Russia
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Russia’
As war engulfed Europe, an Anglican bishop called on Russia to unite the world’s Christians around their veneration for the Bible.
The reign of Edward VII (1901-1910) brought a thaw in relations between Britain and Russia, and when the Great War broke out in 1914, the two nations were allies on the battlefield. A year later, Bishop Bury (who had recently visited Russia) urged his fellow Anglicans to look to Moscow as their most natural ecumenical partner too.
Timur, Muslim lord of Samarkand, threw his weight behind the Golden Horde’s subjugation of Christian Russia, with unexpected results.
Timur, who succeeded his father as Lord of Samarkand in 1369, traced his ancestry back to Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire in 1206. By the time of his death in 1405, he had humbled kings and kingdoms from Russia to Iran, India and Egypt, and changed the course of history more than once — though not always as he intended.
Boris Godunov was crowned Tsar of All Russia in 1598 in the belief that Tsar Ivan’s son Dmitry was dead — but was he?
In 1604, Tsar Boris of Russia faced almost exactly the same scenario that had confronted Henry VII of England in the 1490s: a young man claiming to be a prince everyone thought had died years before, marching on the capital with an army of rebellion. The chief difference was that in Russia’s agonised Time of Troubles, the impostor actually got to play King.
Richard Cobden told an Edinburgh peace conference that the biggest threat to the United Kingdom’s security was her own foreign policy.
In May 1853, Russia took military action to liberate Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia (modern-day Romania) from Turkey’s harsh rule. In England, the talk was of sending troops to defend poor Turkey, and of Russia’s secret designs on western Europe. That October, Richard Cobden told a peace conference in Edinburgh that our fears and economic hardships were all of our own making.
The interminable squabbling among the Slavic peoples around the southeast Baltic prompted their leaders to drastic action.
In 865, a large and unwelcome army of Vikings swept across the North Sea, but within sixty years Vikings and English had together established a new, united Kingdom of England. Just three years earlier, the squabbling Slavic peoples of the Baltic’s southeastern shores had actually invited the Vikings over, and within a generation the foundations of Russia had also been laid.
Peter the Great wanted Russia to join the nations of Western Europe, but the nations of Western Europe refused to make room for him.
On the eve of the Great Northern War (1700-1721), most Europeans saw Russia only as an uncouth land useful as a supplier of wax, hemp and leather goods. Her ambitious new Tsar, Peter I, swore that Germany would soon admire her industry, and France her elegance, and that the Dutch and English would salute her navies; but without a European seaport, all this was an idle dream.