Word: czars
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Cracking Rifles. The first two productions bore him out. On opening night, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov had a cast of 280 bedecked in pounds of furs, brocade, velvet, gems and clattering swords. Czar Boris' throne room in the last act was a breathtaking showcase of Byzantine opulence, with richly colored frescoes on the multidomed ceiling and an elaborately carved golden throne beneath two 800-lb. chandeliers. In Prokofiev's War and Peace, which ran for four hours the following night and called for 40 soloists even in the condensed version, some scenes were framed...
When Alexander Kerensky proposed a measure to abolish the death penalty in Russia, Czar Nicholas II was opposed to the notion. What would become of discipline in the army, he wanted to know? Kerensky, who was a bit of a fusspot but a far more decent man than any of the Bolsheviks who replaced him, tried gently to explain to the last of the Romanovs that the law he proposed was designed to preserve the Czar's own life...
...oily hands of Rasputin, whose prayers they believed would heal their more than fragile son Alexis. Rasputin not only destroyed the morale of the aristocracy, he also made it impossible for Nicholas to heed sensible advice until it was too late. And he fatally fractured the image of the Czar in the mind of the masses. The imperial pair saw a calumniated saint in Rasputin; the people, in the words of a monarchist member of the Duma, saw "the beastly, drunken unclean face of a bald satyr from Tobolsk...
...match she made in 1894 between Nicky and Alicky would have been a happy one, had they not received the vast, ramshackle Russian Empire as a wedding present. His father, Czar Alexander, died at 49, and carefree Nicky, who had expected that papa had another 20 years of healthy despotism ahead, had to fill his big boots. Mourning marred the sumptuous Orthodox wedding, and worse was to come. At war with Japan in 1905, Nicky sent the Russian Baltic battle fleet lum bering round the world, but it was sunk in 45 minutes at Tsushima. What Nicky called the "monkeys...
...World. Nicky was the Czar, but the official classes and the police governed. At the center of the administrative web, Nicky and Alicky lived in a cocoon of preposterous protocol unchanged in a single item since Catherine the Great. Of pogroms and general misery, Nicky knew only what he was told. Of the good features of Russian life-the upsurge of national genius in fiction, poetry and science-he knew little, and what little he did know he did not like. His sole success was in contriving some sort of private life for himself and Alicky. At Czarskoe Selo...