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Whatsapp A gathering of the Romanov family, including Tsar Alexander III, in the late 19th century.

From the wild banquets and gory anatomy lessons of Peter the Great, to the fashionistas and nymphomaniac empresses of the 'petticoat period', and to the assassinations of the 19th and 20th centuries, being a member of Russia's ruling dynasty was never for the faint-hearted.

The reign of the Romanovs lasted 304 years—from 1613 until the Russian revolution in 1917—producing rulers like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, whose names still resonate around the world today.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's new book, The Romanovs, chronicles the lives of these megalomaniacs, monsters and saints, and finds that despite their obvious wealth and power, it was hard being a tsar. In fact, six of the final 12 were murdered.

'This is a family in which fathers killed their sons, sons killed their fathers, wives killed their husbands—and all of those happened in one century,' Montefiore tells Late Night Live.

PETER THE GREAT (1682-1725)

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Whatsapp Portrait of Peter the Great by Paul Delaroche.

Montefiore describes Peter the Great as essentially a military autocrat, who changed the destiny of Russia with his victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltava. Another lasting legacy was his construction of St Petersburg.

'He forced people to move there,' Montefiore explains. 'He designed everything. He was into the detail.

'He used to stand at a stand-up desk and used to scrawl in his handwriting orders to do everything. He used to say, "If you don't do this, I'll literally come and punch your face in." He used to take his ministers by the scruff of their neck and beat them.'

Peter was also obsessed with the human body and medical technology. 'When he was in Holland he loved going to see bodies being dissected. He insisted on biting them to see if their texture had changed,' Montefiore says. 'He was fascinated when he beheaded people to see if they stayed sitting up for a long time after their head came off.

'When he had his mistress Mary Hamilton beheaded he lifted up her beautiful head and gave a lecture to the audience, a medical lesson on anatomy, which shocked even the Russian crowd. Then he kissed the head on the lips and dropped it and went back to work.'

He was famous for wild banquets in a clubhouse called the Jolly Company. 'They were forced pleasure. You had to drink so much that you could pass out on the table,' Montefiore says.

'They had naked girls jumping out of pies, they had dwarfs being tossed, they had dwarfs dressed as old men, old men dressed as dwarfs, many of them naked except for a bishop's mitre carrying dildos on a cushion. It was a kind of mock religious ceremony as well.'

Peter is also remembered for his cruelty towards his son Alexei, who had very different ideas for Russia, according to Montefiore. He wanted to move away from St Petersburg, to dismantle Peter's fleet, to not go to war all the time, and to not bring so many westerners into Russia.

'The son was weak and was terrified of his father—rightly as it turned out—so he ran off and fled to Europe,' Montefiore says.

'Peter had him hunted down. He was lured back by promises and then immediately arrested. Then Peter led a Stalin-like case against his son, who was tortured and tortured and tortured until he died, and Peter visited him that day for more torture. He basically killed Alexei.'

ELIZABETH (1741-1762)

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Whatsapp Portrait of Elizabeth by Vigilius Eriksen.

Peter was succeeded by his wife, Catherine, whose rule Montefiore describes as chaotic and frivolous. More impressive, he says, was Peter's daughter, Elizabeth, sometimes known by English historians as Elizaveta. She came to power during a century of mostly female Russian rulers, an era that has become known as 'the petticoat period'.

'There was nothing mediocre about her,' Montefiore says of Elizabeth. 'She was known as the Russian Venus, she was so beautiful, but you didn't want to cross her. She was very much Peter the Great's daughter.

'She was an early fashionista. She loved haute couture, and when she died there was something like 6,000 dresses in her cupboard.

'If anyone was a nymphomaniac it was not Catherine the Great, it was the gorgeous Elizaveta, who had multiple lovers—uninhibited.'

CATHERINE THE GREAT (1762-1796)

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Whatsapp Portrait of Catherine the Great by Dmitry Levitsky.

The best-known female ruler of Russia, of course, is Catherine the Great. She came to power after her husband Peter III was murdered in a coup, and became known as one of the great women of history. According to Montefiore, rumours of her promiscuity were largely exaggerated: though she was 'highly sexed', she was really a serial monogamist whose relationships with men often had a political edge.

'She started off with Grigory Orlov, who helped bring her to power,' he says. 'When he proved rather lazy and rather uninterested in hard work, she found [Grigory] Potemkin, who was 10 years younger than her but was her equal in brilliance, intelligence, statesmanship. Potemkin founded Odessa, Sebastopol, all these southern cities. He took Crimea. They had this amazing love affair as well.

'I think this is the most successful partnership in history between a man and a woman. Forget Antony and Cleopatra or Napoleon and Josephine. This is it.'

It's believed Catherine and Potemkin were married in secret. While the pair effectively ran the government, the empress also had a series of young lovers.

'She spent her time with them teaching them the classics, reading Tacitus together, gardening, inspecting the gardens, they walked beside her,' Montefiore says. 'They were increasingly young. The age difference got bigger and bigger. But they had no power or significance at court. They ran nothing—Potemkin ran the government with Catherine.'

After Potemkin's death, Catherine took up with a man more than 40 years her junior. 'She was in her late 60s. Her lover was 21. So that's a bit of an age difference,' Montefiore says. 'I don't criticise her for it—she did it because she could.'

ALEXANDER I (1801-1825)

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Whatsapp Portrait of Alexander I by Franz Kruger.

Montefiore says Alexander was a beautiful man, blue-eyed, tall and blond, a rock star of his day, with many mistresses.

'Women literally threw themselves at him everywhere. He got very sick of having women throw themselves at him, rather like a rock star. But his mistresses never gained any power or importance at all.'

Alexander was immortalised in Leo Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace and its subsequent adaptations, including a recent TV drama produced by the BBC. But Montefiore worries these representations undersell the emperor's achievements.

'The tsar of War and Peace, especially in the BBC version, is a complete popinjay and a useless character,' he says. 'The real tsar Alexander I had an amazing career.

'He basically colluded in the killing of his own father, Paul the Mad, who was beaten in the face with a huge snuff box and then strangled. He had a particular psychology—the psychology of a man who's killed his father.

'He also fancied himself as a commander in chief, which he wasn't. He was a disaster at the battle of Austerlitz. But he learned, and by the time Napoleon invaded Russia, he'd become an impressive statesman.

'What you don't see in War and Peace is that he put together an army that marched all the way across Europe, defeating Napoleon, and took Paris. He is one of the greatest of the Romanovs and was capable of impressive statesmanship.'

NICHOLAS I (1825-1855)

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Whatsapp Portrait of Nicholas I by Franz Kruger.

Alexander was succeeded by his brother, Nicholas, who Montefiore says was a 'pretty talented autocrat really'.

'He's normally regarded as a rigid, slightly monstrous martinet, but actually he was very well suited to being an autocrat.

'He ran everything himself. He wanted to run Russia like Peter the Great did. But in the end his rigidity told and he failed to reform Russia.

'He became deluded by success. He was, after all, the son of Paul the Mad.

'In the end he made a terrible mistake going into the Crimean War against the two great industrial powers of the western world, Britain and France, and he lost and died in misery. But he was a pretty impressive character for much of his reign.'

ALEXANDER II (1855-1881)

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Whatsapp Photograph of Alexander II of Russia.

In Montefiore's view, one of the most underestimated tsars in Russian history is Alexander II, who survived several assassination attempts before being killed by bombers in St Petersburg.

'Alexander II really used autocracy well to negotiate the freeing of the serfs in 1861,' he says.

'He became the tsar emancipator, the tsar liberator, just at the same time as Lincoln, who was also assassinated.

'He then was overcome by the expectations of more reform, more liberalisation. He stepped back and this outraged liberal opinion and terrorist factions began to hunt him down to kill him.

'They believed that killing the tsar would accelerate liberty and the bringing of reform. But Alexander II really wanted to bring in a constitution. He was, I think, an impressive character.'

NICHOLAS II (1894-1917) and his children

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Whatsapp Tsar Nicholas II with his wife and children.

The Romanov dynasty all but ended one night in 1918 when Nicholas II and his entire family—including the small children—were murdered in Yekaterinburg, almost certainly on Lenin's orders.

The tsar had abdicated after the February 1917 revolution, but was later captured by the Bolsheviks. Montefiore says the family were probably expecting to be rescued by the White Army or sent to live in exile somewhere in Europe. Only at the last moment would they have realised they were about to die.

'It's really unbearable reading the story of the massacre, because it was so bungled,' Montefiore says.

'They'd smuggled a huge amount of Romanov jewellery out of St Petersburg with them when they were into exile and they'd sewn these into their underwear. This underwear was incredibly heavy but it was also a sort of diamond-studded bullet-proof vest they were all wearing.

'When they were shot, the bullets bounced off the diamonds. They didn't die. When they were stabbed with bayonets, the bayonets glanced off them. They were finally killed with shots to the head and frantic stabbing.'

Montefiore says he believes this may be the origin of the rumours that some of the Romanov children survived.

Other relatives of the Romanovs are scattered around the world. Until last year, a descendant of Alexander III had been living in the Northern Territory town of Katherine. Montefiore, however, hasn't researched these far-flung branches of the family.

'I stop when power stops.'

Listen to the full interview Simon Sebag Montefiore joins Late Night Live.

Subscribe to Late Night Live on iTunes, ABC Radio or your favourite podcasting app.

