[PDF] The Tsars eBook

Author : Robert Service
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 44,37 MB
Release : 2017-09-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1681775727

GET BOOK

A riveting account of the last eighteen months of Tsar Nicholas II's life and reign from one of the finest Russian historians writing today. In March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated and the dynasty that had ruled an empire for three hundred years was forced from power by revolution. Now Robert Service, the eminent historian of Russia, examines Nicholas's life and thought from the months before his momentous abdication to his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The story has been told many times, but Service's deep understanding of the period and his forensic examination of previously untapped sources, including the Tsar's diaries and recorded conversations, as well as the testimonies of the official inquiry, shed remarkable new light on his troubled reign, also revealing the kind of Russia that Nicholas wanted to emerge from the Great War. The Last of the Tsars is a masterful study of a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even willfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political ferment in Russia that followed the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, and the beginnings of Lenin's Soviet socialist republic.

Author : Marc Ferro
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 46,32 MB
Release : 1995
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0195093828

GET BOOK

A figure surrounded by myth and speculation, at the center of one of history's most cataclysmic events--the Russian Revolution--Nicholas II remains haunting and enigmatic. Now one of France's most eminent historians presents a biography that goes beyond the lies and half-lies surrounding Nicholas's reign to provide an evocative portrait of this most mysterious ruler. Illustrations.

Author : Michel (Prince of Greece)
Publisher : Vendome Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 47,26 MB
Release : 2006-10-17
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN :

GET BOOK

The worlds fascination with the Russian imperial family endures, and with this stunning book a new spotlight is added. "Jewels of the Tsars," the first book to examine the familys unparalleled collection, is illustrated with extraordinary photographs taken under special conditions at the Kremlins Diamond Fund, and accompanied by 18th- and 19th-century portraits and photographs of the Tsars, their families, and their court. Prince Michael of Greece, a Romanoff descendant, writes with an insiders knowledge of his familys passion for rare and beautiful jewels, and their place in the troubled history of Imperial Russia.

Author : William Clarke
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 39,74 MB
Release : 1995-12
Category :
ISBN : 9780312303938

GET BOOK

At its peak before the first world war, the fortune of the Romanovs of Russia has been calculated at over 45 billion dollars. It included fabulous state jewels, exquisite Faberge eggs, the palaces in and around St. Petersburg and the Crimea, the royal yachts and trains, and millions in Tsarist bank accounts in London, New York, and elsewhere. Since the secret murders of Nicholas and Alexandra and their family in 1918, and the subsequent, and controversial, discovery of their remains, the mystery persists: What happened to all that wealth? Questions surrounding the lost fortune are inevitably tied up with the issue of just who was killed that terrible summer's night in 1918 at Ekaterinburg. William Clarke goes to the heart of the Romanov story, to the Central State Archives in Russia, which for three-quarters of a century had been filed away in secrecy, and is only now open to investigation. The result of over twenty years of research, Clarke's quest reveals the truth behind claims to the Tsarist fortune made by the likes of Anna Anderson and Michel Goleniewski, and sheds new light on this most intriguing of historical mysteries.

Author : Constantine Pleshakov
Publisher :
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 32,18 MB
Release : 2003-04-24
Category : History
ISBN : 0465057926

GET BOOK

A lively account of one of the greatest naval battles in history retraces the fateful journey of the Tsar's armada from the Suez Canal to the Korea Straight, where it was destroyed by the Japanese Navy in 1905. Reprint.

Author : Michael Farquhar
Publisher : Random House
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 16,68 MB
Release : 2014-07-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0812985788

GET BOOK

“Michael Farquhar doesn’t write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it.”—Gene Weingarten, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist Scandal! Intrigue! Cossacks! Here the world’s most engaging royal historian chronicles the world’s most fascinating imperial dynasty: the Romanovs, whose three-hundred-year reign was remarkable for its shocking violence, spectacular excess, and unimaginable venality. In this incredibly entertaining history, Michael Farquhar collects the best, most captivating true tales of Romanov iniquity. We meet Catherine the Great, with her endless parade of virile young lovers (none of them of the equine variety); her unhinged son, Paul I, who ordered the bones of one of his mother’s paramours dug out of its grave and tossed into a gorge; and Grigori Rasputin, the “Mad Monk,” whose mesmeric domination of the last of the Romanov tsars helped lead to the monarchy’s undoing. From Peter the Great’s penchant for personally beheading his recalcitrant subjects (he kept the severed head of one of his mistresses pickled in alcohol) to Nicholas and Alexandra’s brutal demise at the hands of the Bolsheviks, Secret Lives of the Tsars captures all the splendor and infamy that was Imperial Russia. Praise for Secret Lives of the Tsars “An accessible, exciting narrative . . . Highly recommended for generalists interested in Russian history and those who enjoy the seamier side of past lives.”—Library Journal (starred review) “An excellent condensed version of Russian history . . . a fine tale of history and scandal . . . sure to please general readers and monarchy buffs alike.”—Publishers Weekly “Tales from the nasty lives of global royalty . . . an easy-reading, lightweight history lesson.”—Kirkus Reviews “Readers of this book may get a sense of why Russians are so tolerant of tyrants like Stalin and Putin. Given their history, it probably seems normal.”—The Washington Post

Author : Russell E. Martin
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 38,79 MB
Release : 2021-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1501754858

GET BOOK

The Tsar's Happy Occasion shows how the vast, ornate affairs that were royal weddings in early modern Russia were choreographed to broadcast powerful images of monarchy and dynasty. Processions and speeches emphasized dynastic continuity and legitimacy. Fertility rites blended Christian and pre-Christian symbols to assure the birth of heirs. Gift exchanges created and affirmed social solidarity among the elite. The bride performed rituals that integrated herself and her family into the inner circle of the court. Using an array of archival sources, Russell E. Martin demonstrates how royal weddings reflected and shaped court politics during a time of dramatic cultural and dynastic change. As Martin shows, the rites of passage in these ceremonies were dazzling displays of monarchical power unlike any other ritual at the Muscovite court. And as dynasties came and went and the political culture evolved, so too did wedding rituals. Martin relates how Peter the Great first mocked, then remade wedding rituals to symbolize and empower his efforts to westernize Russia. After Peter, the two branches of the Romanov dynasty used weddings to solidify their claims to the throne. The Tsar's Happy Occasion offers a sweeping, yet penetrating cultural history of the power of rituals and the rituals of power in early modern Russia.

Author : Tricia Starks
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 17,85 MB
Release : 2018-09-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1501722077

GET BOOK

Approaching tobacco from the perspective of users, producers, and objectors, Smoking under the Tsars provides an unparalleled view of Russia’s early adoption of smoking. Tricia Starks introduces us to the addictive, nicotine-soaked Russian version of the cigarette—the papirosa—and the sensory, medical, social, cultural, and gendered consequences of this unique style of tobacco use. Starting with the papirosa’s introduction in the nineteenth century and its foundation as a cultural and imperial construct, Starks situates the cigarette’s emergence as a mass-use product of revolutionary potential. She discusses the papirosa as a moral and medical problem, tracks the ways in which it was marketed as a liberating object, and concludes that it has become a point of increasing conflict for users, reformers, and purveyors. The heavily illustrated Smoking under the Tsars taps into bountiful material in newspapers, industry publications, etiquette manuals, propaganda posters, popular literature, memoirs, cartoons, poetry, and advertising. Starks frames her history within the latest scholarship in imperial and early Soviet history and public health, anthropology and addiction studies. The result is an ambitious social and cultural exploration of the interaction of institutions, ideas, practice, policy, consumption, identity, and the body. Starks has reconstructed how Russian smokers experienced, understood, and presented their habit in all its biological, psychological, social, and sensory inflections, providing the reader with incredible images and a unique application of anthropology and sensory analysis to the experience of tobacco dependency.

Author : Nikolaos A. Chrissidis
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 38,75 MB
Release : 2016-08-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1609091892

GET BOOK

The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes. In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy's impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He also shows that Russian and Greek educational enterprises were part of the larger European pattern of Jesuit academic activities that impacted Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox educational establishments and curricular choices. An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is the first study of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in English and the only one based on primary sources in Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin. It will interest scholars and students of early modern Russian and Greek history, of early modern European intellectual history and the history of science, of Jesuit education, and of Eastern Orthodox history and culture.

Author : Daniel Beer
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 513 pages
File Size : 25,62 MB
Release : 2017-01-03
Category : History
ISBN : 0307958914

GET BOOK

Winner of the Cundill History Prize The House of the Dead tells the incredible hundred-year-long story of “the vast prison without a roof” that was Russia’s Siberian penal colony. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Russian Revolution, the tsars exiled more than a million prisoners and their families east. Here Daniel Beer illuminates both the brutal realities of this inhuman system and the tragic and inspiring fates of those who endured it. Siberia was intended to serve not only as a dumping ground for criminals and political dissidents, but also as new settlements. The system failed on both fronts: it peopled Siberia with an army of destitute and desperate vagabonds who visited a plague of crime on the indigenous population, and transformed the region into a virtual laboratory of revolution. A masterly and original work of nonfiction, The House of the Dead is the history of a failed social experiment and an examination of Siberia’s decisive influence on the political forces of the modern world.