sandr020

I normally think of the Edwardian era as time of culture, literature, science, medicine and peace. But 1905 began with a series of strikes and demonstrations in the Russian streets . In Jan a protest march in St Pet­ersburg was led by a workers’ organ­isation, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Plant Workers . c200,000 mar­chers moved to the Wint­er Palace to present pet­itions to the Tsar, but soon 1,000 protest­ors lay shot dead that Bloody Sunday. Anger spread throughout Russia with more strikes and mar­ches. In March the universities were shut down by radicals. In July, sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutinied in Odessa and avoided death only when the firing squad seized the ship instead. Odessa’s citizens turned out to support the sail­ors and many were massacred on the steps leading to the wharf. Albert Einstein 1905 In St Petersburg Leon Trotsky set up a Soviet Workers’ Council to organise opposition to the Tsar. But Trotsky and his supp­or­ters were soon imprisoned. A...

We understand the very close connection among the three principal monarchs of the early C20th. 1.  British King George V and Russian Tsar Nicholas II ’s mothers, the princesses Alexandra and Dagmar, were sisters, the daughters of King Christian of Denmark and his wife Queen Louise. The king and tsar were thus first cousins. 2.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and King George were first cousins (via Wilhelm’s mother and George’s father), while Wilhelm and Nicholas were third cousins. It was common for European royalty to promote each other into the other’s defence forces.  In the photo below, Tsar Nicholas II was in the uniform of the German Westphalian Hussars and King George V was in the uniform of the German Rhenish Cavalry . King George V was appointed Colonel-in-Chief of the German regiment in Jan 1902 and served in this role until the two countries declared war in 1914. If their grandmother Queen Victoria had still been alive, said the Kaiser, she would never have ...

50,000 Jews lived in Kishinev (now Ukraine) in 1900, 46% of the total population. Kishinev was the 5th largest Jewish city in the Russian Empire city after Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz and Vilna. Thanks to the book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Steven Zipperstein, 2018) and to my grandfather. Rumours of attacks surfaced before Easter each year in Kishinev. Acc­usations of ritual murder in Pavel Krushevan ’s anti-Semitic newspaper, Bessarabets , remained ugly; there were rumours of menacing anti-Jewish meetings held in the back room of a Kishinev tavern, and leaflets calling for the beating of Jews were left in bars and cheap restaurants. By then Bessarabets had launched a semi-secret, anti-Semitic soc­iety. Against this backdrop, Jewish anxieties were heightened. Jewish shop owners took home bank records, receipts and financial doc­u­ments for safekeeping. Employees were told that shops could stay shut after the Passover festival. Heartbroken fathers claimed their children'...

My family’s borscht is milchig (no meat), made up of beetroot, pot­ato, cabbage, somewhat bitter sorrel and sour cream; it was the heart and soul of my grandmother’s Russian cuisine. From my friends at school in the 1950s, I knew that the Ukrainian, Lith­uan­ian and Polish Jewish families also loved borscht. For families with too many children and very little spare income, borscht was an ideal food. Cheap and easy to grow at home, beet­roots and potatoes were collected by the children in autumn and stored in the family cellar for use during the long winter months. There were no fridges of course, but the family cellars were so cold that the vegetables were naturally preserved. I had assumed that borscht was always vegetarian, hot and tasty in winter, chilled in summer. The women in my family in any case traditionally avoided meat when they could help it; meat was too expensive and who wanted to slaughter helpless animals? Other families preferred meat borscht, made with beef marrow ...

Let us start with whist. The  history of Whist can be traced at least to the early C16th in England (as mentioned in a pub­lish­ed sermon by Bishop Latimer in 1529) and through succeeding centuries under different names. Whist maintained its pop­ularity as a fashionable amusement, but it was not until 1742 that Edmond Hoyles’ famous Short Treatise on Whist appeared. In 1834 Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1804-70) invented the first sig­nal where partners defending against a contract could play particular cards to give a coded meaning, to guide each other. After ret­irement in 1857, Cavendish devoted himself to playing world class whist at the Port­land Club in London . In fact the first game of Duplicate Whist was pl­ayed in London that year, under Cav­end­ish’s dir­ec­t­ion.      Two beautifully dressed couples playing bridge c1900 The USA progressed in parallel with Britain in extending Duplicate. A dup­licate whist game was played privately in Chicago in 1880 ...

In July 1918 Bolshevik revolutionaries, acting on Mos­c­ow’s orders, shot Czar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, four daught­ers (Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia), their son Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich and four servants. Their bodies were taken from the Yekaterinburg cellar, in the Urals, and buried in the forest, yet a rumour got out that the body of the Grand Duchess Anastasia had not been accounted for. Did she hide in the closed cellar? Since 1918 many women have presented them­selves as the missing Anastasia (or another sister). However only Anna Anderson and Eugenia Smith gathered substantial support. Thank you to True Crimes and Curiosities for much of the information . The princesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Alexander Palace, 1916 Olga, Alexei, Anastasia and Tatiana Under house arrest in  Tsarskoe Selo , 1917 Last known photo of the Romanov siblings A] In 1920 Anna Anderson tried to commit suic­ide and was sent to a mental health centre in Be...

The first part comes from the Blavatsky Archives ; many thanks.  Helena Petrovna von Hahn was born at Ekaterinoslav in Southern Russia, in 1831. She was the daughter of Colonel Peter von Hahn, and writer Helena de Fadeyev. Her mat­er­nal grandmother was Princ­ess Helena Dolgorukov, noted botanist-writer. After her mother’s early death in 1842, Helena was brought up with the grand­parents. This clever linguist was a sensitive child, and was soon aware that her psychic powers puzzled others. At 18 she married the much older Nikifor Blavatsky , Vice-Governor of Yerivan Province. The marriage was never consummated and she soon escaped and travelled across Turkey, Egypt and Greece. Only 2 years later, in London in 1851, she met the Mahatma/ Master  Morya of her childhood visions, and fully accepted his guidance. In 1852, Helena left for Canada, the USA, Mexico, South Am­erica and the West Indies, then went via the Cape to India and Tibet. Then to Britain, America again, India vi...

In the 1780s a St Petersburg nobleman serving Empress Cat­h­erine the Great retired from the Royal Household and moved to Moscow. There he decided to build a house and invited architects from Italy. Well-versed in Russian taste and with a keenly honed feeling for Mus­covite architectural style, Italian architects built a baronial Bar­oque man­sion a la russe . Baroque details run throughout the interiors of the building. The house passed to a German aristocrat in the mid C19th as part of his future wife’s dowry. Front entrance, Tverskoy Boulevard tripadvisor Financial ruin forced the new owner to open a pharmacy in the building, successfully. Downstairs, the customers waiting for their medicines to be prepared could drink restorative drinks, teas, coffee, or hot chocolate while waiting for their medicines to be prepared.  At the same time, a library full of reference books was installed on the upper & mezzanine floors. The library collection grew to 3,000+ volumes. At ...

Danila Ivanovich Vassilieff (1897-1958) was born at Kagalnitskaya, near Rostov-on-Don Russia. Educated at a technical school at Novocherkassk and at a milit­ary academy in St Petersburg, Danila specialised in mechanical eng­ineering. In WW1 he served on the Eastern Front with a Cossack cavalry regiment. Then he saw action with the White forces in the Russian Civil War.  After being captured and imprisoned by the Reds at Baku in 1920, Danila escaped on a motor bike, event­ual­­ly travelling to China. Due to his wartime experiences, Vassil­ieff felt free to continue life as a womaniser; until  he married Anisia Nicolaevna at the Shanghai Russian Church in 1923. From Shanghai the couple sailed to Australia  in 1923. In 1923 they bought a sugar-plantation near Towns­ville but in 1928 he separated from his wife and was employed on the Northern Territory railway. In 1929 he left Australia, studying art in Brasil (1930-1) and in the West Indies and South America (1932-3). Then...

The Arabs de­clared war on the Tang Chin­ese forces and eventually crushed them at The Battle of Talas 751 AD. This led to the ex­pulsion of the Tang Chin­ese from Central Asia. While cros­sing Central Asia, dif­ferent routes developed. Kashgar in far Western China became the new cross­roads of Asia; from here the routes again divided, heading across the Pamirs to Sam­arkand and to the south of the Caspian Sea, or to the South into India. Eventually the road reached the shores of the Caspian Sea, via Tashkent . Thus the 8,000 km long Silk Road connected Beijing to Con­stan­tin­op­le via the movement of relig­ions and products. And Tashkent emer­ged as a major trading city en route. Friday Mosque Kukeldash Madrassah The rise of Islam impacted on Asia, separating the East and West. The Islamic State of the Gh aznavids (962-1186) extended from Persia to India, with Lahore as the capital. Timur/Tamerlane (1336–1405) was an Islamic Turco-Mongol conqueror. In 1390 Tamerlane ravaged Kash...