A History of Russia - Tsars and Revolutions - Documentary

In the words of Winston Churchill, Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Even today, years after the fall of Communism, Russia retains a scent. Russia's history remains a riddle. There's no question in my mind that there is not one Russia, but that there are many Russias. And there's also very little question in my mind that there are many different, uh, Russian histories. Is there a Russian Nation? Yes, there is a Russian Nation. What is it? A thousand different things, depending on what you want it to be.

What makes Russia particularly different is, firstly, its sheer size. It is, after all, the biggest country on Earth. And secondly, I suppose, the fact that it is Europe. But then again, it isn't quite Europe.

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Russia begins long ago. Before Stalin, before Lenin, before the Reds took power, Russia was ruled by the Romanov Dynasty for 300 years. Yet even the Romanovs are relative newcomers. The birth of the Russian Empire reaches back over a thousand years, to an age when history tangled with myth, and a nation found its identity in a mystical faith. At its peak, the Empire of the Tsars would span one-sixth of the globe, from the glories of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, across the endless forests of Siberia, to the shores of the Pacific and beyond. The land which is currently Russia is, of course, enormous. The distance between one end of the Russian Empire and the other end of the Russian Empire is the same as the distance from Moscow to Chicago. And part of the story of the history of Russia is the filling up of that space.

The land that would be Russia was never a single country. The Russian people never a single race. Turks and Slavs, Mongols and… Russia is a nation of many nations. A land not of one people, but of many different peoples. All those groups have different patterns of settlement, obviously speak different languages, and have no sense of, of being part of a coherent land at all. Before Russia became a nation, what connected the people of the Eurasian frontier were rivers. Endless, awesome rivers. Rivers were the highways, rivers roads. The rivers were the connections between the widely scattered populations. The rivers provided the force lines, drawing people together. The rivers are absolutely essential to the expansion of the Russians in every direction and to the creation of this kind of enormous state. Without the rivers, they could never have held it together.

In the 9th century, Viking warriors sailed down the rivers at the edge of Europe. The Dnieper, the Don, the Volga. The Vikings pioneered new trade routes, a… which is of the Orient, Arabia, and Constantinople. Natives along the rivers called the Vikings the Ruse. And as the Vikings battled, embarked their way to power, the frontier between Europe and Asia became known as the land of the Ruse, Russia. One of the stories of Russian history is how gradually links are forged. In a very small way, it's trans-emerge beginnings of connections happen and begin to intertwine. Herman turned round and good heavens, we have a place called Russia.

By the late 10th century, the land that would be Russia was a patchwork of warring city-states. Rival Viking princes battled for supremacy. The greatest of these ancient cities was Kiev. And Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, was the most powerful man of the land of the Rus. Vladimir wasn't content to be first among equals. The Grand Prince sought greater power, to reign over the Rus as a God-given ruler. One of the things which a would-be ruler of that large and diverse land needed was some central focus of authority, some sort of central cult which would give him a legitimacy and authority beyond simply the use of military force.

In the legends of Russia's birth, Prince Vladimir searched for a single religion to bind together the many pagan peoples of the Rus. According to ancient texts, Vladimir sent out emissaries and met with the Jews, the Muslims, and the Catholics, in a quest to find the one true faith. Then his men came to Constantinople. Here, in the heart of the Christian Orthodox world, Vladimir's envoys at last found the power and glory their Grand Prince craved. The envoys went to Constantinople and was so impressed by the sheer ascetic beauty of it. We saw such beauty there, we did not know whether we were in heaven on Earth. We only know that God must live in that place.

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Constantinople's might and splendor helped convince Vladimir to convert to the Orthodox faith. Then, as God's agent on Earth, he commanded his subjects be baptized as Christians, or face his wrath. Prince Vladimir had united the land of the Rus with religion. But at his death, he left his kingdom divided among his sons. Civil war between rival brothers threatened to tear the kingdom apart. One of Vladimir's heirs, Sviatopolk, was determined to rule all by himself. But he feared that his brothers, Boris and Gleb, would stand in his way. Boris and Gleb were not interested in seizing power, but Sviatopolk doesn't trust them. He's described in texts as lawless, as though he were outside Christian morality. And he decides to kill them. Boris was alone at prayers when his brother's henchmen found him. He knew a fight for the throne would tear his beloved land apart. He chose instead to die without resisting.

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To die to save the soul of Russia. The murderous drama was repeated as the killers slaughtered the tyrant's other brother, Gleb. They fell upon him like wild beasts and overcame him by piercing him with sharp blades. Sviatopolk's treachery ignited open war. The Rus arose to avenge the blood of the martyrs. Ironically, the tyrant was driven into exile, while Boris and Gleb were invested with divine power, canonized as the first saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. Their sacrifice consecrated the new faith of the Rus with holy Russian blood. That's the significance of Boris and Gleb. Their innocent sufferers, they accept the blows of the lawless Sviatopolk, and in accepting those blows, they act out the passion of Jesus. In the bloody slaughter of Boris and Gleb, Russia's church and Viking rulers had achieved a holy glory and divine authority. For Russia, the blood had just begun to flow.

In time to come, invaders from the East would turn the land of the Rus into their stomping grounds. The Mongol Khans of the Golden Horde. In the year 1237, having conquered the Eastern world, the Mongol horde, the sons of Genghis Khan, unleash their fury on the West and the land of the Rus.

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The Mongol horde was the greatest war machine in history. Tens of thousands of men on horseback, organized to murderous perfection. In just three years, they subdued almost all of Russia. In over a thousand years of history, only the Mongols would ever accomplish that feat. They came in huge numbers. They came prepared for long-distance campaigns. Their campaigns would normally have between maybe fifty thousand to a hundred thousand, and if we're to believe some sources, well, in excess of a hundred thousand, uh, soldiers. Mongol warriors trapped Russian armies and cut them to pieces. They captured Russian princes and held them hostage. They torched Russian cities and left them in ruins.

In 1240, the Mongols' leader, Batu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, laid siege to the soul of ancient Russia, the city of Kiev. His messengers sent a warning: "If you surrender to me, you will be forgiven. If you resist, you will suffer greatly and perish cruelly." Kiev chose death, refusing to submit to the invaders. The greatest city in the land of the Rus was reduced to a smoldering ruin. Some accounts claim that when the Mongols rode onto the West, they left Russia littered with the skulls of the dead.

So began the reign of the Golden Horde. It would last for two and a half centuries. The Mongols were going to create the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known. They saw it as almost part of their birthright, as almost part of their divine right, that they ought to rule as much of the world as possible. The leaders of the horde were Mongol warriors. Their soldiers were Eastern Turkic tribes. In time, the Russians would call them all Tatars. Yet the Tatars never sought to occupy Russia, only to dominate it through tribute and terror. Their use of horror had been honed in the conquest of Asia. There are a number of instances where the Mongols in Central Asia would lead out parts of the population onto an open plain, where they would systematically kill the population, sometimes decapitate them.

The murderous Mongol yoke reduced the princes of Russia to underlings. To hold on to his throne, a prince came to the court of the Tatar Khan, literally cap in hand, to the horses of his overlords. After his humiliation, he would pay the Khan a lavish tribute, the price of princely power. So long as the Mongols got what they wanted, so long as they got the money and men which they required, then that was fine. They were not interested in anymore. They were not interested in settling in Russia, particularly. They were interested in what they could extract. It was a parasitic existence, but it's not in the parasite's interest to kill the host. The Tatar Khan would choose one prince to rule the Rus in his stead. The donor of the richest tribute was awarded the honor title, Grand Prince of Vladimir. The princes fought brother against brother as rival Russian noblemen competed for the prize.

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The Mongols had divided the Rus. Only a united people would be strong enough to resist their rule. Over time, the lords of one city learned to hold the Mongols' favor, even though their city was an upstart, barely a century old. The city of Moscow. Moscow was founded as an isolated river outpost in the 12th century, but by the 1300s, Moscow was a growing city, built around a great fortress, her Kremlin. In 1325, Moscow's Prince Ivan the First cut a deal with the Mongols. Ivan would collect tribute for the Khan, not just from Moscow, but from all nearby lands as well. His role as taxman soon won Ivan the nickname Kalita, Moneybags. Moscow learned to use the Mongols well. The Muscovite princes, over time, will come to monopolize the title of the Grand Prince of Vladimir, and they could not do that without Mongol support. As Moscow grew, of course, it had more money than anyone else, and it could assume military leadership of the Russian principalities, of which there were what, 50 or probably more. Yet, as their power grew, Moscow's princes chafed under the grip of the Khan. Over time, the Muscovites acquired the resources to build an army and turn against Russia's oppressors.

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In 1380, Dmitri, Moscow's new Grand Prince, rallied over 50,000 warriors from across the land on the banks of the River Don. Prince Dmitri led Russia into battle for freedom from the Mongol horn. They swept into battle like two powerful storms. Their weapons glittering like lightning. Blood flowed down the valley and mixed with the River Don. Tens of thousands died. Prince Dmitri himself was pulled, near dead, from beneath a pile of corpses. The prince survived. The Russians had won the battle, but the Mongol yoke was by no means broken. 100 years of struggle for freedom had only just begun. There was no set piece occasion on which the Russians said, "Mongols, you are out," and the Mongols said, "Oh no, we're not," and the Russians said, "Oh yes, you are," and the Russians then threw them out. Uh, the end of Mongol rule was, was a process, not, not an event. As internal power struggles splintered the Mongols into rival factions, Moscow rebuilt and grew. By the late 15th century, the wealth and power of Moscow's new Grand Prince, Ivan III, rivaled even the Mongol Khan.

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Russian rulers had paid the Khan for the privilege of power. In 1480, Ivan of Moscow cut the Mongols off. Ivan the, eventually said, "No, we're not going to pay tribute anymore. You were our overlords. We will simply not do this anymore, and see what you can do about it." Faced with a united Russian front, the Tatar armies could no longer dominate the battlefield or the Rus. The [ __ ] Khan abandoned control of Russia to Moscow and her Grand Prince. Prince Ivan III had united the Russians under the banner of Muscovy and beaten back the Mongol horde. Soon, Ivan would take a new title for himself: Tsar, absolute Imperial ruler of all the Russians.

1453. Constantinople, the holy city of Orthodox Christianity, fell to Muslim invaders. Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, was dead. A new empire, a new emperor, would soon arise in the Orthodox Christian citadel of Moscow. Grand Prince Ivan III began to transform his dominion into a holy Russian Empire. For centuries, the Byzantine double eagle had been the symbol of absolute authority. Ivan now claimed it as his personal emblem. To lift his line to Imperial blood, he took a wife, Zoe, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor. Moscow's royal family even devised a new family tree, tracing their line back to Rome and the sea. Ivan III's wife was quite influential in telling him, "You no longer need to be the first among equals, but you need to be the autocrat, the Tsar, the Caesar." And so, in 1493, the Muscovite prince began to adopt the Imperial title of the Byzantine emperors, Tsar, Russian for Caesar.

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As Prince Ivan remodeled himself as a Russian Caesar, he remade Moscow and its Kremlin into a new Rome, an Imperial Holy City. Rome and Imperial Holy City. Ivan brought in the finest architects from Italy. He charged them to raise monuments to God's glory and Moscow's power. The Kremlin becomes a sacred Christian center. That is where the great cathedrals of Moscow are built. You might liken it to the Imperial City in Beijing, and the Chinese Emperor's sacred inner city. For a finale, Ivan's architects enlarged and restructured the Kremlin fortress itself. They encircled it with stone ramparts, 16 feet thick, and crowned by 19 towers. A royal city within the city, filled with palaces, armories, and churches.

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In the endless lands outside Moscow, Ivan the Great also began to change the rules of life for Russia's rural majority. Once peasants had been free to farm wherever they found open land, by paying tax or tribute. They could grow crops on fields belonging to noblemen or the church. If the land grew tired or taxes too heavy, the farmers moved to greener pastures.

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Tsar Ivan issued decrees crippling the peasant's traditional right to roam. Now, only once a year, in the depths of the frigid Russian winter, could peasants leave one landlord for the fields of another. The peasants were not yet serfs, slaves bound to the land, but Ivan had begun their journey into bondage. Ivan's death in 1505 would bring his son, Vasily, to the throne. And perhaps the most historic act Vasily Ivanovich would make was not as an empire builder, but as a lover. Behind the gates of a convent, the prince locked away his first wife, Salomea, and failed to give him a child. And so he took a new bride, Elena.

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The Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem condemned Vasily's sinful second marriage. "You will have a wicked son. Your states will be prey to terror and tears. Rivers of blood will flow. Your cities will be devoured in flames." The patriarch's fearful prophecy would prove all too true. August 25th, 1530. The omens were awesome at the birth of Prince Vasily's son. The legend says the skies split open and lightning struck the Kremlin. The night Ivan IV, heir to the Russian throne, was born. Spread the news across the land. Far to the east, a Tatar prince, the Khan of Kazan, warned that Russia's new prince was born a monster. "A sovereign has been born to you, and he already has two teeth. With one, he will devour us. With the other, he will devour you." Tyrant, history would remember him as Ivan the Terrible. He had been born, but almost from birth, Ivan was a prisoner of the Kremlin and its intrigues. The death of his father, Vasily, when Ivan was only three, set off a deadly power struggle. The young Grand Prince watched as Russia's powerful noblemen, the boyars, fought for control. Moscow's high priest, the Metropolitan, was battered and broken before his eyes.

Ruled. They ruled very poorly. Each one of these boyars tried to steal as much as possible, to grab as much property as possible, to break the treasury. Between his birth and by the time he came of age in 1547, it became frowned upon. There are at least 14 murders that took place. Bitter intrigues swept the Kremlin. Even Ivan's mother, his crown regent, may have been a victim. She died when he was just seven, poisoned, some claimed, by rivals trying to seize the powers of the throne. As he came of age in a climate of violence, Ivan soon showed a cruel streak. When he became an adolescent, he was quite wild. Sometimes he would amuse himself by throwing dogs and cats out of the belfry of the Ivan the Great Cathedral. So the cruelty had been nurtured in him from his childhood.

Whenever he could, he escaped outside the Kremlin. He hunted, he read, and he plotted his revenge. According to some accounts, it was at a Christmas banquet in 1543 that the 13-year-old prince made his first deadly play for power. As rival boyars gorged themselves, the young Prince Ivan stood up and accused the powerful Shuysky family and others of treachery. "You have all conspired to steal my throne," the boy said. "But I will be satisfied if one among you, Prince Andrei Shuysky, is punished." He had a kennel and he kept dogs, and one time when Andrei Shuysky was walking in the Kremlin, Ivan told the kennel master to sic the dogs on him. The dogs ripped Shuysky apart. Death was Ivan's warning to boyars who dared usurp his powers. If wearing the crown called for terror, Ivan was ready. Ready to reign with a ruthless hand, even if it called for blood, murder, intrigue, treachery.

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Prince Ivan of Moscow came of age, watching boyars wage a ruthless struggle for the power of his crown.

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When the time came to claim his birthright, the Grand Prince made it clear.

The struggle was over. The crown and the power belonged to Ivan alone.

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January 1547. The cathedrals of the Kremlin glittered with splendor for the coronation of Ivan Vasilyevich.

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Not content to be crowned merely Grand Prince, 16-year-old Ivan reached into the past for the authority of an emperor. He resurrected a title used only occasionally by his grandfather, Ivan the Great. The old Russian word for Caesar. The formal adoption of a coronation ceremony of Ivan IV as Tsar was part of the process of transition from a Muscovite principality to a Russian Empire. The term Tsar is not an official title. It's not going to become an official title for the Russian rulers, the Muscovite rulers, into life in the terrible in 1547. The first prince formally crowned Tsar. Ivan's Imperial title echoed the awesome scope of his realm. From the Ural Mountains at Europe's eastern edge, to the headwaters of the great Dnieper and Volga Rivers, Russia already spanned close to a million square miles, twice as large as England, France, and Spain combined. And across all that land, one man reigned supreme. Under Ivan, all power was concentrated in the hands of the Tsar. The aristocracy held no hereditary land or power. The nobles, called boyars, owed their post and authority directly to Tsar Ivan. Nobody had any individual rights that he was born with. These people were, they were made by the state, appointed by the state, and if the ruler felt like it, could be removed by the state, and everybody knew it. The Tsar's powers were absolute, a tradition Ivan's successors would defend to the death of the Russian Empire. If we are to say that our people still to this day have some affinity for the monarchy, the foundation for this was laid by Ivan the Terrible. He preached the ideology of autocracy.

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Even with all Russia at his command, Ivan wanted more. He dispatched armies to expand his dominion East and West. Under its Tsar, the land commonly called Muscovy would become a nation of nations, a true empire. As his crusade of terror swept the land, only madmen or the most devout dared to challenge the Tsar. As Ivan approached the city of Pskov, this holy man, this holy fool, came up before Ivan and offered him some raw meat, dripping with blood. And Ivan said, "I do not eat meat during Lent." And the holy fool said, "But you drink Christian blood." For nearly eight years, the Tsar waged war on his own people. When Russia's real enemies attacked, the nation was too weak to resist. In 1571, Russia's age-old nemesis, the Tatars, capitalized on Ivan's terror. Tatar warriors swept north out of the Crimea and sacked Moscow. Flame engulfed the wooden metropolis. In three hours, the city burned to the ground. Over sixty thousand people died in a day. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Ivan's madness seemed to burn out. Faced with a ruined capital and a shattered land, the Tsar abolished his terrible army of black riders. But the damage had already been done. The brutality of the Oprichniki, coupled with disaster and disease, in years to come would devastate the heart of Muscovy. If we are to believe the statistics that have survived, some of the areas of Muscovy are 50%, 60%, some of them are 80% and 90% depopulated.

Still, Ivan's fiery passions were far from spent. Since the death of his first wife, Anastasia, he had married so many times, the Orthodox Church would no longer bless the ceremony. Ivan's amorous intentions even extended to England's royal court. He actually investigated the possibility of a marriage proposal to Mary of Hastings, who was a lady-in-waiting in Elizabeth's court and who is related to Elizabeth herself. And this too would have made for a rather strange juxtaposition, Moscow and London in the age of Shakespeare. The Tsar had no need of a wife to breed an heir. The succession was assured. Ivan's eldest son, the Tsarevich, shared his father's lust for knowledge and power, some say even for torture.

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But on a November evening in 1581, Ivan's terrible passions devoured devout joy. The Tsar had never been happy with his son's choice for a bride. This night, disapproval boiled over into bloodshed. Ivan was furious at the dress of his daughter-in-law and was furious at the way she behaved towards him, which he took to be as a sign of disrespect, and possibly may have begun to manage. Shocked, Ivan's son and heir turned on his father. The Tsar responded in fury. Blind with rage, Ivan struck out with his heavy iron staff at the Tsarevich, and the son of his great love Anastasia, struck dead by Ivan himself. With the death of his heir, Ivan's life seemed to unravel. Accounts say that the Tsar felt haunted by the thousands he'd had killed, not least the murder of his own beloved son. Executed a great number of people, and as a religious person who tried to seek absolution for this sin, the terrorists, as part of that, he ordered that the names of all those who perished during the terror be written down. According to legend, at the age of 53, Ivan convened a congress of mystics and stargazers to peer into the future. What they foresaw was his death. They even named the date: March 18th, 1584. Ivan was playing chess on the eve of the 18th. Not long before midnight, the Tsar felt dead. All right. Tsar Ivan the Terrible had raised Muscovy from a kingdom to an empire.

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But Ivan's very own brutality had destroyed the son and heir he had raised to lead Russia. After his death, Ivan had shattered a royal line that stretched back over seven centuries, and the empire he had worked so hard to build hurtled into chaos. For decades, Tsar Ivan the Terrible had held Russia together with the force of will and fear. Then, in 1584, Ivan died. His reign of terror was over, but the chaos had only just begun. The Russians themselves would call the early 1600s Smutnoye Vremya, the Time of Troubles.

Time of Troubles was really a very traumatic and disastrous time. The country has gone through terrible upheavals. In the terror, famine, disease, all these things. So everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. It's a disaster. It's a catastrophe. I don't think there's any other way to explain it. A vicious cycle of hardship spread chaos and despair across the land. To survive, peasants ate grass, bark. Some records claimed they even turned to cannibalism. Russia's rulers fared little better. Fyodor Ivanovich, Boris Godunov, Fyodor Godunov, Vasily Shuisky. Between 1598 and 1610, six different men claimed the title Tsar, only to die or be deposed. The Kremlin grew so shaky, the throne fell prey to an outright imposter. The Pretender came from Poland, claiming to be Tsar Ivan's long-lost heir. The charlatan wore the crown for a year before he was exposed and sent home, Russian style. The Russians killed him, burned his corpse, stuffed his ashes in a cannon, pointed it at Poland, and lit the fuse. After that, things only got worse. In the South, Tatar raids and peasant revolts shattered Moscow's authority. In the North, Sweden, the greatest military power of the day, invaded from the Baltic coast. Then the Poles flooded across the border. Their armies drove deep into the Russian heartland. In 1610, they captured Moscow. The King of Poland stood poised to add the throne of the Tsars to his dominions. Russia was on the brink of obliteration. And there's a real possibility that a Pole will sit on the Russian throne, and that I think more than anything stirs nationwide revolt.

In the dungeon of the Kremlin, the Poles imprisoned Russia's last national authority, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Not far from death, the Patriarch issued a desperate plea. He begged the Russian people to rise up and save their motherland. Noblemen and peasants alike heard the call and banded together. A national militia arose to retake Moscow. After two years of fighting and blood sacrifice, the improvised Russian army liberated Moscow from the Poles. Victorious in saving their capital, the Russian people knew now more than ever they needed a Tsar to survive. The militia's leader, Dmitry Pozharsky, "Without a sovereign, how can we defend ourselves against our common enemies, the Poles, the Swedes, and Russian rogues who stir up strife?" Nobles, merchants, warriors, priests, they assembled to choose a new Tsar. They sought divine authority, a devout Orthodox monarch with blood ties to Ivan the Terrible. In a monastery far from Moscow, they tracked down a distant relative of Tsar Ivan's first wife, a 16-year-old boy, Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov. Young Michael at first refused the crown, then bowed to pressure and ambition. July 1613. Mikhail Romanov was crowned Grand Prince of Moscow, autocrat and Tsar of all the Russias. It was the birth of three centuries of Romanov family rule.

A dynasty which survives 300 years is successful. You know, this is one of the great European dynastic regimes, one of the great European families. The Romanovs spawned a whole series of Tsars and Tsarinas who were, who reformed Russia, who brought Russia into the modern world, who made of her a world power. Under the first two Tsars of the new Romanov Dynasty, Moscow began to reassert control over Russia and her people. Any nobleman who dared challenge central authority faced exile or the loss of his lands. In return for their loyalty, the nobles were soon awarded unprecedented control over the peasants who worked their fields. The chaotic Time of Troubles had opened a window for the peasants. For years, they walked away from debts and landlords. The exodus crippled farms across Russia and destroyed the nation's economy. Moscow's solution: serfdom. And what serfdom really is, in the law code of 1649, is to give any landholder unlimited time to find and return a runaway peasant. And that is from that point onwards, it's understood that a peasant on these estates is to be considered a serf. Three Russians had been made serfs, slaves, the legal property of the nobles who owned the land.

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Law-bound peasants, their children, and their children's children to the fields for life. Serfdom, the enslavement of their own people, would haunt the Empire and the Romanov Dynasty until its demise. The second Romanov, Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, set other more promising trends in motion as well. He opened Russia's borders to trade with the West. His armies pushed Russia's eastern border all the way to the Pacific. And even then, Russia's thirst to expand was far from finished. Drive to the sea. The Russians saw that their fate as a nation was to reach the Pacific Ocean, to go north up to, to go north to the Baltic Sea, to go south to the Black Sea, and that that was what they were destined by geography to do.

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Russia's thrust for the Black Sea would shape war and peace for centuries. The quest for the Baltic would become the driving obsession of Tsar Alexis' heir, Peter the Great.

May 30th, 1672. Moscow erupted in celebration. The Tsar's new wife had given birth to a healthy new prince, a boy who would fall in love with boats and ideas and power, a boy called Peter. It was clear young Pyotr Alexeyevich would make a perfect Tsar. Problem was, he wasn't the next in line for the throne. Peter's father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, sired two families with two different wives. Peter's half-brothers, Fyodor and Ivan, were both ahead of him in the succession. But there was one other member of the family determined to break tradition and seize the crown for herself: Peter's half-sister, Sophia. She was educated beyond what women had usually been educated, and she was a very smart woman. In fact, she was probably the best choice among all the Romanovs to rule Russia. Well, at Tsar Alexei's death, Sophia's brother Fyodor took the throne, only to die soon after. Now Peter's family reached for the crown. With the blessing of the church, Peter's uncles prepared to make the ten-year-old boy the new Tsar. But Sophia had other plans, plans that would leave Peter scarred forever.

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Fyodor's funeral. Sophia planted a vicious rumor: "People see how our brother Tsar Fyodor has suddenly gone from this world. His enemies have disposed of him." Sophia's rumor hit the Kremlin like a bomb. Elite Musketeers in the army, the Streltsy, cried for the blood of Peter's family. Peter was 10 years old, and he witnessed things that no 10-year-old should ever have witnessed. Having his uncles, many of the family's closest friends, his father's chief of state, having them all dragged out of their chambers.

Having them thrown onto upturned pikes, and then having their bodies dragged to the center of Red Square and hacked to pieces. For three days, Peter and his mother had no idea whether they would live or die. Peter was spared because he was of the royal blood. He was the Tsarevich. To kill the legitimate Tsar would have been a terrible sin. Sophia couldn't kill Peter, so she took power with a cunning compromise. Russia would crown not one Tsar, but two: Peter I and his half-brother Ivan V. But big sister Sophia would be their Crown Regent, and the real power behind the throne, literally. And there's even a good visual image of this. There's a two-seated throne that was made for the boy Tsars, Peter and Ivan, except behind Peter's seat, there's a little window, and so Sophia would sit back there and whisper suggestions to the young Peter. Although Sophia pulled the strings, tradition kept her from wearing the crown. She was never crowned Tsarina. Russia was not ready for this yet, even though they would have a woman at the helm not far after the death of Peter, but she was still running the scenes as Regent while Peter was a young boy.

Having escaped the bloodbath with his life, Peter abandoned the capital. And while Sophia built a power base in the Kremlin, young Peter built his own stronghold from scratch.

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From childhood, the boy Tsar loved to tinker and build. He sought out craftsmen who taught him to work wood, metal, and stone. As he turned 13, Peter built a wooden fortress in the fields outside Moscow. Then he built an army to attack it, an army of boys, 300 strong. I think he, in fact, had considerable freedom to do what he wanted. And what he wanted was essentially war games. He gets interested in all manner of military things, and he starts building up a sort of mini play army of sorts. The sons of nobles and commoners alike were drummed into Peter's ferocious war games. Though the cannonballs were made of leather, the cannons were real. At one skirmish, 24 young soldiers were killed. Peter's games were deadly serious. The boy Tsar was preparing to save his life and his crown, a crown Sophia had begun to treat as her own. Peter's half-sister now claimed the regal title, Great Sovereign. She posed for a portrait wearing the Tsar's royal regalia. She entertained foreign dignitaries and negotiated alliances. She used her brother Ivan as her frontman, but she couldn't ignore her half-brother Peter. Peter, when he was a child, and Sophia obviously hated each other for political reasons. They were in two different political camps.

By the age of 17, Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov was poised to take power. The boy Tsar had grown into a six-foot-seven-inch giant, backed up by two regiments of the finest troops in Russia. His presence was just overwhelming to people, and, uh, in many ways, he terrified people with his presence. And then you combine that with his temper, and he was a formidable character. In 1689, Peter unleashed his temper on sister Sophia's designs on the crown. In a letter to his half-brother and co-Tsar Ivan, Peter threw down the gauntlet: "Sovereign brother, the time has come for us to rule the realm entrusted to us by God. It is disgraceful that this shameful person should rule the state in our stead."

August 1689. Rumors that Sophia and the Streltsy were preparing to strike first precipitated a new showdown. And this time, Peter was no longer a helpless child. When the showdown occurred, practically everyone supported Peter. Even the Streltsy, some of the regiments wavered, but nonetheless, they supported Peter and did not support Sophia. The great sovereign Sophia's power base evaporated in the face of Tsar Peter's bold gambit. In the end, Peter treated his half-sister like any woman who crossed the Tsar. He banished her from public life and ultimately forced her to take the veil. Sophia Alekseyevna Romanova, a woman who dared to grab the power of the Tsar, would spend the rest of her life as a nun, imprisoned behind convent walls.

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In the kingdom called Muscovy, two brothers sat on the throne of the Tsar. The brothers, Tsar Ivan V and Peter I, ruled a far-flung empire of isolated villages, cities, and towns. A place where daily life had changed little since the Middle Ages. In the 17th century, Muscovy was definitely stuck in a medieval time warp, and it seemed backward by any measures. Muscovite Russia had not experienced the Renaissance. It had not experienced the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Born in a medieval environment, the young Tsar Peter was captivated by everything modern, anything new, anything from the West: people, ideas, even clothes. In 1696, Peter's half-brother and co-Tsar Ivan V died. As Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov assumed sole control of the Russian throne, he declared his lifelong goal: "To break the bonds of the inflexible customs of Muscovy and to lead this country toward a new day, which shall be better than this." And for Peter, Russia's new day dawned not in the East, but in the West. In Europe, there was no alternative in the end, because if one was going to survive, you had to westernize, because the alternative to westernizing was essentially to be run over by one's European neighbors. For Peter, one thing above all symbolized the new Russia he hoped to build: ships. Warships, transports, merchant ships. As Tsar, Peter would build his fascination into a Navy, a force that would change Russia and the world.

Peter had a passion for all sorts of knowledge, but shipbuilding from a young age was something that just fascinated him, and he learned everything he could possibly learn about shipbuilding. But as a potential maritime power, Peter's kingdom had one crippling drawback. Russia, the largest nation on Earth, was practically landlocked. In the north, Sweden and Poland held the Baltic coast. In the south, the Ottoman Empire encircled the Black Sea. Peter wanted a seaport for Russia, a window on the world, the West. He wanted to take Russia out of its Muscovite isolation and backwardness and communicate with the West, uh, communicate with them in terms of technology, in terms of ideas, in terms of exchanging goods. And for that, he needed warm water ports. At 23, the Tsar set his sights on the Black Sea's warm waters and the Turkish stronghold of Azov.

1695. Peter and his army marched south on Azov. The Tsar posted himself to the front line artillery. Peter from almost day one of the Azov campaign is seen action, and that continues for most of his life. He's very much a guy who wants to be where the action is and does not spare himself, as is willing to be out there and be in danger. But even with the warrior Tsar manning the guns, the Turks sent Russia home in defeat. The setback gave Peter a new insight: to capture the naval outpost, he cried, first he needed a Navy to lead the attack. The Tsar ordered up a fleet of battle galleys. He needed them finished in five months. But Russia had never been a naval power. First, they had to build shipyards and train the builders before they could build the ships. Peter himself led the effort. He was right there hammering nails and building, and it was through him that Russia's first Navy was created. No, nothing resembling a Navy had ever existed before.

Peter next spring, the untested Russian flotilla cruised down the River Don. Peter himself at the helm of his flagship. He insisted his men not call him Tsar or Admiral, but simply Captain. On land, the Russian army again attacked the Turks at Azov, and from the sea, Peter and his new Navy backed the troops with a withering naval bombardment. Considering that the first campaign had been a failure and had very serious heavy losses, the second time was a piece of cake. So in that sense, he starts a pattern of, even though he might fail initially, he still won't give up on his objective. Militarily speaking, he'll come back even stronger. Real quick, a taste of naval power had at last won Russia a port on the Black Sea.

But Peter wanted more. He wanted the secrets of the high-tech warships of the great Western navies. And so the Tsar of Russia left his kingdom to seek out the know-how he craved. No Tsar had ever before set foot outside the kingdom. No Tsar had ever even seen Europe. Peter was going to shatter tradition. The winter of 1697, Peter and some 200 nobles, craftsmen, musicians, servants, and a troop of dwarves headed west on a year and a half long European road trip. To escape the tedious burdens of royalty, the Tsar himself often masqueraded as a common sailor. He wanted to absorb as much knowledge as he possibly could without the trappings of formality and court ritual and all of that. So he wanted to, you know, observe unnoticed. It was kind of difficult to be unnoticed, except, you know, at his height, but he didn't want, you know, didn't want to be known as the Tsar. He just wanted to be known as a traveling student.

For a self-taught craftsman, Western Europe offered the ultimate education. He studied printing, iron casting, paper making, even how to render whale blubber. He took classes in surgery and anatomy in Leiden, art in Leipzig, and dentistry in Dresden. He was kind of a jack of all trades. He had such a passion for life and for experimentation that he not only wanted Russia to build a Navy, but he wanted to learn how to be a shipbuilder himself. He wanted not only more Western style, more Western standards of medicine, but he himself practiced dentistry and practiced on some of his unfortunate men. I'm sure that his talents were pretty much limited to pulling out people's teeth, and that was about it. He was observing an anatomy course in Holland, and, uh, they produced a dissected corpse, and all his comrades grew really squeamish when that happened. I mean, they were just repulsed by this because it was just an unusual thing at the time, and Peter was just mortified that their squamousness. He was embarrassed and angry, and, uh, in retaliation against it, he made every one of them stand up, marched down to the table, and take a bite out of the corpse. It was, uh, it was just his way of saying, "Stop it."

Peter's greatest hunger was for nautical science. In Holland's finest shipyard, he apprenticed himself to a master shipwright. Then, Russia's carpenters, he learned how to build a 28-gun frigate from the keel up. But even with a Dutch ship of the line to his credit, Peter wasn't satisfied. The British ruled the seas, so the Tsar headed for England. He knows the reputation also of the British fleet, and the British very much cultivate that. They so they provide a craft for him to sail on the Thames, and although he rams a couple of other vessels while he's learning to pilot this vessel, he does enjoy this, and he, at the end of this all, says that all things being equal, he'd really rather be an admiral in the British Navy than anything else. The English offered Peter a fine manor house for his stay. The Tsar's host would come to regret the hospitality. They tear the place up. They mess up the plantings, the hedge, they shoot up the house. A few months later, a bill which was presented for damages caused to the house by the Russians, and these damages included paintings on the walls which had had shots fired into them, paving stones ripped up, with windows smashed, furniture soiled in various ways. He was on some levels a frat boy, you know, and, and he would just, uh, drink himself silly, and he would, you know, off and on while he was on tour around Russia, he would, I mean, around Western Europe, he would be visiting people's houses, and they were just left a wake of destruction, uh, behind him. When the rowdy Russians wore out their welcome in one land, they moved on to the next.

July 1698. After 16 months on the road, Peter's entourage was partying in Vienna when an urgent message arrived from Moscow. Emboldened by Tsar Peter's extended absence, reactionary Streltsy regiments were stirring up revolt yet again. Peter's European apprenticeship ended abruptly. The Jack of all trades Tsar headed home to assert himself as Russia's unquestioned taskmaster.

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Peter I had reveled in the shipyards and palaces of Western Europe. When he returned home in 1698 and compared his realm with the West, Russia's Supreme Autocrat wasn't happy. His capital, Moscow, struck Peter as primitive and gloomy. Russia's nobility, the boyars, seemed medieval in their long beards and caftans. The Orthodox Church wielded far too much power at the Tsar's expense, and to top it off, the Streltsy, the army's die-hard conservative Musketeers, were in open revolt. Peter resolved to change it all. He dreamed of a new nation, a westernized Russia, an empire inspired by and wedded to Europe, a gilded land of order, progress, and power. He started his revolution with a little barbering. He was known to rip people's beards right out with his bare hands, uh, at the roots. And beards to him were just something that said old barbaric way. It was a tangible way of dragging the nation forward. The Tsar ordered a complete change of clothes for his noblemen. Boyars caught in the traditional long caftans of Muscovy had their robes cut short on the spot. What he's saying to the Russians, certain to the Russian nobility, is, "You can't be very Russian anymore. You have to be Europeans. You have to re-educate yourself to act out the life of European gentlemen and gentlewomen." Peter ruffled feathers all over the place. I mean, what he, he was proposing radical changes. He wanted to drag Russia, literally, out of the Dark Ages, kicking and screaming, with the force of his own will. If his new Russia called for blood sacrifice, the Tsar had no qualms. He saved his greatest wrath for the Streltsy, Russia's reactionary Musketeers. You never really forgave the Streltsy for having murdered so many members of his immediate family, and he sentenced, um, 1,182 members of the Streltsy to execution, and it was widely rumored, and I think it was true, that Peter himself participated in the beheading of many of these Streltsy.

One obsession would shape Peter's entire reign: to create a Russian port on the Baltic coast, a window that would open Peter's kingdom to the world. But in 1700, the Baltic coast belonged to another nation and another bold young king, Charles XII of Sweden. Born and bred a warrior, Sweden's King Charles would make Peter and Russia pay dearly for his Baltic dream. Cost the blood of thousands and 20 years of war. The duel began late in the year 1700. Peter's army, forty thousand strong, marched on Narva, the Swedes' Baltic stronghold. With only eight thousand men, Charles was outnumbered five to one. But in a blinding snowstorm, Sweden's warrior king seized the moment. "Now is the time. With the storm at our backs, they will never see how few we are." The Swedes charged out of the blizzard and completely overwhelmed the Russians. Peter, who had all these dreams of making Russia a superb military power, met ignominious defeat. His 35, 34,000 soldiers were trounced by Charles. Charles's army of 8,000. Convinced that Russia was a paper tiger, Charles turned west to attack Poland. He would save Tsar Peter for later.

What Narva did to Peter is to convince him that all of the resources of the vast country which was under his control had to be put to serve one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to build Russia into a military power. Peter seized bells from Russia's churches and melted them down to make cannon. He jacked up taxes to pay for a military buildup. He drafted 45,000 new

Troops from Russia's peasant families. The term of service in the Russian army when people are drafted is 25 years. It's considered a death sentence. And when peasants leave the village to go into the army, they're given essentially a wake. They're treated as though they had died and that they're not coming back.

While Charles and the Swedes were distracted in Poland, Peter's army marched for the sea. By 1703, the Russians had carved out a beachhead on the Baltic along the shores of the Gulf of Finland, on a boggy island where the river Neva meets the gulf. Peter the Great staked his claim by nature. "We are fated here to cut a window through to Europe. Here shall be a town." He could have settled in the cities of of the of the Baltics, but no, he had to start a brand new city. And this was significant. It was richly symbolic in that he was creating a new Russia, a new Russian Empire, and to essentially be able to start from scratch.

May 1703, the Tsar grabbed an ax and began to build the city. He christened Sankt Pietersburg. Never a patient man, Peter wanted his new town to rise as fast as possible. He built his own log house in just three days.

I knew Charles and the Swedes would return and try to force Russia out of the Baltic. He wanted fortresses and fighting ships ready to hurl them back. He wanted a city that Russia would never surrender. He ordered it all built, whatever the cost.

Peter drafted thousands of workers to build his new city: peasants, soldiers, even Swedish prisoners, often without tools. They dug with their hands. In summer, malaria and mud crippled the work. In winter, ice and scurvy took their toll. Laborers died by the thousands. The Russians would say, "St. Petersburg was built on bones."

The way that Peter forced the creation, the building of Saint Petersburg, also illustrates the steps that he was willing to take to bring Russia into the modern period, to rent Russia into the modern period. More than a new city, Saint Petersburg was the foundation of a new society. To dramatize the transformation of his realm, Peter would erect a gilded showcase just outside the city: Peterhof, his new Summer Palace. The Russian Czar sought to outdo even the glories of Versailles. Peter's goals, his new city, his new nation, were more important than any Russian life.

Uprooted, his entire court and commanded them to build new homes in his window on the west. He even told them how and where to build. Peter's city was really his plaything, in a way. I mean, like some kings would line up their soldiers and make them march. He did the same thing, really, with Petersburg and its inhabitants. So, the city had a sort of martial character to it from the start.

When Sweden's King Charles heard of Peter's mad rush to build, he scoffed. "Let the Tsar tire himself out with founding new towns. We will keep for ourselves the honor of taking them later." In 1708, Charles prepared to make good his boast. The battle-tested Swedish army stormed out of Poland and marched for Moscow. Peter answered with fire, a blanket of fire, burning everything in the Swedes' path. Wherever Charles attacked, his troops conquered only scorched earth.

By the following winter, the mighty Swedish army was trapped deep in Russian territory, hundreds of miles from their supplies, running short of ammunition and food. Peter waited for spring, then sent his rebuilt army, sixty thousand strong, to confront Charles's invaders. In July, the Tsar and the King of Sweden faced off outside the Ukrainian town of Poltava. Crippled from wounds, Charles had to be carried onto the battlefield. But even outnumbered nearly three to one, Sweden's Warrior King still ordered his troops to attack. Sweden's first wave curled the Russians back. Then Peter's artillery opened fire. Russian guns riddled Charles's troops. Russian conscripts drove them back. Peter's new army was simply too big and too well-armed. On the killing fields of Poltava, King Charles's reign of glory was drowned in blood and dust. Russia's absolute ruler, Tsar Pyotr Alexander Romanov, would become the new master of the Baltic. Russia was at last a great European power.

In 1711, Tsar Peter the Great moved Russia's capital to his triumphant city on the Baltic, Sankt Pietersburg. There was just one problem: the Russian people still considered Moscow the capital. But Peter never let public opinion interfere with his grandiose plans.

Peter lived life non-stop. He often traveled over 100 miles a day in an age when most people might never travel that far in a lifetime. The list of his innovations and reforms seems endless: the first Russian newspaper, the first hospital, the first museum, schools for navigation, geography, mathematics, politics, and astronomy. A new name, a new army, a new capital. Ultimately, Peter outgrew even his crown. Not content with the old Muscovite title and regalia, Peter ordered a new European-style crown. Then he bestowed on himself a new regal title: not Czar, but Emperor, Autocrat of All the Russians.

Still, Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov had come of age in the shadows of the Kremlin. He had seen palace intrigue destroy powerful men. Now, in his 40s, Peter knew that his life's work might be erased at his death. He really did, I think, have a very long-term vision, and it was very important to him that everything that he'd done was not, was not be undone. It must be continued.

To guarantee the survival of his new Russia, Peter needed a loyal, capable successor. But Peter's only son, the Tsarevich Alexei, would prove to be the great man's greatest disappointment. The two could not have been more different. Peter was this giant of a man; he was energetic, he was decisive. And yet, his son was short, he was lazy, he was sluggish. He wasn't as bright as his father. It was really quite a disastrous situation. He wanted to kind of live a life of luxury and disregarded all the training that was necessary to be Peter's heir, and it bothered Peter to no end.

As Alexei reached manhood, Peter berated his son. "You do not make the least endeavors, and all your pleasure seems to consist in staying idle and lazy." His father essentially tells him, "Look, you're either going to do it my way, or you're going to have to renounce the throne. There's no other way. You have got to prepare yourself to be the ruler as I tell you to. If you do not mend, I will deprive you of the succession, as one may cut off a gangrenous limb." For his part, the Tsarevich begged his father to relieve him from the burden of succession. "I do not think myself fit for government. My memory is weak, my body decayed. I do not aspire to the Russian crown."

While Alexei failed to meet Peter's high expectations, the Tsar had already found someone else who did: a buxom Lithuanian peasant girl, Marta Skavronska. She starts life, really, as a sort of camp follower. She was a beautiful young woman, and one of the Russian generals took a fancy to her. The story then goes that Peter then caught sight of her, and, and he, of course, as the Tsar, could have anything he wanted, and that he then took her.

As Marta evolved into the Tsar's closest confidant, the camp follower acquired a respectable society name: Ekaterina, Catherine. She was the helpmate that he needed. I mean, she went with him to battles, she comforted him when, when he got angry, she, she was, she produced children for him and gave him the love and the warmth that I think he had been denied, probably, as a child.

The queen married first in secret. Later, they remarried before the court. In time, Peter would even crown her Empress of Russia. And in 1715, Catherine gave Peter what he craved most: a new male heir. The birth of a baby half-brother complicated life for Peter's first son, a 25-year-old Tsarevich Alexei.

As the gulf between the Tsar and his heir widened, Peter issued an ultimatum. "I cannot resolve to let you live according to your own will. Either strive to render yourself worthy of the succession, or become a monk." Tsar Peter prepared to imprison his son in a monastery. Desperate to live free of his overbearing father, Alexei escaped to the West. But Alexei's sudden flight only helped to convince Peter that his son was part of a plot against the Russian Crown.

The Tsar's spies tracked Alexei to Austria and lured the Tsarevich back to Russia. And behind the stone walls of Saint Petersburg's island fortress, Alexei faced his father's wrathful inquisition. He was almost immediately confronted with an ultimatum: that unless he divorce all his accomplices, he would not get his, his pardon. Treason, conspiracy. The Tsarevich confessed to every offense his father could imagine. Alexei named names and accomplices.

You believe that the election, probably, was part of a conspiracy against him, and to find out the truth, he had Alexei tortured with a knout, which is a thick leather whip that it just shreds through skin. And 15 to 25 lashes with the knout were considered standard. Anything over that would cause death. And on the first day alone, Alexei got 25 lashes. The Tsar showed no tolerance for even the possibility of counter-reform. He sentenced his son to be beaten for two brutal days.

June 1718. Alexei Petrovich Romanov died behind the fortress walls, and then to death by his own father. That's our. I honestly don't believe that ultimately Peter wanted Alexei dead. He wanted him alive and being the Alexei which Peter wanted, but which is what Alexei couldn't be.

Barely a year later, the wheel of fate turned on Peter. His young son, Pyotr, the child of his beloved Catherine, died. The Russian Empire now had no male heir, and for Russia's first official Emperor, time was running short. On a cold November day in 1724, Peter spotted a vessel foundering in the Baltic. Hands on to the very end, Peter waded into the freezing waters to save the sailors. Soon after, the Tsar fell sick.

As he lay dying in January of 1725, Peter took pen and paper and prepared to write his will. In a single generation, Peter the Great had remade Russia. He had transformed his ancient land from an isolated kingdom into a modern global power. The goal, a headstrong young man had set some 30 years before. Peter introduced so much that was new, but in particular, he ended the xenophobia and the religiosity of the old Muscovite way of life, and he ended the isolation of Russia as a country. And I think this is terribly important. He introduced a whole new style of statecraft. Peter saw himself not as being a religious keeper of the status quo, which the Muscovite Tsars were, but as being a secular, hard-working, reforming Tsar, capable of creating through force and fiat. And I think these were the ways in which Peter demonstrated himself to be a real revolutionary.

A task remained. Peter still had to name an heir to his empire. Yet, of 15 children by two wives, only two daughters survived. On a piece of paper, he wrote, "Give it all to..." He died without finishing the sentence, without naming an heir. I think ultimately, though, the reason that Peter didn't choose was he perhaps thought that he was immortal. He didn't expect to die as soon as he did. He thought he still had time. He left it too late.

The giant of the Romanov Dynasty had stumbled and left the greatest empire on Earth without a ruler. Winter and doubt gripped Russia. Spring could be foretold, but Russia's future was unknown.

On a November evening in 1741, Peter the Great's daughter, Elizabeth Petrovna Romanova, dressed for a night to remember. Like her father, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth loved dramatic surprises. Tonight, she planned a showstopper: a bold grab for power over the largest empire on Earth. Elizabeth built upon the popularity she had with the guards, and when her carriage ran through the streets of Saint Petersburg, there would often be cries, "Elizabeth, you are our true Empress! You must take the throne!"

Elizabeth's father, the legendary Tsar Peter, had transformed Russia from an isolated borderland into an 18th-century superpower. Russian arms controlled the balance of power across northern Europe and Western Asia, and it carried the empire east to the Pacific. But on his deathbed, Peter plunged Russia into turmoil when he died without naming an heir to the throne. Some saw Peter's daughter Elizabeth as his natural successor, but the late Tsar's enemies had their own designs on the crown, and at 15, Elizabeth was not ready to fight for power in the ruthless Russian court. And so, Elizabeth watched for 16 years as rival factions dragged the Romanov Dynasty to the brink of extinction. First her mother, then a nephew, then an estranged cousin took the throne. Hard living, smallpox, death claimed them all. Finally, a distant cousin, a two-month-old baby boy with hardly a drop of Tsar Peter's blood, was proclaimed Emperor of Russia.

Elizabeth is well aware that her family once were the controllers of the throne, and so she feels some threat that if she doesn't make a play for power, she may suffer even worse consequences. She might be sent to a convent.

With an infant on the Imperial Throne, Elizabeth sensed opportunity and took action. On November 25th, 1741, Peter the Great's daughter donned a royal guardsman's uniform, rallied her father's most loyal officers, and led her forces in a swift and bloodless coup. Her helpless rival, the infant Tsar, was locked away the rest of his unfortunate life. At 32, Elizabeth seized the crown and her birthright as Empress. She was brilliant in her transfer of power. She immediately came out with an accession manifesto that said, "I will rule in the spirit of my father and my mother. I will be a reformer. I am a Russian. I will keep Russian interests at heart. We have finally gotten rid of this treasonous group who had occupied the throne and robbed Russia of its riches."

Elizabeth wasted no time naming her own heir. Childless herself, in 1742, the new Empress chose her nephew, German-born Peter Ulrich, next in line for the throne. He was born under the luckiest of stars. The kid, at the moment of birth, could have been the Grand Duke of Holstein, the King of Sweden, or the Emperor of Russia. Now, that's a very good bloodline. At the age of 14, the lucky princeling left his beloved German homeland of Holstein to join the Russian court.

There was just one problem: the young Tsar-to-be, Peter III, hated Russia and all things Russian. He was Empress Elizabeth's nephew, and he was designated by her to be the heir. He was truly a foolish, stupid character. He was immature, uh, he had a shrill, irritating voice, and thought that the height of wit was to stick his tongue out. Peter's dubious character and open scorn for Russia made him a less than perfect candidate for the throne.

To protect the Empire and the Romanov Dynasty, Elizabeth wanted an heir she could trust, a child of Peter III, but bred from birth to rule and love Russia. What she needed now was a healthy young princess to breed her a baby Tsarovich. And so, in the winter of 1744, the Empress summoned a second young German to her palace: Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. It was the beginning of a 50-year odyssey which would transform the daughter of impoverished aristocrats into the most powerful woman on Earth: the Empress Catherine the Great.

She realized that this was her great opportunity. That she was from a rather low-ranking German princely family, and that her future in Russia was a lot more promising than anything that she could find in Germany. Not long after she arrived, the 15-year-old girl was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church and re-christened Catherine in honor of Elizabeth's own mother. From the start, Catherine eagerly embraced her adopted homeland.

Russia was her fiancee: the German-born heir to the Russian Throne, Grand Duke Peter III. The fact that Peter seemed dim-witted and childish didn't help the romance. Peter's passions were his toy soldiers. He would bring them to bed with him and put them through their maneuvers, and she had to play along. He would kind of drill her and march her around and this kind of thing. She got tired of that. She walked in one day to find a rat hanging from a rope, and he, he explained to her that the rat had committed treason, and that he was paying the penalty. So this is what she was dealing with in terms of a husband: an imbecile.

Fireworks lit the skies on the night of the royal wedding. In the bridal bed, fireworks were out of the question. In the arena of court politics, producing an heir to the throne would soon be a matter of survival. Under the circumstances, delivering on that job might take Catherine more time than expected, and perhaps a little extramarital assistance.

In 1753, after eight years of marriage, the Grand Duchess Catherine, wife of the heir to the Russian Throne, finally lost her virginity, but not to her husband, the Grand Duke Peter. The Empress Elizabeth expected Catherine to produce the next generation of Romanovs. With her husband unwilling or unable to help, the Grand Duchess followed the advice of her friends and gave her heart and body to a willing courtier, Sergei Saltykov. She was encouraged to have this affair with Sergei Saltykov, and this apparently was an attempt to get both Peter and Catherine more at home with matters sexual, and then to get them together to produce the promised heir. With Peter off doing his thing, leaving her lonely and abandoned, the one role that she was designated to do, she wasn't able to do, which was reproduce, and that put her in a very threatening position.

Treason could be a dangerous game, but for Catherine, more risky than remaining childless. Soon, she delivered what the Empress required: a baby, Paul. Historians still debate whether the royal heir was fathered by Catherine's husband or lover. Having performed her duty, Catherine was cast aside, discarded by her husband, the Empress, and their circles at court. But the Grand Duchess had already developed an appetite for power. Catherine became a student of silent observation, and in doing that, she learned all the customs of Russia, the language. She even converted to the Russian Orthodox Church as a way of incorporating herself into the system. She learned Russian politics. She liked politics. She read widely to keep herself abreast of European thinking. So, for all of these reasons, Catherine became a very attractive figure at court.

Catherine had been bold since childhood, and now, with the royal heir to her credit, she waded into the political fray. At one dinner, she warned the French ambassador to mind her ambitions. "Never was a woman bolder than I. I have unbridled the audacity." Peter and Catherine drifted from distant relations to open hostility. The Tsar-to-be warned that once he succeeded Elizabeth on the throne, he might lock his wife in a convent or dispose of her entirely. But while her husband threatened, Catherine built defenses and planned for the future. She forged alliances with generals and politicians throughout the Empire and across Europe.

In 1758, Catherine's growing web of influence caught the attention of the Empress Elizabeth. To cover her tracks, Catherine burned her journals and correspondence, then she met the Tsarina for a private conference to discuss Catherine's loyalty and Elizabeth's unsatisfactory heir, Peter. It certainly had been planted in Catherine's mind that she might like to be Empress in her own right. So, there were, there was plotting, and people who recognized Peter as being incompetent, feared despotic tendencies in his character, rallied around Catherine.

While Peter and Catherine sparred, the Empress Elizabeth's armies marched into battle. The Empire's enemy, Crusher and his warrior king, Frederick the Great, a man the German-born Grand Duke Peter had idolized all his life, shaken Europe's balance of power. Elizabeth had joined an alliance to quash Frederick's upstart Germanic Empire. By 1761, Russian forces had gained the upper hand.

In Saint Petersburg, heroes from the front returned to adoring throngs. The greatest hero of them all, the Guardsman Grigory Orlov, swept the Grand Duchess Catherine off her feet. Grigory Orlov was the second of the five Orlov brothers, all of whom were handsome, all of whom were reckless, all of whom were dashing, and Catherine fell in love with the said Grigory Orlov, and he was the one who helped organize the guards to support her bid for the throne. Catherine and the Orlov brothers dubbed Peter "the monster." They despised his childish ways and crushing fixation.

As the year ended, events came to a head at the front. The Russian army had overrun Berlin. Frederick the Great was on his knees. His German kingdom was about to be wiped off the map. At the palace, Grand Duke Peter was in despair at the impending defeat of his beloved Prussia, while his aunt Elizabeth was poised for victory. Then came Christmas Day. Elizabeth Romanova, 52 years old, sole surviving child of Peter the Great, Tsarina and Empress of Russia, fell dead.

Elizabeth really had created the modern Russian European type court. A European court was unthinkable without women, and women had not been at all prominent at the Muscovite court. In many ways, Empress Elizabeth, despite her flaws, was a role model for Catherine: on that, a woman can be in charge and have power.

The Empress's nephew and heir to the throne, the German princeling Peter III, danced for glee at Elizabeth's funeral. In his first act as Tsar, Peter declared peace with Prussia, sparing his hero Frederick from annihilation and infuriating the entire Russian army. And the new Tsar wouldn't stop there. He ordered the officer corps out of the Russian green uniforms he hated and dressed them in Prussian blue. He stripped the icons out of the Russian Orthodox Church he feared and ordered the priests to dress like German Lutheran ministers. Hearty adventure. Peter ordered up an invasion force to claim the German homeland he had left 20 years before: the distant Duchy of Holstein.

One night, Tsar Peter toasted his impending crusade. When his wife Catherine failed to raise her glass, Peter announced to all that her time had run out. He was threatening to divorce Catherine, send her to a nunnery, and leave her without anything. And so, Catherine realized that the moment had come also for her to act. The next night, Catherine's lover, Grigory Orlov, his brothers, and their fellow Guardsmen led a coup to save Catherine and Russia. They deposed Peter with ease. But for the hapless Tsar, the worst was still to come.

If you are an Empress, the only good ex-Emperor is a dead ex-Emperor. To keep Catherine's hands clean, Orlov and his brothers dragged Peter out of Saint Petersburg. The conspirators' hatred soon got out of hand.

A letter to Catherine from Orlov broke the news: "The monster was dead."

In July of 1762, Peter III, the Tsar of Russia, suffered an unfortunate fatal accident. He collided with the ambitions of his wife, Catherine the Great. The official word was that he had died of hemorrhoids, an odd disease to pick, but nonetheless. After he was killed, it became even more important that she establish that she was the savior of Russia, and that he was going to crucify Russia.

To depose an unpopular ruler was one thing, but for a German princess to claim the Tsar's crown, Catherine would have to transform herself and the Russian nation. How did Catherine have the hutzpah to think that she could rule? The hubris, indeed. Well, again, I think she knew she had the talent, and she had the backing, and she had become Russian. She certainly saw herself as legitimate, that she was the competent person, that she was devoted to Russia and Russia's interests, that she saved Russia from disaster.

For more than half her life, Catherine had forged allies and studied the path to power. Like her model, the Empress Elizabeth, Catherine seized the throne with a coup. Then, to consecrate her authority, she headed to the cathedrals of the Kremlin to be crowned. She immediately orchestrated a brilliant coronation in which she was celebrated as elected by the people, and then she embarked upon a program of reform. That was how you demonstrated your fitness for the throne. After Peter the Great, you reformed. You became a reforming Tsar.

At 33 years old, a German princess had claimed the authority of the Russian Emperor. The Empress Catherine the Great's lust for knowledge and power would prove to be the stuff of legend and the engine of history. Fill the rooms of Saint Petersburg's palaces with art by the great masters, turning her Hermitage into the world's greatest museum. She collected admirers like she stockpiled art: powerful friends and devoted lovers, men she used to cement her hold on power and ease the burdens of Imperial rule. For hunger for land, expanded the empire in almost every direction, from Eastern Europe to Alaska and America's Pacific Northwest. Catherine reigned supreme. Above all, she pursued reform. She promoted local government, she chartered schools and universities, she encouraged Russia's elites to challenge tradition, and in so doing, lit the fuse for revolutionary change in Russia. The entire Russian elite felt as though they were having a honeymoon period with her, because they discovered that finally, they had an Empress who spoke the same language as they did, the language of the Enlightenment, who had the same goals as they did, namely, to make Russia a state based on law, not based on personal rule. And they applauded this Empress of theirs.

Catherine seized the Russian throne in 1762. In the age of Enlightenment, philosophers and writers heralded the Rights of Man, the belief that reason could perfect human society. Catherine saw herself as a priestess of the liberal movement. "Liberty, the soul of everything; without you, all is dead." Yet, the Rights of Man confronted the Empress Catherine with a dangerous paradox. For in Russia, where the economy was built on the slave labor of the serfs, human rights was an explosive ideal. It's precisely because you have this enormous gap between sections of educated society and the realities of Russian life, and indeed, the values and the mentality of the bulk of the peasant population, that Russia becomes increasingly difficult to govern.

The plight of Russia's serfs gnawed at Catherine's high ideals. Still, the Empress knew her crown depended on the loyalty of the nobility. To free the serfs would undermine the nobles and her throne. But in villages along the Volga, the peasants took liberation into their own hands. Three a sack and army deserter, Emelian Pugachev, proclaimed himself to be Catherine's dead husband, Tsar Peter III. He called on the masses to overthrow the tyrant queen, set up a court, and started issuing edicts quite of a revolutionary nature, namely, "Let us exterminate the officials and the landlords. Let us end taxation and end military equipment. Free the serfs and divide up the land." So, this was quite revolutionary and attractive to many parts of the population.

Over a year, rebellion gripped. Murdered, hated, but even as they swelled to over one hundred thousand men, Pugachev's forces would prove no match for Catherine's army. In 1774, the pretender was captured, brought to court in an iron cage, interrogated, and executed. His peasant revolt died with him. The fate of Russia's working poor would haunt the Empire to its death. But for Catherine, human rights ended where they threatened her absolute rule. It's been said by people who were in her entourage that she developed a fear of the common people and conviction that it was much too early to free the serfs.

Like Peter the Great, Catherine was committed to reform, but survival came first. And for a Russian ruler, survival often depended on raw power, conquest, and expansion. There's a very clear logic in Russia's expansion, just as there's also a political logic. I mean, the ruling class of Russia is a land-owning aristocratic class. Territorial expansion brings them enormous benefits. The state itself is a sort of deal between the Tsar and the aristocracy, and both of them gained tremendously from expansion.

Catherine knew that one territorial goal had always tantalized the Tsars: to expand Russia to the shores of the Black Sea. Seizing the Black Sea coast from the Ottoman Empire would become the Tsarina's enduring obsession. In 1768, Catherine's armies marched into years of warfare with the Ottoman Turks and their allies. The struggle would shape much of Catherine's reign and her personal life. Obviously, she could not be a general in the field, but she paid a lot of attention to the armed forces, made sure they were loyal to her, she gave them all sorts of favors. One victorious commander in the Turkish campaigns won special favor for the Empress: Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin. As the Turks gave way in the South, a champion gained sway in the court. Soon, his position eclipsed old favorites like Grigory Orlov. Potemkin was tall, one-eyed; he'd lost an eye, greasy, brutish, all qualities that repulsed most women, but to Catherine, he was just the end. And through satisfying her, he gained a lot of power in the kingdom. The moody, battle-scarred warrior became the Empress's closest advisor and the great love of her life. He was awarded chambers in the Winter Palace, and for years, he could be seen roaming the halls at night. From all sources, it appears that they had a very passionate affair, and they may have been secretly married. And here you have an example, once again, of Catherine using someone who, who grew into becoming a great statesman, one of the great statesmen in all of Russian history.

Catherine enlisted Potemkin in her plan to dismember the ailing Ottoman Empire. The critical first step: conquer the strategic Black Sea Peninsula, the Crimea. This would give Russia a commanding Southern stronghold. For years, Potemkin guided Catherine's assault on the Crimea. In 1784, Russia would officially take control of the peninsula. To show her gratitude, the Empress anointed Potemkin Prince of Crimea.

After 20 years on the throne, the Empress Catherine had realized the age-old dream of the Tsars. Russia had seized the Crimea and become a leading Black Sea power. To commemorate her reign, Catherine unveiled a monument to Peter the Great in the heart of Saint Petersburg. The magnificent Bronze Horseman became a symbol of her legitimacy, one more link to the chain between a German Princess and the dynasty of the Romanovs. She wanted to make clear to them that she was going to follow the kinds of policies that Peter the Great had, that Russia was going to be great again. And she actually was offered the title of "the Great" in the first year of her reign, and she rejected and said, "This is absurd. This is only something that posterity can decide."

Catherine now considered herself truly Russian. Once, when doctors came to bleed the Empress, she joked that she hoped they would drain the last drop of her German blood. In the end, Catherine's legacy would be shaped by blood: blood in the streets of Paris, over a thousand miles away; the blood of the French Revolution.

The Empress Catherine of Russia entered the last decade of the 18th century as the most powerful woman on Earth. Her dominion stretched from Poland to Alaska. She ruled nearly 30 million nobles and commoners and serfs with a firm hand, firm faith in progress and reform. Catherine introduced public participation in government in a way that had never occurred before in Russian history, and thereby laid the foundations for what is called today a civil society. She is one of the greatest monarchs of the 18th century, one of the greatest monarchs in Russia, and perhaps one of the greatest monarchs of all time. But the almighty Empress was powerless to affect history a continent away. And in the late 18th century, Russia's destiny was being shaped in the streets of Paris.

1793. Revolutionary terror claimed the life of Louis XVI, King of France. For Catherine, his execution was a crime against God's will. She saw Louis XVI beheaded, and she started doubting the Enlightenment ideals that may have resulted in all of this. So she became somewhat panicked by the French Revolution. In 1796, the revolution flooded out of France as the army of the French Republic marched into Italy, led by a brilliant young commander: Napoleon Bonaparte. He had made his entrance on the grand stage of history.

Now 67 years old, Catherine knew her own exit from history was not far off. She was adamant that her empire would continue to be led not by a populist mob, but by her own flesh and blood. By law, Catherine could choose whom she pleased as heir to her throne. And the Tsarevich Paul, the son she had borne for her murdered husband Peter, was not necessarily first choice. Catherine was afraid of Paul. She saw qualities in him, dangerous qualities. He was a cruel, unstable, dangerous person, and he asked a lot of questions about what had happened to his father and why was his mother on the throne, and that made him dangerous to Catherine.

Unwelcomed and uncomfortable in his mother's court, the Tsarevich devoted his life to drilling and re-drilling his Prussian-style battalions. In Catherine's eyes, the thing Paul did best was to breed children, particularly his firstborn, the Grand Duke Alexander. Alexander had a difficult, interesting childhood and adolescence. He was, in a sense, stuck between his grandmother, the Empress Catherine, and his father. Alexander more or less had to be everything to both of them, pretending that he sympathized with both sides, and that bred in him a certain caution, a certain tendency always to be charming to everyone, to make everybody believe that he agreed with them. Catherine had the finest liberal scholars tutor Alexander in Enlightenment ideals. His father Paul taught him to be a military drill master.

As Catherine faced mortality, the question of her successor, her son or her grandson, bloomed large. November 5th, 1796. The aging Empress was paralyzed by a stroke. The following night, the German princess who had ruled the Russian Empire for 34 years was dead.

Some historians claim that her son Paul searched Catherine's chambers before the body was cold and burned any papers that threatened his right to be crowned Tsar. Paul I wasted no time taking revenge on his mother. He dug out the corpse of his father, Peter III, put him in a coffin, and placed him right next to her at the funeral, so that they would be eternally together, which he just thought was a divine joke. For 71 years, women had ruled Russia. Paul had chafed under his mother's rule. After her death, he rushed out a decree that only the males of the Romanov line were fit to wear the Russian crown. He had been eager to have power for more than 20 years, and I think that's part of the reason that he made such a mess of things, because he was a man in a hurry. He always felt that he didn't have much time left, so he had to do everything overnight.

Paul reversed policies without reason. Anxious nobles feared chaos. This guy directed every element of Russian life, from the way people dressed to what they were allowed to do at a funeral or a wedding. Rumors of a coup to put Alexander on the throne began almost with Paul's coronation. Alexander was approached by many members of Russia's elite about the need to get rid of his father, and Alexander himself recognized that his father was proving to be quite erratic, quite capricious. Paul became convinced he was a target for assassination. Behind a moat ringed with centuries, he built a palace like a fortress. He moved in before the plaster was dry and placed his son Alexander under house arrest.

Within days, the coup plotters were on the move. On the night of March 11th, 1801, influential men from the inner circle at court swept past the guards at Paul's palace fortress. The conspirators found the Tsar hiding in his bedroom. A scuffle that followed turned into a deadly brawl. For a third consecutive generation, a Romanov had snatched the crown from another. But his father's murder left the new Tsar, 23-year-old Alexander Pavlovich, racked with guilt. I'm sure they told Alexander that Paul would simply be pushed aside, and I'm sure Alexander persuaded himself that that would be the case, but it wasn't realistic. You couldn't have a retired Tsar sitting in some palace on the outskirts of Petersburg, waiting for the next coup against his son in order to be restored. It was never viable.

Commander had no part in the coup. He did nothing to stop it. Similar indecision and contradictions would cloud Alexander's reign. Inspired by liberal ideals, the new Tsar flirted with granting Russia a constitution, but he would never follow through. Under Alexander I, it was difficult to know in what direction Russia would go. He couldn't make that decision, that momentous, heroic decision to oversee the devolution of his own power.

As Alexander wavered about the future of Russia, a continent away, a bold upstart declared himself Emperor of France, plunged ahead with plans to remake all of Europe: Napoleon Bonaparte. You could not find two more different men than Napoleon and Alexander I. Napoleon was completely filled with self-confidence. He felt called upon to be the master of the universe, never doubting his genius and never doubting his flair, never doubting of strategy. Whereas Alexander I, um, seems to have been born confused and not knowing exactly what direction he wants to take, and so he goes off in all these various directions.

In 1807, Napoleon would force Alexander to sign a treaty of friendship, but the Tsar of Russia and the self-made Emperor of France were fated to wind up bitter enemies in a struggle for the fate of Europe. As the French destroy the two great intermediary powers, Prussia and Austria, Russia is faced with a big dilemma, because obviously, if Napoleon dominates the whole of Europe from the Atlantic to the Russian border, he controls such immense resources that he's basically going to be able to get make Russia do whatever he wants.

In 1811, Alexander finally took a stand, defying Napoleon's grand ambitions. He declared allegiance with England and prepared for all-out war with France. Napoleon answered in force. Close to half a million fighting men, the largest army in European history, were marched on Moscow. In the face of overwhelming forces, the Tsar's commanders turned to the strategy that had served Russia for centuries: fall back and harass the invaders as they struggled across the vast motherland.

All summer long, Napoleon marched deeper and deeper into Russia. He looked for a decisive battle but found only an empty and unwelcoming land. On the morning of September 7th, 1812, one day's ride from Moscow, Napoleon finally found what he was looking for: 120,000 Russian soldiers, Alexander's Imperial Army, ready to fight to the death for the fields of Borodino.

Borodino, September 7th, 1812. The armies of two great empires attacked and counter-attacked. A bloodbath began at dawn and went on long past dark. For over a decade, Napoleon Bonaparte had seemed invincible as he marched across Europe. Alexander's Russian armies were the last obstacle to continental dominance. For Napoleon to win in 1812, he had to destroy the Russian army, because otherwise, they would just go on retreating in front of him, and in the end, his own line of supply would become so immense that his army would disintegrate. 75,000 men would die that day. Both sides would claim victory. Still, the death toll convinced the Russian generals to leave the field and the city of Moscow to Napoleon. The losses on both sides were enormous, and it was very clear to the French soldiers and generals that the Russian Army's will to fight was by no means exhausted.

For weeks, Napoleon waited for Alexander to concede defeat. Then, the Russians set fire to his prize: Moscow. More than half the city burned to the ground. For the Russian people, it was a sacrilege. For Napoleon, disaster. The main impression was horror that having marched all this way and seized Moscow, he was actually no closer to achieving his goal, because sitting in Moscow through the winter, even if the city hadn't been destroyed, was impossible.

Napoleon's order to retreat came too late. The Russian winter came early and hard. The French were 1500 miles from home with little to eat and no shelter from the storm. Then, the Emperor Alexander called on the Russian people to annihilate the enemy. Russians of every class rose in fury and fell on the invaders. Napoleon's mark of invincibility had been taken away from him. I mean, after all, he lost well over 500,000 men in that campaign. The losses were immense, huge, and in some ways, the losses of the horses were even more important than the losses of the men, because even after losing half a million men in Russia, which was simply unprecedented in European history, what he couldn't do was make up for the loss of trained cavalry and trained artillery. And in that sense, the retreat was vastly important, because the French cavalry was virtually wiped out.

Napoleon had entered Russia with the largest army in European history. By the time they reach the Polish border, his Grand Army had been reduced to barely 25,000.

For Alexander, the burning of Moscow had sparked a mystical religious conversion. The born-again Orthodox Tsar now embarked on a holy crusade to eliminate Bonaparte and return the capitals of Europe to their rightful monarchs. Alexander feels that God has rewarded him for his strength and for his renewed Christian faith by giving him Napoleon, you know, on a plate, if you like, defeating the conqueror of Europe. Armies from Prussia and Austria joined the crusade. In 1814, with the Tsar himself in command, the Allied forces swept across Europe to the gates of Paris. For 25 years, France had endured revolution and endless war. Paris was ready for an end to chaos.

Alexander entered Paris in triumph. This is actually the culmination of the 18th century in Russia. For the entire 18th century, Russia had been drawing itself closer and closer to Europe, trying to prove that it was an equal partner in the family of Europe. And now here was the Russian Tsar leading the Allied troops from all of Europe to unseat the evil usurper. But in the cradle of the Revolution, Russia's elite Guardsmen saw the power of liberal politics in action. The ideas that these Russian soldiers picked up were ideas of a constitutional monarchy, not an absolutist monarchy; the idea that civil and political rights was something that all people should enjoy; the idea that equality before the law should be, and indeed, a regime based on rule by law should be the foundation for any modern state.

On their return to Russia, many young officers who had ridden with Alexander into Paris remained inflamed with ideas of liberty and reform. They met in secret and plotted the unthinkable: a constitution for absolutist Tsarist Russia. The would-be revolutionaries had no confidence that the Tsar would lead the way. Alexander had abandoned liberal ideas too often before. Tsar Alexander, well aware of the rising fever for reform, instead withdrew into religious mysticism. In 1825, by the shores of the Black Sea, the Emperor died childless himself. The Tsar had left the throne to his younger brother, Nicholas. Nicholas was 19 years Alexander's junior. So, while Alexander I was a child of the Enlightenment, Nicholas I was not. Nicholas I grew up in an atmosphere of hostility to revolution and of breaking revolution wherever one might spot it.

But the succession from Alexander to Nicholas had been a strictly kept secret. The Tsar-to-be hesitated to take the throne. None of this had been publicly established, so there was a sort of interregnum of a few days, and the conspirators took advantage of this to try to achieve the overthrow of the absolute monarchy.

With the succession in turmoil, the radicals knew they might never have a better chance. December 14th, 1825. Nicholas ordered Russia's elite to swear allegiance to his reign. Rebel officers of the Decembrists gathered in Saint Petersburg's Senate Square. They began to chant for a new form of rule: a constitution. By new, 700 rebels waited in the square. Troops loyal to Nicholas surrounded them. Then, the Tsar-to-be rode into view. "Salute!" Rule or a constitution? For a moment, Russia's fate hung in the balance. Then, Nicholas opened fire. The Decembrist rebellion and the dream of sweeping political change collapsed in chaos. The Tsar still reigns supreme. Nicholas I had preserved the Romanov Dynasty. The Russian Empire was now acknowledged as the most powerful nation on Earth, but a hundred years of revolution had just begun.

On the very day he took power, December 14th, 1825, Tsar Nicholas I turned his gun against revolutionary rebels in the army. The Decembrists had threatened the new Tsar's right to absolute power by demanding a constitution for Russia. Nicholas treated the insulin rebellion to a taste of Tsar's rule. He crushed it. What it did do, though, was to frighten him and to persuade him for the rest of his life that there was a real risk of revolution in Russia.

Nicholas exiled the rebel rank and file to Siberia. The ringleaders of the Decembrist rebellion, he sent to the gallows. Under Nicholas, the Tsar's absolute rule became Russia's official creed. He declared democracy or a constitution out of the question. "I have never thought that any system could be better than that by which kings were delegated by Providence to govern the masses." In the Russian Empire, politics was illegal. There were no legal political parties. One could not write what one believed. One could not discuss ideas. One could not discuss politics legally, or one was taking a great chance. Politics was driven underground into secret, small cells.

Russia's elite still wanted their share of power. Aristocrats, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs all dreamed of changing society. They were humiliated by Russia's backwardness. They didn't have the same political rights that upper-class people had in England or France. Even to discuss rebellion was a crime. The secret police enforced the Emperor's will with exile and execution.

Only one man dared to publicly express the universal longing for dignity and freedom: Russia's great poet, Alexander Pushkin. "The heavy chains will fall, the dungeons crumble at a word, and freedom will greet you at the gate, and brothers will give you back the sword." In a land where self-expression could be a crime, Alexander Pushkin was a national hero. January 27th, 1837. The rebellious voice of the Russian people had a fatal appointment to keep. The poet had challenged an officer of the guards to a duel. The Guardsman had flirted with Pushkin's wife. Honor and...

Reputation were at stake. Russia, a man's honor was more precious than life.

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The great poet's death was a national tragedy. Still, it was only a drop of blood compared to the tragedies to come. Political change was suppressed in Russia. Outside the Empire, revolutions were already shaking the Ancient Order. In Western Europe, the Industrial Revolution was booming. Nationalism, socialism, and democracy followed in its wake.

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In 1848, popular rebellions overthrew aristocratic rule in cities from Paris to Prague. When the Thai Rebellion toppled the Austrian Emperor on the very doorstep of Russia, Tsar Nicholas struck back. Russian troops marched in to put the Habsburg Emperors back on their Imperial throne. Royalists regrouped, crushing revolts all across the continent. Tsar Nicholas was proclaimed the John d'Arc of Europe, the cop who kept Europe safe for monarchy. The idea of a mighty, powerful, overwhelming Tsar to act as a bulwark against Anarchy, it was very much in the center of Nicholas the First's mentality and his conception of his role.

The Tsar's faith in Russian power now bordered on arrogance. As his reward for saving the rights of Kings, Nicholas turned his eyes on Turkey and the Balkans. The Tsar dreamed of extending Russia's domain over the remnants of the dying Ottoman Empire. In 1853, the Tsar's forces attacked the Turkish Balkans and Black Sea ports. Russia's grab for control of the Ottoman Empire set off alarms in London and Paris. England and France rushed in to prop up the Turks. The Crimean War was on. For Russia, war with the Western Powers would be a rude awakening. The Crimean War showed that Russia actually was not as powerful as people had thought, not as powerful as its own rulers had thought. The English and the French fight and move with the technology of the Industrial Revolution. That means the steamship, it means the rifled musket, it means the railway. The Russians fight and move with the technology of the pre-industrial era.

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Underfed, outgunned, and outmaneuvered, the tsarist military machine Nicholas had come to believe was invincible was thrown back. Entrenched Russian troops waged. This was the Russian army that had defeated Napoleon. They had an inflated sense of the strength of their own army. There had been decades of deterioration in the army, which really only became clear during the war itself. They were resting on their laurels. Militarily, before the Crimean War, Russia was considered the greatest military power in the world. Dying, dying Russian soil. There's tremendous shock that they were not able to win that war. It's considered to be a terrible disgrace, a terrible disgrace.

February 1855. Abandoned and attacked by the monarchs who had recently sung his praises, Tsar Nicholas reviewed his troops under a cold, driving rain.

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The next day, he came down with pneumonia. One week later, he was dead. With the empire in crisis, the burdens of the crown fell to Nicholas's son, Alexander II. The new Tsar had learned from his father's defeat in the Crimea. Alexander faced up to reality. He conceded defeat and called home the troops. He had new battles in mind, a war with Russia's past.

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Tragedy, humiliation, crisis, defeat in the Crimean War made it clear that Russia had fallen behind. Russia's old ways, her army, her economy, her society needed to change to catch up.

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Steam and steel were transforming the world, but in Russia, change was forbidden unless one man led the way. That Tsar, as he came to power in 1855, Russia's new Tsar, Alexander II, took a clear-eyed look at the job to be done. By then, the industrial revolution had begun to affect Western and even Central Europe, and it hadn't really begun to affect Russia in general. It's perfectly clear to the rulers that the whole system is impossibly backward by the standards of the leading powers of Europe, and therefore fundamental reforms have to occur.

In the first years of his reign, Alexander pardoned the Decembrist rebels, abolished corporal punishment, instituted trial by jury, relaxed censorship, chartered new industries, and commissioned a railway to the Black Sea. But his crowning achievement would be to liberate Russia's serfs from centuries of bondage. The Emperor became convinced a nation built on slavery could never compete in the Industrial Age. Liberalism, private enterprise, rule of law, constitutional assemblies, but these are the wave of the future. And it was considered by Alexander himself that modernization was incompatible with serfdom. Conservative nobles vehemently opposed emancipation. Without free labor, they warned their fortunes would evaporate and the Russian economy collapse. But Alexander saw no option to emancipation. He believes that it really, it's a way to save the autocracy. He makes a famous speech to the nobility in which he declares that either we emancipate the serfs from above, or they will emancipate themselves from below.

In 1861, two years before U.S. President Abraham Lincoln freed America's slaves, Tsar Alexander signed the Emancipation Manifesto. "We have resolved to execute this task. The serfs will receive in time the full rights of free rural inhabitants." Originally, the emancipation was greeted as a great and heroic act. Alexander II was hailed as the Tsar Liberator, and he wore this title with pride through the rest of his life. But very quickly, people had become disappointed with the actual effects of the emancipation. The peasants had to buy their land from the landlords at very high prices, which put the peasants into deep debt. The Emperor had set the peasants free, and yet they were poorer than ever. Agricultural production plummeted, and as many had feared, Russia's economy teetered on collapse.

The revolutionary underground began to call for radical action. Small but significant sections of Russian-educated society are calling for the overthrow not just of the monarchy, but of private property and of marriage. Well, you know, advocating republicanism, socialism, and free love in the reign of Queen Victoria in the 1860s is pretty radical. Not at all surprisingly, these people turn against the terrorist regime. Some called for elections and free land, others called for blood, the blood of the Tsar. They called themselves The People's Will. The tight-knit terrorist ring was led by a woman, Sophia Perovskaya. She's a child of privilege. Her father was the governor general of Saint Petersburg, this is one of the most powerful positions in the entire empire. Yet she turns into a revolutionary who's dedicated to killing the Tsar. And in fact, this is one of the paradoxes of Russian history, of course, that it's the most privileged stratum in society that is producing the revolutionaries dedicated to overthrowing this regime. "We believe in the destruction of the most harmful persons in the government to raise belief in the revolution and build a body accustomed to warfare, purging society with tsarist blood." Sophia and her comrades believed was the only way a new, free land would arise.

In 1879, Sophia's death squad launched a campaign to assassinate Russia's leading progressive Tsar, Alexander II. November 1879. The Imperial Express approached Moscow.

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A bomb shattered the Tsar's carriage. Alexander escaped death by traveling ahead on an earlier train. February 1880. As the royal family headed for dinner, the Winter Palace dining room exploded. Dozens of servants and guards were maimed and killed. Despite devoting his reign to reform, the Tsar found himself hunted by assassins. "Am I a wild beast that they should hound me to death? Can you imagine someone going into the White House and blowing up, you know, setting off a bomb that kills 13 people? This would have been the psychological effect that this had on the Tsar's family and on really all of society and public opinion." A rumor that Alexander was on the way could clear the streets of bystanders or empty a theater. Yet despite the terror campaign, the Emperor still championed reform. He announced plans for a new legislative council for the first time in Russian history. The Tsar proposed to share his power.

Sunday, March 1, 1881. Tsar Alexander II planned to publish his proposed balance of power with his new legislature on Tuesday morning. In 48 hours, Russia would be on the long road to parliamentary rule. But for the terrorists of the Narodnaya Volya, reform could only start with the death of the Tsar. Sophia Perovskaya and comrades had staked out the route Alexander took to the Palace that Sunday afternoon.

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With the drop of her kerchief, their revolution was on.

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Failure had taught the assassins that the Tsar might escape one suicide bomber. Sophia brought four, and one of the revolutionaries throws a grenade, and it explodes. But the Tsar's carriage is actually bulletproof. It was a gift from Napoleon III of France. It protected the Tsar. But then the Tsar made a fatal mistake. He got out of the carriage to tend to the wounded.

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And a second revolutionary had a second grenade. Skull shattered, legs blown off. Emperor Alexander Nikolayevich Romanov asked to go home to the Winter Palace, where the Tsar Liberator bled to death. The revolutionaries believed that a new era has begun, that the people have been liberated. They truly believe this, and it doesn't take very long before they find out that in fact, the opposite has occurred. Repression returned with a vengeance. The murdered Tsar's son and heir, Emperor Alexander III, rounded up Sophia and her accomplices and had them hanged. On the side of his father's assassination, the new Tsar raised a masterwork of Russian architecture, the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. But the crown jewel of his father's reign, the Tsar Liberator's plans to share power with the legislature, he rejected as folly. Under the despotic new Tsar, Alexander, reform was finished. Starting in 1881, what you have is a recoiling from any of the progress, political, economic, social progress that had occurred in the rest of Europe. And to close the curtain like that meant that you were opening the door to revolution.

Six years later, remnants of the Narodnaya Volya plotted to kill the new Tsar. Their plans were discovered, and the ringleaders were hanged. One of the executed revolutionaries, Alexander Ulyanov, left behind a devoted younger brother, Vladimir. Inspired by his elder brother, Vladimir Ulyanov would soon remake Russia under his revolutionary nom de guerre, Lenin.

In 1894, Russia was a land hurtling into the future. 30 years, the Empire had built nearly 30,000 miles of railway, a rate that eclipsed any other nation. Industrial output was soaring. Peasants were flocking to new jobs in the factories, turning provincial towns into crowded urban centers. But as Russia industrialized, a working class emerges in the big cities, especially in Moscow, in Saint Petersburg, in Kiev. And, at the same time, Marxist ideas begin to trickle into Russia. The capital of Saint Petersburg was now home to a million souls, including a young radical lawyer, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin. Like many revolutionaries, Vladimir Ulyanov was a child of Russia's educated elite, the son of a provincial school superintendent. His brother's execution for revolutionary crimes propelled Lenin into the radical struggle. In 1893, he came to Saint Petersburg to help organize a Socialist Workers Party. He arrived at a fateful time. Tsar Alexander III was near the end of his reign, 13 years of political repression and economic expansion. The following year, Alexander died and left the crown to his 26-year-old son, Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov. From childhood, Nicholas showed little interest in government or initiative to rule. Neither his reactionary father nor his conservative tutors prepared the Tsarevich to grapple with the changing realities of a modern industrial world. I think that Nicholas II felt himself completely unprepared to be Tsar. You got a lot of positive reinforcement with that idea because people around him also believed that he was unprepared to be Tsar.

Dreading the overwhelming burdens of leading the world's largest empire, Nicholas reached out for his soul mate, the young German Princess Alex Victoria Helena Louise of Hesse. Although she was the grandchild of England's Queen Victoria, the future Tsarina was no better suited for the burdens of rule than her husband. She was so shy that she was, she would sit there and just tear at her gloves. Public appearances were agony for her. She wanted seclusion, and the Russians interpreted that as a disinterest in the plight of Russians. She was just seen as an arrogant, uncaring German.

With the nation officially still in mourning for Alexander III, Nicholas rushed into marriage. His German bride took the Russian name Alexandra. People muttered that the new Tsarina had arrived behind a coffin. Nicholas was crowned in the Kremlin amid splendor meant to bond the Tsar with his people. Instead, the opulence only underscored the divide between Nicholas and his subjects. After more than 30 years of forced industrialization, Russia's working poor were as poor as ever. Factories, mines, and farms became breeding grounds for unrest. Radicals like the young Lenin fed the discontent. They spread Marxist propaganda and organized revolutionary cells. In 1895, the Tsar's police struck back. Lenin was arrested, convicted, and shipped off to Siberia. After his release, Lenin fled Russia for the West. But even in foreign exile, his radical ideas would continue to fan the flames of revolution.

But the Tsar, Nicholas, remained oblivious to his subject's suffering and their growing will to take action. Instead, his boldest step as Russia's Supreme Commander would only fuel the rising fire. On the Pacific Rim, Nicholas sought to seize new territories from China and Korea. Grandiose imperial ambitions collided with another growing empire, Japan. Alarmed by Russian advances, in 1904, the Empire of the Rising Sun declared war. The recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway enabled the Tsar to pour troops into the conflict, but machine guns and aggressive Japanese tactics sent Russia's death tolls soaring.

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To back up his forces, Nicholas assembled a naval armada in the Baltic, 300 ships, and ordered them to sail for the Sea of Japan, an odyssey of 21,000 miles. In May 1905, after eight grueling months of hunger, mutiny, and disease, the Russian ships finally reached the Pacific coast, where the Japanese lay in wait.

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With faster ships and better guns, in a single battle, the Japanese sank two-thirds of the Russian Fleet. The pride of Russia, the Navy Peter the Great had founded, was all but obliterated. The war itself was not necessary. It was a terrible waste of Russia's resources, and of course, on top of that, Russia was defeated, which was a catastrophe both for the legitimacy of the regime and for the Emperor's own prestige in the eyes of his ministers, as senior officials, and indeed of the educated public. In Saint Petersburg, news of the naval disaster would reach a city already in open revolt. 1905 would be a year of revolution. The Tsar's ancient right to divine, absolute rule was about to collide with the will of the Russian people.

In August of 1904, Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov celebrated the birth of their fifth child. After 10 years and four girls, at last an heir to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei. To be born into the Russian royal family in the 20th century was to be blessed and cursed. Blessed with a life of privilege and luxury, and cursed by history. Nicholas and Alexandra had realized their personal dream: a close and loving family. But from infancy, the Tsarevich Alexei was not well. Doctors soon confirmed the worst. The baby had hemophilia, the bleeding disease. No treatment existed. Most victims of hemophilia died in childhood. Disease was the Romanov family's curse. If the Royal heir died, the Empire would be rocked by a succession crisis at a time when the Tsar's prestige was faltering. Alexei's hemophilia is a secret of state because he's the heir. No one can talk about it. His health in general is not discussed at all.

But in the streets of Russia's cities, the Romanov dynasty was already under attack. As sick and out of touch. The fall of 1904 brought soaring inflation. Winter brought hunger and hardship. News of the disastrous string of defeats in the war with Japan shook public faith in the Tsar's leadership. On Sunday, January 9, 1905, a vast throng of protesters marched on the Winter Palace. Workers, students, priests, led by Orthodox priest Georgi Gapon. The marchers carried a petition signed by over a hundred thousand. They asked the Tsar for representative government, freedom of speech, workers' rights, and peace with Japan. This is a non-violent demonstration. It's also non-political. The workers are not carrying banners with revolutionary slogans. Rather, they're carrying icons, and they're, they're making it very clear that they're deeply religious, faithful people who love the Tsar, who are simply trying to tell the Tsar of their plight and to ask the Tsar to help them out. The marchers refused to leave without delivering their petition to the Tsar.

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But Nicholas was out of town with his family. The palace guard's response was swift and brutal. Mother, Georgi Gapon!

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"A cry of alarm arose as the guards came down upon us."

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"I saw the swords lifted and falling."

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"The men, women, and children dropping to the earth like logs of wood, while moans, curses, and shouts filled the air." Palace claimed fewer than a hundred had died. Marchers put the death toll at a thousand. Whatever the truth, the debacle, Bloody Sunday, ignited a wave of rebellion. The impact of Bloody Sunday is that it shatters forever this, this myth that the Tsar doesn't know that the Russian people are suffering. By summer, uprisings had crippled factories and farms across Russia. Revolutionary councils grabbed for power in 50 cities. Armed workers threatened to destroy any factory that stayed open. Facing open civil war, Tsar Nicholas, defender of the dynasty, weighed his options. To crush the rebellion by sheer force, that would mean rivers of blood. The other way out would be to give the people their civil rights, to have laws confirmed by a State Duma, that of course would be a constitution.

In October 1905, the Tsar bowed to reality. The October Manifesto granted basic civil rights and a new elected assembly, the Duma. Nicholas was forced to make certain concessions, but this was done under tremendous pressure. He hated the political parties, he hated the Duma, he hated the constitution that he was forced to acknowledge, and in many ways, he didn't acknowledge these things. In May 1906, Russia's new Duma demanded radical reform. Nicholas's response: to dissolve the assembly. After four years of tinkering with election rules, the Tsar finally got a Duma conservative enough to live with. He still believed that only the Romanov family could rule Russia, that he had a mission from God, that he was on the throne because of divine right, that no one could take that away from him or his family, and if they did, it would mean the destruction of Russia.

Amid all the political turmoil, Nicholas and Alexandra's greatest concern was their son, the Tsarevich Alexei. Hemophilia put the boy's life on the line every day. Any nick, any bump, any bruise would be just result in agonizing pain for this child, and it destroyed his mother. I mean, just to watch this, this apple of her eye, just writhing in agony, it makes her also incredibly spiritual and mystical, and she's looking anywhere she can for, for a cure, for answers. The Empress prayed for a miracle. A close friend brought her a miracle worker, a mesmerizing Siberian mystic, Grigori Rasputin.

When Alexei turned eight, Rasputin's divine powers were put to the ultimate test. The child had fallen, and it really appears as though the child's gonna die. Alexandra writes by telegram to Rasputin and says, you know, the child is sick, can you intercede somehow? And Rasputin replied to her and said, don't worry, he will stop hemorrhaging tomorrow. And indeed, the Tsarevich stopped hemorrhaging, and from that day on, he was God to Alexandra. The wild-eyed Siberian peasant became a fixture in tsarist circles. But his darker side scandalized Saint Petersburg's conservative society. Women of high society had a very strict life, and here comes this man from the Russian countryside, from Siberia, just brimming with sexual energy. Rasputin really wore two faces. To the Empress, he was a man of God. But other people saw the real Rasputin, whose name means "the debauched one." He was greasy, unwashed, and a voracious sexual appetite. He was an animal in many ways, and people saw that. Alexander never saw that.

Summer 1914. The Tsar's prestige hung at the edge of the abyss. Then Europe exploded. World War I. Russia and Austria-Hungary clashed over Serbia. Within days, Germany, Great Britain, Turkey, and France, all the empires of Europe plunged into the maelstrom. For a moment, the divisions tearing Russia apart were forgotten. Radicals and conservatives, workers and nobles, as in generations past, the Russian people rallied to save the empire. Volunteers would swell the ranks of Russia's armed forces to 15 million men. Within two and a half years, more than half that number, eight million men, would be lost, foreign, captured, or killed.

With the empire on the line, in the summer of 1915, Nicholas left the capital for the front. As Russia's ruler, ordained by God, he believed it was his holy duty to lead the troops. He had no military experience whatsoever, and he also was not good at, for example, serving a symbolic role of walking around to the soldiers and and urging them on and building their morale. When he stood in front of soldiers, according to the accounts that we had, he basically went silent. He didn't know what to say to them.

The staggering losses at the front and starvation at home soured the Russian public on the war and its leaders. The revolution began to build again. Planet slogan was peace, land, and bread, and this really resonated with the population of Russia at that time. For 300 years, the Russian people had bowed to the divine authority of the Romanov family. That bond was breaking. The Russian Revolution was at hand.

On a dark December night in 1916, the infamous Siberian holy man, Grigori Rasputin, staggered out of a very private party. Rasputin's cancerous influence over the Empress Alexandra and the Imperial government had infuriated even loyal tsarist. To save the Tsar, Prince Felix Yusupov and his cronies resolved to take the mystic out of the picture. Yusupov invited Rasputin to join him for a midnight meal in his Saint Petersburg Palace. He feeds Rasputin poisoned wine, poisoned hors d'oeuvres, enough poison, Yusupov says later, to kill five men. But Rasputin, who is an enormous person, shows no ill effects whatsoever. When it was obvious that the poison wasn't going to work, they turned, they decided to shoot him, and he runs outside, and they take more shots at him.

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He was an incredibly resilient character.

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Cut a hole in the ice and stick them in there, and, uh, they're now sure that Rasputin's dead. Three days later, Rasputin rose yet again, as the icy River Neva yielded up his lifeless body. But when they did find the body later, and they found water in his lungs, that indicated he was breathing still when he was in the water. It was a stunning episode. Rasputin's murder devastated the Empress. Alexandra saw it as a death sentence for her son and the Romanov Dynasty. But tsarist and reformers alike rejoiced. Now, imagine the situation: world's largest country, Tsar's top advisor murdered by one of the elites, and the elite celebrate. It shows you the situation that Russia had had found itself in.

February 1917. With millions of men trapped at the front, Russia's economy was in ruins. Inflation made the ruble all but worthless. Food and fuel ran desperately short. Ages led to breadlines. On February 23rd, breadlines turned to riots.

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Nicholas lost support of the army, the police, and all educated society. And no government can rule without an army and police force that's loyal. As army garrisons abandoned the Tsar, urban anarchy gave way to full-fledged revolution.

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People since the Decembrists had been plotting revolution for almost 100 years, yet when it did come, it surprised everyone. On February 27th, Nicholas boarded the Imperial train to race home to protect his family and his crown. Striking workers trapped the Tsar's express outside Saint Petersburg. March 1, 1917. Stranded on the rails, Nicholas II received an ultimatum from the Duma to save the nation. The legislators demanded that the Tsar abdicate and hand all power to the Duma. For Nicholas, the very thought was sacrilege. We have to keep in mind that the rulers believed that they had been ordained by God, and so stepping down might actually be a sin against the church, or might be an offense against this tradition, or a religious offense. The destiny of the empire, a thousand years of history, rested in his hands. Desperate to preserve the monarchy, Nicholas tried to sign over power to his son, the twelve-year-old Tsarevich Alexei. But advisors convinced him that it would be a death sentence for the boy. Instead, Nicholas signed over the throne to his brother. With his life on the line, Mikhail Alexandrovich Romanov refused to take the crown.

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After 300 years, the Romanov Dynasty, the last absolute monarchy in European history, had fallen. Could things have been different if Nicholas had given up the autocratic principle? Perhaps. But the key fact is that he didn't, and he wouldn't, and he couldn't. He didn't believe that he could be the Tsar of Russia without maintaining autocratic power. It's not just that the monarchy collapses, it's when it collapses that is very important, because when it collapses, it really allows the Bolsheviks to exploit the opportunity and to take over power.

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One month later, another train would roll into Saint Petersburg. In a sealed compartment, it carried the future of Russia. After nearly 20 years of exile, the prophet of the workers' paradise, Lenin, was coming home. In October, Lenin's Bolshevik disciples would storm the Duma. The February Revolution fell to a communist coup. Soon, Russia plunged from World War I into a bloody, bitter civil war. It's very hard to imagine that anything other than either a right-wing dictatorship, that is a military dictatorship, or a left-wing dictatorship, could have emerged out of 1917.

With power prisoners in their own palatial home, the former Tsar Nicholas and his family turned to each other. The girls, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, once the darling of every officer's eye, learned to live simply. The Tsarevich Alexei stayed close to his mother and father. The family that had controlled Russia became pawns of the political struggle. The Bolsheviks shuttled the former Tsar and his family across Siberia like common serfs. July 1918. Nicholas and his family had been imprisoned in a modest home in the Urals. Then new orders arrive from Moscow and Lenin. Awakened at midnight, the royal family is told they are being transported to another new residence. By now, they are well accustomed to surprise journeys. The girls wear corsets stuffed with diamonds, emeralds, and pearls, the Romanov family jewels. In a basement room, they are told to pose for a family photo before they leave, but there is no photographer waiting for them. The Red Army soldiers. This is not a sign of strength of the Bolsheviks. It's a sign of weakness. It's a sign of their fear that in this very difficult year for them, 1918, when the Civil War begins, they really are concerned that they might not make it through that year. So the execution of the royal family is, uh, it's a way of trying to snuff out any possible resistance to their rule.

After the bloodbath, the bodies were soaked in acid and thrown into a bonfire. The royal line reduced to shards of bone. There could be no survivors, no possibility to revive the dynasty. A brutally clean slate, so Russia could begin again. Lenin proclaimed a radiant future, but as Russia's new masters tightened their grip, the Communists resurrected ghosts of the tsarist past.

Thank you. After in the great, they seized power with a coup and murdered a hated Tsar to help legitimize a new regime.

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Like Ivan the Terrible, they used terror and exile to control the masses. Like Peter the Great, they dreamed of a Russia reborn through endless radical reform. Still, the Russian Empire left another far brighter legacy, a legacy prized by all the Russian people: monuments to great achievement and enduring patriotism, and the Orthodox Christian faith, so tied to the nation's history and identity. Today, years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has entered a new phase of history, a land of deep pride and profound contradictions. In the year 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized new Saints: a loving Russian family, four girls and a boy, their mother and their father, Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, last Russian Emperor, the last Tsar.