Russian History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Russian History’
Richard Cobden saw Britain’s international standing in terms of peaceful trade rather than military interventions.
In 1855, Cobden urged Parliament to tone down its anti-Russian rhetoric, not out of any fondness for St Petersburg’s domestic or foreign policy but because British influence was better felt in industrial innovation and international trade than in annexing land, toppling governments or rattling the Russian bear’s cage.
Lord Salisbury seeks to calm the Viceroy of India’s nerves in the face of anti-Russian hysteria.
In 1877, military advisers urged Britain to ready themselves for war against the Russian Empire, citing St Petersburg’s diplomatic ties with Afghanistan, and warning that the Russians ‘could’ invade Turkey or even India. Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India, wrote to the Viceroy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, urging calm.
Two young English princes were banished to the court of Yaroslav the Wise, and one returned to claim the crown.
Edward the Exile was one of two princes, sons of Edmund Ironside, driven to Kiev after the Danish warrior-king Cnut the Great took their father’s crown in 1016. In 1054, Edward returned to England with his wife and young son Edgar, encouraged by his uncle King Edward the Confessor to believe that he was about to regain his lost throne.
A succession of religious leaders came to Kiev, hoping to win the wild barbarian Prince to their cause.
The Christianity that spread across England in the 7th century spread to Kiev in the 10th, but there it had to compete not just with paganism but with Islam, Judaism, and other flavours of Christianity — and also with Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev (r. 980-1015), who liked his religion spicy.
As a last, desperate throw of the dice in the Great War, the Germans detonated an unusual kind of weapon in St Petersburg.
At the height of the Great War, beleaguered Britain’s trusty ally Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was forced from his throne. Would the new Russian Government support the Allies? Some were naive enough to think so, but as Winston Churchill explained, the Germans had yet another deadly weapon in their arsenal.
It was the opinion of Leo Tolstoy that even Napoleon was never master of his own destiny.
Thomas Carlyle was a famous proponent of the ‘Great Men’ theory of history, which holds that world-changing events are moved by bold, iron-willed men of vision. Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was not of this brotherhood. In his classic War and Peace, he reminded us that even a man as great as Napoleon is much less in control of his own destiny than we might imagine.