 1649 Sobornoe Ulozhenie, the comprehensive Russian legal code issued in the reign of Alexis, was the basis of Russian law until 1832 (Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War, 2001).
The imperial transformation
The transformation of the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire was the work of Peter the Great (1682-1725). Peter was determined to modernise Russia, and his programme of reform — the new army, the new navy, the new government, the new church, the new capital, the new calendar, the new court — produced, in 22 years, a fundamentally different state. The proclamation of the Russian Empire on 2 November 1721, after the Treaty of Nystad that ended the Great Northern War, was the culmination of the programme; Russia’s victory over Sweden made Russia the dominant power of the Baltic, and Peter was given the title of “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.”
The eighteenth-century Romanovs — Catherine I, Peter II, Anna, Ivan VI, Elizabeth, Peter III, and Catherine the Great — consolidated the new empire. Catherine the Great (1762-1796) presided over the Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), the conquest of the Crimea, the annexation of the Northern Black Sea littoral, and the beginning of the Russian advance in the Caucasus. The Russian cultural establishment of the period — the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Arts, the Smolny Institute, the Hermitage — was the foundation of the Russian imperial cultural tradition (Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great, 1985).
The 19th century: the Romanovs and reform
The nineteenth-century Romanovs — Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II — were a period of reform, reaction, and revolution. Alexander I (1801-1825) presided over the post-Napoleonic settlement of 1815; Nicholas I (1825-1855) over the suppression of the 1830 and 1863 Polish uprisings and the Russian response to the 1848 revolutions. Alexander II (1855-1881) presided over the Great Reforms: the emancipation of the serfs (1861), the judicial reform (1864), the zemstvo reform (1864), the city reform (1870), the educational reform, and the military reform (1874). The assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881 was a turning point in Russian history: it inaugurated a period of counter-reform and the development of the revolutionary movement that would eventually overthrow the dynasty.
The late Romanovs — Alexander III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917) — were a period of rapid industrialisation, social change, and political pressure. Alexander III presided over the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the beginning of the Russian industrial take-off; Nicholas II presided over the 1905 Revolution, the 1905 Manifesto, the 1907 Fundamental Laws, the Russo-Japanese War, the Stolypin reforms, and the First World War. The dynasty collapsed in the February Revolution of 1917 (Lieven, Nicholas II, 1993).
The Romanov legacy
The Romanovs left a complex legacy. The dynasty presided over the largest contiguous land empire in modern history, and the cultural achievements of the imperial period — the literature of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky; the music of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and Mussorgsky; the painting of the Wanderers, the World of Art, and the Russian avant-garde; the science of Mendeleev, Lobachevsky, and Pavlov — are among the great treasures of world culture. The Romanovs also established many of the institutions that shaped Russian political life for centuries: the autocratic state, the Table of Ranks, the Holy Synod, the Senate, the provincial administration, the imperial court.
The Romanov legacy was, however, also defined by the autocratic system itself, which the dynasty maintained for 304 years. The dynasty was unable to develop a stable constitutional order; the dynasty’s suppression of the Polish uprisings, the Finnish independence movement, and the various other national movements produced a long legacy of imperial crisis. The dynasty’s resistance to political reform produced the 1905 Revolution, the February Revolution, and the end of the Romanov dynasty itself. The Russian Orthodox Church, which had been closely tied to the autocratic state, was persecuted in the Soviet period; the imperial cultural tradition was largely destroyed by the 1917-1922 emigration; the imperial territorial structure was reorganised by the Soviet government. The Romanovs left an empire; the Romanovs also left a memory of an empire that, in the post-Soviet period, has been the subject of sustained historical, cultural, and political debate (Hosking, 1997).