Browse Items (73 total)

From the Land of the South Slavs... Published in Vienna, this calendar of the world's happenings from its beginnings uses the Russian civil alphabet, introduced to the Russians by Peter The Great. The author, Serbian school teacher, writer,…

The Grand Inquisitor... Peter the Great had no love for Catholicism, but in the early days of his reign he showed deference to the church. Unfortunately his reforms did little to improve conditions for Catholics, and under Catherine II their…

Crime and Punishment ... Austria's attitude towards pre-Peterburgian but nevertheless Petrine Russia can be seen in this diary of the journey to Moscow of the Count of Guarient and his secretary to the mission, Johann Georg Korb. While Peter was on a…

Positively antediluvian; or, Floods looking for a city ... Long before the founding of St. Petersburg, Europeans looked towards Russia like rabbits casing the carrot patch, especially those travelers such as Sigmund von Herberstein in the 16th and…

The Emperor's Wearing Clothes! An Internet search under August Racinet will bring up beautiful reprints of Le costume historique, a prime resource for theatrical designers. This set is of the "Grand édition," published in 1888, the plates in…

Put Her in a Pumpkin Shell... The palatial Peterhof or Petrodvorets, Peter's favorite home, was 30 versts or about 20 miles from the old St. Petersburg. Was it indeed still part of larger Petersburg today? We discovered that although it's still…

Coming in 1703 to a Swamp Near You... In the 10th century the marshes where Sankt Pieter Burkh would begin to be built almost 800 years later were a part of Novgorod land, originally the area around Lake Il'men, home to the Il'men Slavs. The town of…

Beginning of Russian Bibliographical Statistics... The Great Soviet Encyclopedia adopts as Russians many of the European admirers of St. P. who spent much of their lives in Russia. H. F. Storch, a German born in Riga and called Andrei Karlovich…

All of 6-foot-6 in Stocking Feet... The following quotation is from the column, "Who am I? Test your biography I.Q.," in the pop-magazine Biography for Jan. 2002: One of the most controversial figures in Russian history, I brought many reforms to my…

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…