Posted on 12/05/2010 6:45:55 PM PST by decimon
A rare window into life in imperial Russia is due to open on Monday, when hundreds of letters, postcards, photographs and even menus from the court of Tsar Alexander III are put up for auction in Geneva.
The documents were all sent by Alexander's children, Nicholas (who later became Nicholas II), George, Michael, Olga and Xenia to their Swiss tutor Ferdinand Thormeyer.
Mr Thormeyer was born and brought up in Geneva, but emigrated to Russia as a young man where - in 1886 - he became a tutor of French language and literature to the imperial children.
Throughout his time with them the children wrote him letters, partly as a way of practising their French.
But when Mr Thormeyer left Russia in 1899, they continued to write to him and to his family; Olga's letters only stopped when she died in exile in 1960.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Swiss timepiece ping.
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I saw the movie “Nicholas and Alexandria” when I was but a lad.
It had a very strong impact on me and drove me to study Russian history in college, especially through its literature — amazingly interesting to say the least.
Recently released documents from the archives of the British secret service indicate that the murder of Rasputin was almost certainly the work of Brit agents in St. Petersburg. Rasputin had an absolute hold on the Empress Alexandra, a first class dimwit, who was then ruling Russia while her equal dimwit husband, Nicholas, was “running” the war effort 500 miles away. The Brits were petrified that Rasputin would convince her, of German birth, to get Russia out of the war, freeing up 100 German divisions from the East to smash through the western front. Archives indicate that Rasputin was shot with bullets from guns that only the Brits in Russia possessed and that they had been on scene the night that the Mad Monk was finished off.
That’s pretty interesting.
But; there was a cabal or collection of some sort within the Russian monarchy who wanted Rasputin dead and gone due to his near-complete influence over Alexandra, no? And they were supposedly the ones who poisoned him. That was a completely separate assassination attempt as I understand it.
Not being entirely clear on the dates involved; didn’t Rasp recover from his poisoning and then, sometime later, perhaps months and years, he was shot as you say, and dumped into the River Nieve?
I think I saw that movie. Maybe it was just me on that day but I thought the movie just so-so but visually beautiful.
Well, the Bolsheviki did take Russia out of the war. With German help. Lenin laughed last.
My father had a lot of Russian books and maps, and when I was a kid I was convinced that if I just turned them in the right direction I woul dbe able to read them...
У моего отца было много русских книг и карт, и, когда я был ребенком, я был убежден, что если я просто превратил их в правильном направлении, я woul DBE в состоянии прочитать их...
You’re right that there were many in the Russian Duma who rightly wanted Rasputin out of the picture - Purishkevich, one of the two publicly identified “assassins” of Rasputin (the other was Prince Yusupov, who owned the mansion on the Moika where Rasputin was offed), had shouted “He’s killing Russia” in the Duma which, given his hold over the simpletons Nicholas and Alexandra, was absolutely correct. But both Yusupov and P-kevich repeatedly changed their stories of Rasputin’s murder (Y-pov did it materially 19 times), none of which ever made a lot of sense. Moreover, the bit about Rasputin dying of drowning after having been shot and fed poisoned cakes by his hosts was probably a subterfuge to cover the real details - Rasputin had been shot three times (twice with the British SIS bullets) and his body had been tossed into the frozen Moika Canal adjacent to the mansion and it is apparently very common for submerged dead bodies to absorb water into the lungs.
Just one question, how can a body be thrown into a frozen body of water?
Through the ice - Rasputin was a big guy, both in height and girth. Moreover, this is the Moika Canal (not the Baltic Sea or Lake Ladoga which both adjoin St. Pete), and which has constantly flowing water despite the frozen veneer atop it. So, the ice was never that thick altho’ it would technically be considered a “frozen” canal.
You should see the Russian-Made movie “The Romanovs: An Imperial Family”.
Damn the Bolsheviks for what they did to those children.
That and so many other things about that era can really be studied at tremendous length because the information tends to be spotty and seems to inevitably be told from multiple “partisan” viewpoints.
In 2005 I worked on a RCCL cruise ship and we visited St. Petersburg 7 times, all overnights. Because I acted as a tour guide I was lucky to go to the Hermitage two or three times and many of the palaces. St Pete is just an otherworldly place, an odd combination of 1750, 1850, and 1950. Those palaces, the Admiralty, and the Hermitage while you get overloaded on sheer ornateness, are something like 1/3 mile long! They are unbelievably huge buildings. And they usually have 2 bathrooms at most!
The question I had which I didn’t explicitly ask was: Did the assassination attempts on Rasputin, regardless of the perp(s) all occur clustered together over a period of....weeks? Days?
Beleive it or not, there was only one other murder attempt on Rasputin: a female religious mystic in his home village in Siberia, whom I believed wounded him. The Okhrana (Czar’s Secret Police) had a file a mile wide on his indiscretions but were too loyal to the royals to attempt it. So, at least on the surface, it fell to a member of the Duma (Purishkevich) and two royals who could not be arrested (Duke Dmitri and Prince Yusupov) to the rage of the Empress, who may have been the Mad Monk’s lover; the omission in the historical accounts is that the trio met with the British Intelligence Service before the attempt and the latter agents were seen on site at the Moika Palace the night Rasputin was killed (you can tour the Yusupov Palace where it occurred; there is a wax statue of Rasputin in the corner of the room where he was fed the wine and cakes). You can also now tour the Alexander Palace (at least you could three years ago) where Nicholas and Alexandra lived and see the office where one person (and unfortunately, a very incompetent one) ran all of the Russian Empire. It really was the start of the horrendous evil (Lenin, Trotsky and the gang) that was allowed to come to power in Russia, with consequences for tens of millions.
You seem remarkably well-versed in Russian history! Surely much of Europe is a nexus of historical happenings of all sorts, but equally as certain, St Pete is very high on such a list of places. I sure didn’t get the feeling of historical “gravitas” out of Helsinki, nor Oslo; even though those cities go back 800-900 years vs St Pete only about 300 years.
Where the ship tied up, in the absolutely enormous port of St Petersburg (and as you surely know, the very existence of a Baltic port was probably reason #1 for the establishment of St Pete) were gigantic sheets and bars of steel from the “Red Oktober” steel works....and enormous weldments and crates of equipment stenciled to “Nuclear Energy of Iran”. Interesting place, dripping with history.
I’ve spent mucho time on business and personal business there. St. Petersburg was “lucky” with Stalin. He hated the city and moved the capital of the new communist state to Moscow, where he proceeded to put his archtectural “talents” to use by tearing down much of the old city and erecting intimidating new megaliths in their place - he even wanted to destroy St. Basil’s but even the most hardcore Reds wouldn’t allow that. He blew up the biggest Orthodox cathedral in the shadow of the Kremlin and wanted to build a 1000 foot statue to Lenin; the problem was that everything they built on the site sank because, mysteriously, the soil had become liquid. So, Stalin had them build a swimming pool - the Russians rebuilt the Cathedral to specs on that site in the 1990s when the Reds fell (the workmen wanted to work for free but the government wouldn’t allow it). But Stalin never touched St. Pete as he viewed it as too western, too close to Europe and wanted to let it die on the vine; thus, much more of it is preserved than in many other European cities. I agree that there isn’t much in Helsinki although the lifestyle and the people are great; there is a bit more in Oslo but neither city is the equal of St. Petersburg - really, in my view, only Paris and Prague are in Europe.
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