Autocracy tempered by strangulation

‘It was hard to be a tsar,’ Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his opening sentence, and what follows fully bears this out. In his thought-provoking introduction, he stresses the unique nature of Russian autocracy and its perverse contradictions; the tsar was absolute ruler, yet he was bound by a tangle of restrictions. His subjects were prepared to accept his tyranny and any cruelty its exercise required, but claimed the right to punish him if he failed to provide strong leadership. The system was never meant to give one person tyrannical powers over everyone else. Nor was it intended to work for the greatest good of the greatest number. It was a very different animal from anything we, with our traditions emanating from ancient Greece and Rome, Judaism and Christianity, have ever known. It was, in the words of the French woman of letters Madame de Staël, ‘autocracy tempered by strangulation’.