Word: romanov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From 1613 to 1917, the Russian empire was ruled, sometimes disastrously, sometimes rather well, by the Romanov family. From 1917 until 1991 it was ruled, always disastrously, by the Communist Party. Bringing back the Romanovs now would certainly be poetic justice. As the historian Richard Pipes wrote, the 1918 massacre by communists of the last Czar, Nicholas II, and his family * was "uniquely odious . . . a prelude to 20th century mass murder." Now that communism has been outlawed, who better to help replace it than the relatives of its first victims...
...next Romanov, should he get the job, must understand that he has been commissioned to reign, not rule. His usefulness to his country, and to the future of his family, depends on his being above politics -- a symbol, not an autocrat. The first post-Soviet parliament could audition all living Romanovs (of whom Grand Duke Vladimir, now living in France, is the most prominent) and pick the one who seems most amenable to these goals -- just as the English Parliament, in 1688, replaced a king it didn't trust (James II) with his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William...
...Somehow one could not forget, when viewing the eclectic arrays he promoted as "treasures of the Soviet Union," how in the '30s he and his brother Victor had astutely brought a freighter load of furniture and bibelots from Russian flea markets and hotel lobbies and sold it as "the Romanov treasure...
Despite the ill-considered sale of Alaska, the Romanov Empire by now extended over nearly 7,000 miles, but the vast structure had little strength. The Empire of Japan, newly reopened after its long isolation, proved that in the war of 1905. Though outnumbered, the Japanese pushed back a Russian invasion of Manchuria and virtually annihilated the Russian Navy. Czar Nicholas II barely survived the humiliation and the subsequent revolution that swept over Russia. Eleven years later he blundered into another war, another defeat, another revolution. In the 1918 Treaty of Brest Litovsk, the Germans' price for making peace with...
...merge into a gray blur. But what Gorbachev accomplished last week truly is historic. Though there is still much debate about how the reforms will play out, February 1990 may go down in Soviet history as a month equal in significance to February 1917, when the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty ended with the abdication of Czar Nicholas...