This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a self-conscious attempt to break the hold of Christianity and establish an enlightened, secular, egalitarian state. Secular, it was, anyway. Before establishing their state, the Bolsheviks had to overthrow a self-consciously Orthodox Christian regime and remove and then eliminate the ruling Romanov dynasty–the last step, as Omar Sharif’s character explains in Doctor Zhivago, “to show there’s no going back.” Historian Samuel Sebag Montefiore has written a new book on that dynasty, The Romanovs, published in May by Penguin Random House. Here is the description from the publisher’s website:

The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world’s surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire? And how did they lose it all?

This is the intimate story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence, and wild extravagance.

Drawing on new archival research, Montefiore delivers an enthralling epic of triumph and tragedy, love and murder, that is both a universal study of power and a portrait of empire that helps define Russia today.