Montefiore is not unknown to readers of Russian history. After his early study of Potemkin (2001), his colourful work on Stalin (The Court of the Red Tsar [2003], and Young Stalin [2007]) sold well enough to raise professorial eyebrows. 'The young Stalin had a penis,' scoffed one academic critical of Montefiore's obsession with that body part, 'and he used it.' So what? The Romanovs, too, had genitalia, it turns out, and they deployed them at least as frequently as the later dictator. (Alexander II to his mistress: 'How can I forget how I lay on my back and you rode me like a horse.') When not copulating inside and outside marriage, they were engaged in a never-ending round of wars, internal intrigues, uprisings, palace coups, and the occasional political reform – a winning combination for attracting male undergraduates in particular, as well as a wider public.

Readers might find all the sex alluring or juvenile; the violence will strike some as pornographic, others as realistic; and the sage life advice Montefiore dispenses along the way might amuse or irritate ('Every wife knows that the best way to save a marriage is to befriend the husband's mistress'). The vodka flows in abundance, and death from drinking is nearly as frequent as quartering, hanging, or beheading (for the tsars' enemies) or stabbing, clubbing, shooting, or bombing (for the more unfortunate among the tsars themselves).

As the Romanovs fornicate and fight, drink and dance, murder and torture their way through the pages of this book, the reader sometimes loses track of the countless lovers, conspirators, soldiers, and ministers animating its pages. Mostly, however, a use of the cast of characters at the start of each chapter allows us to follow the rise and fall of 'the most spectacularly successful empire-builders since the Mongols'.

Montefiore develops his historical play in three 'acts'. 'Act I: The Rise' begins with the Time of Troubles, a savage civil war in the early seventeenth century, which ended with the accession to the throne of the first Romanov tsar, Michael (1613–45), and ends with Peter the Great (1682–1725) establishing the growing Russian empire as a European power. Thus begins 'Act II: The Apogee', where Russia becomes one of the most powerful of Europe's polities, eventually taking a leading role in defeating Napoleon under Alexander I (1801–25). 'Act III: The Decline' encompasses the reigns of Nicholas I (1825–55), Alexander II (1855–81), Alexander III (1881–94), and the ill-fated Nicholas II (1894–1917).

At the heart of Montefiore's interpretation of the rise of the Romanovs is their skill in building a warfare state. Near-permanent mobilisation meant that the nobility had to serve the autocrat in army or administration; they had to obey the supreme warlord, and not question his commands; in return they received imperial glory and almost total power over the serfs, the vast majority of the population. It was this compact which held the Russian state together and allowed it to mobilise a vast share of the country's resources for defence and imperial expansion. After the Napoleonic wars, this pact ran into trouble. Increasingly, wars were won with modern weaponry in the hands of citizen soldiers. The most successful states in the wars of the nineteenth century were industrialised mass societies, as Russia learned the painful way in the Crimean War (1853–56), 'the Romanovs' worst setback since the Time of Troubles'. In order to compete with France or Britain, Russia needed to industrialise and it needed well-educated soldiers in an army based on mass conscription, not illiterate serfs press-ganged into long-term military servitude. Hence, major reforms were necessary, the central one the abolition of serfdom in 1861, followed by judicial and local government reform in 1864, and military reform in 1874.

Portrait of Russian Tsar Peter I the Great by Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), oil on canvas, 1698 (Wikimedia CommonsAlexander II, 'the best-prepared heir in Romanov history', understood that such radical reforms were essential, should Russia remain a great power. Yet they undermined the very foundation on which autocracy rested. The abolition of serfdom, in particular, 'broke asunder the pact between ruler and nobility that had made Russia', leaving the tsar's power based on bayonets and bureaucrats alone. To make things worse, the two final Romanov tsars were lacklustre. Alexander III could 'bend horseshoes with his bare hands' but was otherwise distinguished by bad spelling and anti-Semitism. He ruled 'like a curmudgeonly landowner'. Nicholas II, forever in awe of his 'bearded giant' of a father, was thin and neurotic, surviving a first revolution in 1905 only to succumb to the next instalment in 1917, and then shot by the Bolsheviks in the following year. Montefiore is much kinder to the last Romanov than most historians, pitying rather than condemning him.

In Montefiore's narrative, the decline of the dynasty is symbolised by the sex lives of the final two emperors: in sharp contrast to their fornicating predecessors, these were not oversexed empire builders but faithful spouses in happy marriages. Even Rasputin, whose 'feral sexuality' could have filled yet more pages with lurid detail, 'may' have been 'impotent' and 'not much of a lover at all'.

The wedding of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and the Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1894, Laurits Tuxen (1853–1927) oil on canvas, 1895 (Wikimedia Commons)

Montefiore's interpretation of the impotence of autocracy in the modern age stands in glaring contradiction to another thesis he advances in the book: a conflation of 'autocracy' and modern authoritarianisms. Putin, Stalin, the tsars are all basically the same, as are China's rulers of today. True, 'the epochs of the Great Dictators of the 1920s and 1930s' and today's resurgence of strong men 'show that there is nothing incompatible about modernity and authoritarianism'; but if the best way to think about these questions is to declare them all 'autocracies' is questionable. Neither Stalinism nor Putinism are based, after all, on a pact between serf-holding élites and a militarised state led by a monarch with claims to god-given absolute rule.

Nevertheless, Montefiore's book is well worth reading. Fast paced, entertaining, full of colourful detail, frequently disturbing, and often funny, Montefiore's The Romanovs is narrative history on a grand scale.