Death of a Salesman
Grigori Rasputin was one of history’s most infamous, improbable influences, a degenerate Siberian peasant who contributed enormously to the implosion of Russia’s three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty. A self-styled “holy man,” Rasputin presented himself as a miracle worker to Alexandra Feodorovna, the last tsarina, by preying on her penchant for mystics and her bouts of nervous hysteria. Combining coincidence with curative talents, he convinced the empress that he alone could ease the pain of her hemophiliac son and heir to the throne, Alexei. Asked why he allowed the famously unwashed and lecherous intruder in his family’s midst, Tsar Nicholas II replied, “Better one Rasputin than ten hysterical scenes a day.” Rasputin’s influence soon...
Read MoreRed Sails in the Sunset
No, I can’t see Russia from my house in Sonoma County, but I might’ve had a glimpse a couple hundred years ago. With Tsar Putin gobbling up the Crimea and eyeing the rest of the Ukraine, I started thinking about how things might have been if the Russkies still had a foothold here in California. That unsettling notion prompted me to make a trip up the coast to explore their vanished colony and contemplate what might have been. In 1725, Peter the Great took time out from building his new capital city, St. Petersburg, to try colonizing the Pacific territories of North America before Spain beat him to it. He made little headway, but his lust for expansion was continued by Catherine the Great who, sixty years later, had herself a tiny settlement in Alaska. The...
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