Word: tsarina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Alex de Jonge-an Oxford professor of Russian ancestry-takes Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin's rise to power to be one of history's tragic jokes. The Tsarina thought Rasputin a saint because he could apparently heal her son; and because he was a saint, he must be heeded in all matters. The Tsar did not lag far behind in credulity...
...told the Tsar who succeeding ministers should be and where to deploy troops appears to have been an ex-horse thief. Certainly he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. At the end of a night spent listening to gypsy music, he would reel after prostitutes, the gold cross the Tsarina had given him swinging from his neck...
...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...