Word: czarina
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...such high-end spas is that Eve might have a better chance of getting back into Eden than you do of getting an appointment for next week. There's a two-month wait for a signature rubdown at Houston's tony Brea spa. Eliza Petrescu, Avon's eyebrow-waxing czarina, whose customers include celebrities like Natasha Richardson, says her next open 10-min. appointment is not until March 2000. Ann Marie Gardner, beauty director and spa reviewer for the fashionista bible W, gripes, "I had my whole office calling. We couldn't get in anywhere on three days' notice...
Like the Spanish Bourbons, the Romanovs inherited the hemophilia gene from Queen Victoria. But striking the heir Alexis, it proved fatal to the dynasty. The Czarina Alexandra fell under the influence of the Siberian wonder worker Rasputin--and she interfered with policy with disastrous results. Well-meaning but weak, Czar Nicholas could only give way to war, upheaval and finally the Bolsheviks, who massacred the family in a cellar on July...
...discussions that all but canonized Nicholas and endorsed autocracy. His Russia, NTV told its viewers, was a country of "order and prosperity." One young historian argued that Nicholas was a statesman of almost supernatural insight, though he gave himself away when he went on to suggest that Rasputin--the Czarina's "spiritual adviser" whose scandalous reputation did so much to discredit the Czar--was given a raw deal. The guiding logic of the programs seemed to be that if the Bolsheviks hated Nicholas, he must have been a wonderful...
...with a figurehead monarch (a role that would have suited a Czar whose only talent was that he sat on a horse well), Nicholas saw himself as a stern 17th century autocrat. Liberalization was dangerous; had not his grandfather, the cautious reformer Alexander II, been assassinated by populists? The Czarina enthusiastically egged on his autocratic posturing, and when her grandmother, Britain's Queen Victoria, wrote tactfully to suggest that a queen must work hard to win the love of her subjects, she replied, "You are mistaken, my dear grandmama...Here we do not need to earn the love...
...What is the official role of the czarina?" asked a skeptical council member...