Word: russia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...night of July 19, 1907, Alexei, the only son of Nicholas and Alexandra, the Tsar and Tsarina of Imperial Russia, lay in his bed, hemorrhaging. The four-year-old suffered from hemophilia-the hereditary "bleeder" disease for which turn-of-the-century medicine knew no remedy. In desperation the father and mother sent for a holy man, then the rage of St. Petersburg society...
...same could not be said of Russia. "Rasputin took the empire by stopping the bleeding of the Tsarevich," the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane observed. Alas, the empire was hemorrhaging too, and the hypnotic Siberian peasant only exacerbated that wound...
...this drunken lecher with insolent ambitions had the power to make troubled people feel better-to lighten souls, as De Jonge puts it. Animals and children loved him. In his own way he wanted to be what the Tsar and Tsarina believed him to be: the savior of Holy Russia. But even if Rasputin had been an angel, he would have been too late. "A kind of frenzy has seized people," Princess Catherine Radziwill wrote in 1913. Russia had turned into a "very large lunatic asylum" of manic searchers, from table-tapping spiritualists to bomb-tossing anarchists. The whole country...
Prince Felix Yusupov believed he was saving Holy Russia too, when, after midnight on Dec. 17, 1916, he lured Rasputin to his palace and fed him cream cakes laced with cyanide. When the poison failed to take effect, the prince shot him. Left for dead on the floor, Rasputin opened one mad eye, then leaped up in an attempt to strangle his shocked assassin. Another conspirator had to fire more bullets. When the corpse was dragged out of the river near Petrovsky Bridge, water was found in the lungs. In the end, Rasputin may have drowned. Siberian peasants...
...task: extracting a stiff price for Russian commitment. Orlov has other credentials: another uncle is the Earl of Walden, a father figure to young Orlov since the boy's Oxford days. Together, the relatives negotiate the fate of their respective nations. It is not an easy matter. In Russia, revolutionaries are appalled at the prospect of war. Feliks Kschessinsky, a terrorist leader, fulminates, "Half the misery in the world is caused by nice young men like Orlov who think they have the right to organize wars between nations...