Bolshoi Zlatoust Church in Yekaterinburg

876 words

I walked amid thousands of pilgrims carrying icons and clutching crosses close to their breasts in the shadow of the bell tower of the Bolshoi Zlatoust church. The magnificent Russo-Byzantine edifice, now bathed in silver starlight, having been so faithfully reconstructed in 2010 after the communists had blasted Saint Maximian’s holy place with dynamite some eighty years before to make way for a statue to their new gods, Lenin and Stalin.

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2,072 words

Part 3 of 4

The Red Terror: Lenin and the October Revolution

Prison of the Nation presents an original view of the Communist Revolution in Russia in 1917. (more…)

Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan the Terrible, detail, 1897

2,888 words

Part 2 of 4

The Archetype of the Tyrant: Ivan the Terrible

While Ivan III laid the foundations of an independent Russian kingdom (or rather a Muscovite Orthodox khanate) it was his grandson Ivan IV Vasilyevich, better known as Ivan the Terrible who created tsarist Russia and began the real Muscovite expansions of the 16th century.

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4,747 words

Part 1 of 4

Алексей Широпаев
Тюрьма Народа. Русский взгляд на Россию
Москва 2001

[Alexiey Shiropayev, Prison of the Nation: The Russian Perspective on Russia (Moscow, 2001).]

There are different approaches to telling the history of Russia and the Russian people. (more…)