Grand Duke Dmitri of Moscow loosened the grip of the Tartar Horde on the people of Russia, but treachery robbed him of triumph.
The tale of St Dmitri of the Don is a tale of the quest to free a people from foreign domination, of hard-fought victory and of wholly avoidable defeat. In 1380, Grand Duke Dmitri I of Moscow, aged just twenty-nine, freed the city from generations of vassalage to the Tartar Golden Horde, only for treachery to bring all that he had achieved to nothing in the very hour of triumph.
It is one of the world’s most recognisable works of art, and a symbol of God’s blessing on all Christian Rus’.
The Theotokos of Vladimir is an icon of Mary embracing her child Jesus, which came to Kiev from Constantinople in the 1130s. Not only has it become one of the world’s most recognisable works of sacred art, but on several occasions it has been credited with delivering the Christians of Rus’ from seemingly inevitable disaster.
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A loving parent doesn’t want her son to be a success; she wants him to be a fine human being.
In February 1878, Fyodor Dostoevsky received a letter from an anxious mother asking him how to bring up a child. Dostoevsky was taken aback, and told her plainly that she was requiring more wisdom than he was fit to give. In particular, her question “What is good, and what is not good?” left him almost speechless; fortunately for us, that left just enough speech to impart this touching counsel.
John Bright declared it was time stop fighting wars around the world for ‘British interests’.
On January 13th, 1878, John Bright MP assured his constituents in Birmingham that reports of an imminent Russian invasion of Europe were utter delusion. Some in the Commons said that sending troops to aid Turkey in the Russo-Turkish War (now a year old) was in the ‘British interest’, but Bright reminded them how the Crimean War in 1853-56 had achieved nothing but a million dead young men.
In 1941, with much of the West subdued, Adolf Hitler bent the full force of his hatred on Moscow.
The British Empire held out against the Nazis almost alone for two years. The arrival of the Americans in 1942 was a blessed relief, but it was the Russians (also somewhat late to the party) who bore the brunt of the Nazis’ hatred, and whose sacrifices and determination finally broke the vast German military machine.
The story-teller recalls his first meeting with Nastenka, and the man who brought them together.
‘White Nights’ (1848) is set in St Petersburg during those enchanted June nights when the sun barely dips below the horizon. It was on such a night that the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s tale caught his first glimpse of the woman he came to know as Nastenka, and he was far too highly strung to resist the spell.
Dostoevsky had to break it to Moscow’s students that ordinary Russians found their brand of politics patronising.
On April 3rd, 1878, a group of students was beaten up by the locals during a Moscow demonstration. Fyodor Dostoevsky, responding to their plea for sympathy, replied as nicely as he could that the public just didn’t see students as their friends. They saw them as foreign agents, the tools of pro-Western elites who didn’t understand the people — and worse, didn’t respect them.
A Russian princess admitted defeat with a most gracious compliment.
John Smeaton (1724-1792) was an English engineer who made advances in water and steam power, and engineered bridges, canals, harbours and land drainage schemes. Such was his reputation that Empress Catherine of Russia, who had a high regard for English know-how, dangled the lure of her glittering Court and immense treasury in the hope of landing him.
Fyodor Dostoevsky listened with growing bewilderment to the celebrity peace activists gathered in Geneva.
On September 9th-12th, 1867, some of the noisiest political activists of the day, including Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Victor Hugo and Guiseppi Garibaldi, gathered in Geneva for the inaugural Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom. In a letter to his niece, Sofia Alexandrovna, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky complained that they had a peculiar notion of peace.