He was one of the most popular bogatyrs (epic knights) from Russian folklore. He is actually based on a real warlord, Dobrynya, who led the armies of Svyatoslav the Great and tutored his son Vladimir the Fair Sun. His story starts with Dobrynya’s mother telling Dobryana to avoid the Saracen Mountains, to not trample on […]
Category: Russia
Leon Trotsky: Assassination of a Revolutionary
An exiled Leon Trotsky sat at his desk on the evening of August 20, 1940 with long-time friend, Frank Jackson, who was helping edit an article. Except there was no editing and certainly no Frank Jackson. And death was imminent. A Russian revolutionary born in the Ukraine, Lev Davidovich Brohnstein was born to a farmer […]
Peter the Great: Reforms of a Future Empire
Peter Romanov was not born Great but earned the moniker by setting precedents previously unheard of for the kingdom of Russia. Born royal in 1672 to Tsar (or Czar) Alexis I and his second wife, Natalya, as he was the youngest son, no one gave much thought to him ever reigning the kingdom. When Peter […]
Assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanovs
Born on May 18th 1868, at the Tsarskoye Selo near St Petersburg, the former home of Empress Catherine I, wife of Peter the great at the beginning of the 18th Century, Nicholai Alexandrovich Romanov was the oldest child of the heir to the Russian monarchy, Alexander III and his wife Marie Feodorovna (Princess Dagmar of […]
The Tunguska Event
On the morning of June 30, 1908, a fireball, that has been estimated to have been up to 30 million degrees Fahrenheit in the center, was seen roaring across the sky. At 7:17 A.M. in Russia, the flying object exploded above the Earth creating shock waves that registered 5.0 on the Richter scale and an […]