Romanov Riches

The book doesn't open like a conventional history — it starts with the author's personal introduction. Volkov explains that this study picks up where his earlier book, "History of Twentieth-Century Russian Culture: From Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn," left off, reaching back to 1613 (the Romanovs' ascension) — together, the two books cover the entire span of Russian cultural history from Archpriest Avvakum to the present.

Volkov rejects the common view that the Romanovs showed a "striking indifference" to the arts. On the contrary, he argues that while the dynasty's male members were career soldiers, they were also deeply engaged with literature, architecture, music, and painting — Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas I even took a direct hand in shaping culture. His central thesis: the more tightly a ruler controlled the cultural process, the more stable the regime.

The author illustrates this personal dimension with concrete examples: Nicholas I called Pushkin "the smartest man in Russia" and tried (not always successfully) to steer his work; Alexander II's decision to abolish serfdom is said to have been emotionally influenced by Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches; Alexander III eagerly read Dostoevsky, admired Tchaikovsky's music, and collected works by the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) painters he championed as authentically national artists.

Volkov takes a methodologically distinctive approach — grounding the book not just in archival sources but in his own lived experience. He recalls a chance encounter with Khrushchev on a Leningrad street in 1964 as a 20-year-old conservatory student, and later, while living in the US, being able to "look into the eyes" of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin during their visits to New York — experiences he says helped him understand the relationship between power and culture as one between living, flawed people rather than cardboard "geniuses."

The main text opens on November 21, 1836, at the premiere of Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar at St. Petersburg's Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre — described as a major cultural event, held in one of the era's most prestigious buildings, with tickets sold out a month in advance despite the high price. Volkov chooses this scene as the symbolic starting point of the dynasty-culture relationship.

The author's style is notably academic yet vivid — archival documents, diaries, and personal conversations (including his own encounters with Akhmatova, Shostakovich, Balanchine, and Brodsky) are woven together with scholarly rigor but without dryness.

• The author blends academic fact with his own personal encounters, presenting history as made by living people rather than cardboard figures
• Each chapter opens with a concrete cultural event/performance before widening into broader historical context