This younger brother of Alexander I was born in 1796, and became Tsar in 1825 at nearly thirty years old. Any chance that there might have been to…
Category: Russian history
Russia versus Turkey (1787, 1806, 1828, 1853, 1877 etc.)
The only major European power to make war on Turkey in the nineteenth century was Russia – at least five times. Russia intended to increase her territory around…
The Charter of the (Russian) nobility
Catherine II, known as the Great, had few illusions about the Russian nobility, but, unlike other rulers supported or hated by the aristocracy, she chose to be chummy,…
The USSR and its leaders
This article deals with the former Soviet Union, a.k.a. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR was a federation of fifteen republics, forming what was the world’s largest…
A brief history of Russia
Russia is a vast area of land occupying most of eastern Europe and much of northern Asia. So little is known about this country that Winston Churchill said…
The War in the Pacific
Officially, this war lasted from December 1941, when the United States entered the Second World War, until 1945. But the Pacific War really started with the Sino-Japanese War…
The Czechoslovakian Crisis
Many years before The Czech Republic and Slovakia freed themselves from the yoke of being simply Czechoslovakia, this crisis evolved from territorial demands made by Adolf Hitler. One…
The battle of Tannenberg
The battle of Tannenberg. In one of the better Hollywood attempts to re-produce the Second War on celluloid, The Night of the Generals had Peter O’Toole at his…
The battle of the Marne (September 1914)
The river Marne is a tributary of the Seine, leaving it at a point east of Paris. It was also famed for being the site of the furthest…
The Kadets
In 1905 during the first Russian revolution, Young revolutionaries founded the Kadets, a political party with the official name of ‘Constitutional Democrats’. Mostly young middle-class, they formed the…