
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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Russian Ark
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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