Word: tsars
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...square just off Sofia's Ruski Boulevard facing the National Assembly stands a statue of Tsar Alexander II, ruler of Russia from 1855 to 1881. A prerevolutionary Tsar being honored in a Communist country? History provides the explanation: Alexander II freed the Bulgarians from five centuries of Turkish rule in 1878, at a cost of 200,000 Russian lives. Unlike most of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria regards the U.S.S.R. as its liberator, not its conqueror. The two countries share the Cyrillic alphabet and speak similar languages. Though it is difficult to measure the affection felt by the Bulgarian people toward...
...Russian metalworker, Brezhnev was born in the Ukrainian industrial town of Kamenskoye (now known as Dneprodzerzhinsk). His father may have taken part in strikes that accompanied the 1905 revolution against Tsar Nicholas II's rule. Brezhnev was ten years old at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He attended a grammar school that was subsidized by his father's steel plant, worked for a time as a manual laborer and in 1923 joined the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization. After vocational school, one of his first jobs was to help supervise the distribution of land in the Urals...
...surpasses all the monarchs of the whole world. He uses his authority as much over ecclesiastics as laymen, and holds unlimited control over the lives and property of all his subjects: not one of his counselors has sufficient authority to dare to oppose him." Was he describing a Tsar or a Stalin? The power alone is not unfathomable. The country itself seems both to seek subjugation and to struggle against it. It takes a special kind of oppressor to succeed in such a place. Like Brezhnev, he must appear to have sprung from the soil and descended from...
Little is known about Rasputin's early life. The man who 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...