Russia
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Russia’
A succession of religious leaders came to Kiev, hoping to win the wild barbarian Prince to their cause.
The Christianity that spread across England in the 7th century spread to Kiev in the 10th, but there it had to compete not just with paganism but with Islam, Judaism, and other flavours of Christianity — and also with Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev (r. 980-1015), who liked his religion spicy.
As a last, desperate throw of the dice in the Great War, the Germans detonated an unusual kind of weapon in St Petersburg.
At the height of the Great War, beleaguered Britain’s trusty ally Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was forced from his throne. Would the new Russian Government support the Allies? Some were naive enough to think so, but as Winston Churchill explained, the Germans had yet another deadly weapon in their arsenal.
It was the opinion of Leo Tolstoy that even Napoleon was never master of his own destiny.
Thomas Carlyle was a famous proponent of the ‘Great Men’ theory of history, which holds that world-changing events are moved by bold, iron-willed men of vision. Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was not of this brotherhood. In his classic War and Peace, he reminded us that even a man as great as Napoleon is much less in control of his own destiny than we might imagine.
Sixteen-year-old John Wesley Hackworth brought a locomotive over to St Petersburg, and Russia’s railway revolution was ready for the off.
British engineers and a sixteen-year-old boy played a key part in helping Imperial Russia begin her own railway revolution. In one respect, however, Russia failed to learn from the example the United Kingdom set for her: private enterprise.
Passengers sharing Bishop Nicholas’s Moscow-bound flight found his blessings faintly silly — but that was when the engines were still running.
St Nicholas Mogilevsky (1877-1955) was Bishop of Alma-Ata (Almaty) in Kazakhstan during the Soviet era. He endured repeated imprisonment and ill-use at the hands of the Nazis, the Communists and state-sponsored Church ‘modernisers’ with remarkable forbearance. This is just one of several tales from his own lifetime.
A Japanese swordsman confronts a Russian monk for... actually, he’s not really quite sure.
In 1859, Hakodate in Japan became one of the first Japanese cities to establish trade relations with foreign nations, with the opening of a Russian Consulate. Fear of Westernisation was high, and Russian missionary Fr Nicholas Kasatkin went there determined to ensure that Christianity would be as authentically Japanase as possible, but for one proud warrior that was not sufficient.