A Tale of Two Sisters
Their Grand Ducal Highnesses, Elisabeth and Alix, princesses of the minor German House of Hesse and By Rhine, were related to half the royal houses of Europe. Their grandmother was no less than Britain’s Queen Victoria whose misgivings about the sisters’ marriages to Russians proved tragically prophetic when both women met violent ends in Siberia. Their intertwined destinies are among history’s strangest. Born in 1864, Princess Elisabeth, nicknamed Ella, was one of the most beautiful, sought-after royals in Europe. Charming and vivacious, she had no shortage of celebrated suitors. In addition to the expected nobles and aristocrats, she was pursued by Wilhelm, the future German Kaiser, and Frederick II, the future Grand Duke of Baden. Queen...
Read MoreRomancing the Stone
It was a monument to make a pharaoh preen. St. Petersburg’s equestrian statue of Tsar Peter the Great was the brainchild of Prussian-born Tsarina Catherine II in an ambitious effort to ingratiate herself to the Russian people. Like the legendary tsar himself, the project proved to be audacious, unprecedented and a colossal piece of work. It started smoothly enough, with Catherine commissioning French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet who began work in 1770. While he designed the horse and the tsar’s torso, his apprentice, Marie-Anne Collot, only 18 years old, was given the daunting task of recreating Peter’s face which she modeled after his death mask and various portraits. Calamity struck when the mold split while the twenty-foot-tall statue was being cast,...
Read MoreThe Ice Queen
Anna Ivanova (1693-1740) was one of Russia’s lesser known empresses, and, arguably, the cruelest. A blip on the tsarist radar, her ten-year rule was dubbed a reign of terror as well as one of reform and remains contentious among historians. Anna could be petty, progressive or hideously harsh to both man and beast. Some scholars have traced her often erratic behavior to her father Ivan IV, whose mental illness is a matter of record. Her mother, Praskovia, only worsened matters as a cold, controlling woman who raised Anna for the nunnery with all the requisite strictness. As an ignored, unloved, only child, Anna’s emotional growth was understandably stunted. When Tsar Peter II died without an heir in 1730, several potential candidates were passed over in favor of...
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