The Romanovs — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Montefiore traces the Romanov dynasty from its accession in 1613 to its destruction in 1918, drawing on archives, memoirs, and letters to give each tsar a distinct individual character while tracing the institutional continuities of Russian autocracy. The book is particularly good on the dysfunction at the heart of Russian imperial governance — the relationship between autocratic power and bureaucratic incompetence — that made the dynasty's eventual collapse less surprising than it appeared to contemporaries.