Browse Items (73 total)

A Gentle Soul... Before the Industrial Revolution St. Petersburg's visibly wealthy lived side by side with her hidden impoverished, often in the front and the back of the same building! This "illusion" of what the city represented, the pretense that…

"Leave Northern Siberia to the Bears," he said... Among the westerners who achieved scientific immortality for their courageous forays into the frozen parts of Russia, was a Frenchman with equal passion for both religion and science: priest and…

Location, Location... One can see from looking at a map that the piece of real estate Peter chose on which to plant a city might have been an ideal gate for trade from West to East and East to West for centuries. But most maps don't show what a…

My Big Fat and Mighty Kingdom of Muscovy

We've Come a Long Way, Baba. Leningrad, aiming as it was to be a new place in a new time with a new government and society was a natural for the ferment of a literature of science fiction. Strongly influenced by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, 20th…

This is the history of Russia after the founding of St. Petersburg... although that's not quite true, because although it was written after the founding, Lomonosov's History takes us only to the year 1054. Maybe the reason for the discrepancy in size…

Coals From Newcastle. Near the end of the 18th century the English replaced the French in Peterborough as the ethnic group to imitate. The English were fewer than the Germans and French and they were almost non-existent in the provinces, that is to…