Russia

  • Dobrynya Nikitich

    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 baby dragons, to not rescue Russian captives, and to not bathe in the Puchai River. Doing as some young men do, he ends up doing all four. As he is bathing in the Puchai River, he encounters a dragon. Dobrynya could not defend himself, thinking he would die, discovers “a hat of the Greek land”…

  • 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 and a middle class mother on November 7, 1879. The first taste of any revolutionary ideas came soon after Leon moved to Nikolayev to finish his education in 1896 where he found a group of Marxists that he was immediately drawn to. By 1898 at the age of 18, young Leon found himself on the…

  • 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 was only 3 years old, his father passed away leaving his eldest son as the King Of Russia. Feodor III or more aptly named, Feodor the Most Quiet, had suffered from health issues as a result of falling off his horse when he was 12 years old. The injuries left him nearly an invalid as…

  • 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 Denmark). At the age of twelve in 1881, whilst staying at the Winter Palace, Nicholas’ grandfather Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb. Having already survived several assassination attempts, that day Alexander had been out in his carriage followed by two sleighs full of Cossacks and when a member of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s…

  • 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 air blast that was so strong that it sent waves across the globe, twice. It was reported that there was not one single explosion but a series of explosions that occurred which could be heard 745 miles away. Once the explosions were over, dust clouds rose up miles into the atmosphere. The sun reflected off…