When History Becomes Public Relations

No field of study is more susceptible to questionable information, biased interpretation, or prejudiced narration than history. Sometimes so many contradictory viewpoints arise over what happened that it becomes almost impossible to figure out what actually DID happen. And yet, with history, there are no right or wrong answers. That’s why studying it can be both fascinating and exasperating.

Different historians will always have different perspectives about different people and events. That’s why it’s essential for them to responsibly and carefully handle the facts as they respectively relay their subjective stories. Of course, no one could ever possibly know every little thing about every historical event. By comparing and contrasting data and arriving at plausible narratives, however, dedicated historians can help us better understand what actually DID take place and why.

But what happens when so many different stories start circulating around the same topic? That’s when reading and research becomes mandatory for real historical understanding. That’s what I had to do, anyway, when it came to CNN’s “The Windsors: Inside The Royal Dynasty.”

This documentary series first aired on Sunday, February 16th, and was supposed to air every Sunday night after that. Then some episodes got yanked off CNN’s lineup to make room for coverage about America’s pandemic. Other shows about the Windsors returned briefly, then vanished as reports about our nation’s social justice uprisings were featured. At this point in time, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if the rest of the documentary series got shelved — or if there even were any more shows to broadcast.

I do know too much undeserved sympathy and misguided understanding were given to King George V from commentators with decidedly British accents. Why? Because this poor bloke on the throne failed to rescue his relatives — A.K.A., The Russian Royal Family — from their bloody demise.

The featured commentary in that episode blamed his commitment to God and country. He was supposedly influenced by editorials from his subjects that empathized with Russian peasants and not the Romanovs. So, George V would have lost his throne if he’d helped his look-alike cousin and wife (herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria) by giving them sanctuary? That’s a weak theory, at best.

Further commentary involved his rebranding of the British Royal Family name as more, well, British. Despite the obvious German ancestry, George V had to dissociate himself and his royal family from Germany because his country and the rest of the world were fighting “The Great War” with Germany. So in 1917, George V changed the name of his royal house. Like Americans who changed sauerkraut to liberty cabbage and wieners to hot dogs, he changed Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the more Anglo-Saxon-sounding Windsor. So, these historical experts opined, it wouldn’t have looked too good for the future of British Monarchy if he began harboring a non-British royal family at Balmoral Castle.

After all, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra and their children might have become living reminders that George V and his family had familial ties throughout Europe. And yet, the Romanovs were Russian— not German— rulers. More importantly, both Nicholas and Alexandra were his relatives. But other reasons for George V’s failure to help them were never explored. His financial responsibility in supporting a deposed monarch from another country, his jealously about being overshadowed by foreign royalty in his own backyard, his genuine dislike of the high-strung and sickly Alexandra — none of these things were taken into account.

Of course, if you’re giving historical commentary about the British Royal Family in a documentary about said Royals, you wouldn’t want to badmouth them. You’d “mind your tongue.” Otherwise, you might never curtsy in their kingdom again. Then again, excusing or sugarcoating George V’s abject failure to act humanely seems more p.r.-friendly than historically responsible.

Furthermore, side-stepping horrific details about the Romanov’s execution doesn’t lessen George V’s historical involvement. Ignoring or avoiding bad things that he could have been prevented doesn’t serve to protect this self-serving King’s reputation, either. There’s just no way to make a lousy king look regal if he’s already been the turd in the punchbowl.

Let’s face it: George V failed. He screwed up. He backed out of his promise to rescue the Russian Royal family…and they were slaughtered. Their execution wasn’t his fault. But at least, if he would have tried to help them escape, there might have been some decency and altruism associated with his reign. There wasn’t.

No doubt the featured historians weren’t obligated to delve into gory details about these murders. But the way it was broadcast — or maybe edited? — the commentary sounded like a defense of George V’s inactions that didn’t make sense.

Very little information about the Romanov’s assassination was given in this documentary. These same commentators who would have proudly touted Queen Victoria as The Mother — then Grandmother — of European royalty remained strangely silent about the deaths of her relatives. As if discussing the topic would have made the British King look worse than he already was. (From the accounts I’ve previously heard and read, George V was cold, selfish, AND a lousy husband and father.)

In this episode I’m referring to, there was only a mention that Tsar Nicholas and someone else died right away…and the others didn’t. Now, I’m no British or Russian historian, but I distinctly remember this execution as a particularly horrific bloodbath. It was really more gangland massacre than murder of an abdicated Tsar and his family. Heavy clouds of smoke from their gunfire made it impossible for executioners to get their bearings or actually see their intended targets. Bullets ricocheted and bounced off hidden jewels sewn into corsets and undershirts. And then, the Tsar’s daughters who were shot repeatedly still lived — only to be mercilessly bayoneted as they screamed for mercy. They finally expired, but only after being slashed and hacked to death…

Or was I wrong about this massacre being downplayed? Was my memory unfairly casting George V as bad guy because he didn’t try hard enough to save them? Or, did I imagine the entire scenario?

Not according to historian Dr. Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs: 1613-1918. In fact, in his book, he quotes Peter Voikov, a Bolshevik member of the Urals Soviet, who described the aftermath: “bodies lay in an appalling jumble, eyes staring in horror, clothing covered in blood. The floor was slick and slippery as a skating rink with blood, brains and gore.” (So I didn’t imagine it after all.)

Montefiore is one historian who can convey information without resorting to any favoritism or overt criticism. He simply reports what happened with carefully researched facts and information. His version of events never feels influenced or tainted by the powers-that-be. The narratives in his book sound more believable, more matter-of-factly interesting than biased. No small feat when you’re dealing with Russian history.

Even in a documentary with archival footage, British history seems too stuffy and boring to digest. Russian history, on the other hand, can get so jam-packed with exciting events and characters, it seems too unbelievable to take seriously. If British history is a sluggish merry-go-around, then Russian history is a Wild Mouse that zooms though a ring of fire. Then again, maybe that’s because Montefiore recognizes this and writes about it accordingly.

As Antony Beevor of “Financial Times” once noted, “Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs is epic history on the grandest scale…”Game of Thrones” seems like the proverbial vicar’s tea party in comparison…”

In Russia, for example, there aren’t just “bad guys.” There are villains like Khmelnitsky — the elected hetman of the Zaparozhian Cossacks — who purged an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 Jews. He and his savage hordes didn’t just kill other people. They disemboweled, dismembered, and decapitated them. After raping women, they’d make them watch while they cut, roasted, and ate their children.

Then there were the “good guys” who were really the not-so-bad bad guys. When Empress Elizaveta (1741-61) discovered the plot to dethrone her, she sentenced all the conspirators to death. Then she showed mercy by pardoning them. But they still had to be punished. So men just got broken on the wheel, and women just got their tongues ripped out.

Then there was Tsar Alexander II’s passionate affaire with Katya Dolgorukaya that began when she was 16 1/2. Their love letters might seem too tame by today’s standards, but they were steamy enough to finally get placed — uncatalogued — in the Russian Archives. (They didn’t have X-rated phone lines then, so they just had to write sexy letters with pet names for their genitals.)

Maybe these things seem fascinating because so much of Russia’s history remains unknown in this hemisphere. Who knew, for example, that Catherine The Great once retained the services of John Paul Jones to deliver naval victories for her Empire? And who knew that Jones’s rival, Prince Karl de Nassau-Siegen, probably was the one who got him falsely accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl! (Jones left Russia, died in Paris, but his body was “lost” until it was reburied at the US naval base of Annapolis in 1906.) And guess who used to cook for Rasputin, then Lenin and Stalin?… None other than Spiridon Putin, Vladimir’s grandpa!

Needless to say, not every single narrative in Dr. Montefiore’s 744-page tome is spellbinding. He tosses in enough fun facts with his meticulously presented overview, however, so that it seldom becomes boring. Until I read this book, I had no idea that Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. That might not seem like a big deal, but it gave me a sense of real discovery, a good feeling from learning something new. So how did he accurately depict what historically happened without resorting to hyperbole for dramatic effect and without reducing the real-life drama into ho-hum footnotes?

More than any historian I’ve ever encountered, this author has a good handle on how to honor accuracy yet preserve the wonder of historical discovery. And notice the British spellings this historian used in his book’s introduction:

“The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism: this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian menages a trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty.

“Out of context these excesses seem so overblown and outlandish that ascetic academic historians find themselves bashfully toning down the truth. After all, the legends of the Romanovs — the juice of Hollywood movies and TV drama series — are as potent and popular as the facts. That is why the teller of this story has to be wary of melodrama, mythology and teleology — the danger of writing history backwards — and cautious of methodology. Scepticism(sic) is essential; scholarship demands constant verification and analysis. But one of the benefits of narrative history is that each reign appears in context to give a portrait of the evolution of Russia, its autocracy and its soul. And in these large-than-life characters misshapen by autocracy, a distorted mirror appears, which reflects the tropes of all human character right back at us.”

If only Dr. Montefiore could have given commentary about the Windsors…Couldn’t some network let him host his own documentary on Russian history? Fingers crossed.