Word: tsar
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After the Ukraine was absorbed into the Russian Empire in the late 18th century, successive Tsars repeatedly suppressed the nationalist natives. The Tsar's attempts to Russify Ukraine reached its zenith in 1876 when the Tsar issued the Ems Ukaz, which banned all publishing in Ukrainian. Ironically the Harvard building which houses the Ukrainian Institute was built in that year...
...Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia from 1533 to 1584, was not, strictly speaking, terrible. That cognomen came from a mistranslation of the Russian word grozny, which means something closer to "awe inspiring." Yet in just about every other sense, Ivan was ghastly enough...
Young Ivan set about codifying laws, establishing schools and unifying his fractured domain. But his imperial dreams soon drowned in his own appetites. He married eight times and ordered at least one of his wives murdered. The Tsar found he enjoyed killing and torture almost as much as sex and prayer. With his sadistic elder son, also named Ivan, he would turn wild bears loose in the public square and watch them maul passersby. Suspecting that the elders of Novgorod were making overtures to Poland, father and son spent five weeks supervising the slow deaths of as many...
Though Ivan IV liked to deliver his mayhem personally, much of it was meted out by the oprichniki, his 6,000-member guard of thugs who terrorized the country for seven years until the Tsar abolished the group. In a fit of contrition late in his life, Ivan made a list of more than 3,000 opponents he had executed. He sent the names, along with generous sums, to monasteries for memorial prayers to be recited...
DIED. Anna Anderson Manahan, 82, who spent 62 years trying to prove that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and only survivor of the 1918 execution of the Russian imperial family at Ekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk); of pneumonia; in Charlottesville, Va. Contending that she survived the slaughter by hiding behind one of her dead sisters, "Anastasia" was rejected as an impostor by Romanov relatives. She married Historian John E. Manahan in 1968. Her life became the subject of many books and was the basis of the movie Anastasia...