This beautiful, doomed woman was the sister of the Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, and of Prince Ernest of Hesse-Darmstadt, and the daughter of Princess Alice of Great Britain,…
Category: Russian history
Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky
The name is unknown to most of us in the 21st century, and seems to be in a state of banishment from the minds of some of today’s…
More thoughts on that Yalta Conference
In February, 1945, the second ‘Big Three’ conference took place at Yalta in the Crimea. The first had been in Teheran in Persia. What was agreed at Yalta…
Mensheviks
The word means ‘members of the minority’; Mensheviks were another revolutionary party in Russia, similar in their aims, but not as radical as the Bolsheviks. The Russian Social…
Stalin’s Five Year Plans
By the year 1928 Josep Stalin was firmly in the saddle in the Sovietized Russia. The dictator was determined to add Russia to the list of world powers…
The beginnings of Soviet Russia
The February Revolution (1917) It is easy enough to say that the origin of the Revolution in Russia was mainly due to the unpopularity of the Tsar; but…
The Treaty of Nerchinsk
Before the seventeenth century China had been almost a myth; a legendary giant land in the Far East, barely visited by Europeans, a subject for dreams. But in…
Eduard Shevardnazde
This politician came from Georgia, a Soviet state until democratization. He was born in 1928, did well in history studies at the Kutaisi Institute of Education and joined…
Purges in Soviet Russia
Stalin ordered the arrest, summary trial and subsequent execution of millions of people in Communist Russia, particularly between the years 1936 – 8. His aim was simply to…
The Russo-Polish War of 1929
Following the collapse of Germany at the end of the Great War, Poland foundf herself independent, a most unusual position for that sad country. It was November, 1918;…