To this:
Of such are the fortunes of war and revolution!
Posted on 11/21/2014 7:08:32 PM PST by Loyalist
If the end result of a war is an exchange of territory, the outcome of a revolution is ultimately the exchange of real estate. The house at 716 Gerrard Street East is an apt illustration of the downward mobility of the politically displaced.
Listed last week on MLS, the modest two-story Riverdale semidetached was the final residence of the Tsar Nicholas II’s last surviving sibling, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandranova. The highest ranking member of the Russian imperial family to emigrate to North America, Olga convalesced in the care of Russian friends who ran the beauty shop on the main floor.
She was bedridden for a year and ate nothing but ice cream, according to Nick Barisheff, who was 15 when the 78-year-old duchess succumbed to cancer in his family’s apartment. She died in the upstairs front bedroom Nov. 24, 1960, 44 years ago this coming Monday.
It was a step down for the Grand Duchess, whose palace of birth, Peterhof, is also known as the “Russian Versailles.”
At age 19, on the occasion of her wedding in 1901, Tsar Nicholas granted his youngest sister a 200-room starter home — a $453-million St. Petersburg, parapeted, neo-Palladian with a 47-window front façade.
It had its own church, coach houses, a two-storey gardener’s shed, a greenhouse and an art studio for Olga, who painted. For sport, the couple hunted wolves. The childless couple was waited on by a staff of 70.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
To this:
Of such are the fortunes of war and revolution!
From the penthouse to the outhouse, literally.
Could have been worse. She could have been shot in the basement, her body dismembered, and dumped in a pit.
The man invented planking...nice.
After all,Obama's brother calls this place home,located in one of the more upscale neighborhoods of Nairobi.
I doubt it. The human animal hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years at least (to be conservative :{) ...and I am)
Could have been worse.
Uh, I think that should be 54 years ago.
If I owned the pad in the upper picture I would worry my head where I would place my computer to browse FR while munching on bowls of caviar.
Something that our future politicians will experience in the future. Right now let them enjoy their perks, chauffers, food, drinks and their mansions.
At reading the headline, I really thought “semi” was going to be an old Freightliner or something.
Never heard of a “semi” referring to a apartment.
Thanks for the edumacation.
Same here.
Me too. I still have a hard time with "flat."
Bookmark
A trillion bucks! That amount of money makes Warren Buffet and Bill Gates look poor.
They lived in Denmark in obscurity until Stalin accused her of corroboration with the Germans. For safety, the family resettled on a farm in Campbellsville and finally Cooksville, Ont. Her cousin, Queen Elizabeth II, visited in 1959, and invited Olga to lunch on her yacht Britannia when it docked in Toronto.
She was lucky to survive Lenin and Stalin's army of killers.
I’m no fan of the czars, but at their worst they kept something like a few thousand political prisoners, and the prisons they kept them in were these quaint sort of low security affairs where the prisoners could stroll around the courtyard and spend their days writing political missives and their families could come visit them and bring them meals and that sort of thing. Then the left took over and brought an unimaginable level of horror with their gulag system and their systematic torture and starvation and the unpersoning of human beings on a mass scale. Yet somehow the left is able to see itself as the bringer of a higher morality to the world. It’s just incredible.
~I’m no fan of the czars, but at their worst they kept something like a few thousand political prisoners, and the prisons they kept them in were these quaint sort of low security affairs where the prisoners could stroll around the courtyard and spend their days writing political missives and their families could come visit them and bring them meals and that sort of thing.~
Yep, they overlooked Lenin&Stalin and guilty by negligence. No sympathy from me.
Stalin was a convicted felon guilty of bank robberies and a cop killer. They should have hanged him high.
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