Word: czarinas
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Custine reports that when a squall hit a flotilla of small craft carrying "chosen bourgeoisie" on an outing to Czar Nicholas I's seaside palace, scores were drowned. The newspapers suppressed the disaster, so as not to "distress the Czarina [or] imply blame to the Czar." By a similar procedure, when a serving girl was murdered in a back street, the police did not bother to report the crime, but were careful to make a few rubles by selling her body to medical students for dissection...
Alexander III, Czar of all the Russias, was conferring with his court jeweler, Peter Carl Fabergé, about what to give the Czarina for Easter. Fabergé proposed an egg-wjth a surprise inside it. "What will the surprise be?" asked the Czar. With all due respect, Fabergé refused...
...Easter time in 1884, the Czarina received what at first glance looked like an ordinary hen's egg, but the shell beneath its white enamel was of gold. Inside it was a golden yolk, and inside that a golden chick. In the chick's stomach was a model of the imperial crown, and inside the crown was a tiny ruby egg. It went over big. "Next Easter," the Czar informed Fabergé, "we'll be wanting another surprise...
...carved out of rock crystal. Inside it was a golden tree, and perched in the tree was a peacock which, when removed and placed on a table, strutted, turned its head, and folded and unfolded its fanlike emerald tail. The last Fabergé egg to be presented to the Czarina (in 1916) was prophetically grim: made of blackened steel and poised on four bits of shrapnel, it contained only a miniature painting of the Czar and Czarevitch Alexis with staff generals on the Eastern front. Two years later the imperial family was to be shot to death in a cellar...
...another scene, a group of Russian officers invite their French fellow prisoners to the gala opening of a package they have just received from the Czarina. When the package is found to contain books instead of vodka and caviar, the Russians simply set fire...