Quotes About Tsars

Built to celebrate Yaroslav's father Volodymyr's conversion to Christianity, Santa Sofia was intended as, and remains, a place of huge political and spiritual significance. Under the tsars, pilgrims came in millions. (A mournful early graffito reads, 'I drank away my clothes when I was here'.)3

the tsars of the Romanov family dynasty began a lengthy rule of Muscovy-Russia from 1613 until 1917.

In Russia the government is autocracy tempered by strangulation," quipped the French woman of letters Madame de Staël. It was a dangerous job. Six of the last twelve tsars were murdered—two by throttling, one by dagger, one by dynamite, two by bullet. In the final catastrophe in 1918, eighteen Romanovs were killed. Rarely was a chalice so rich and so poisonous. I

In the twenty-first century, the new autocracies in Russia and China have much in common with that of the tsars, run by tiny, opaque cliques, amassing vast wealth, while linked together through hierarchical client–patron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler. In

The Okhrana may have failed to prevent the Russian Revolution, but they were so successful in poisoning revolutionary minds that, thirty years after the fall of the Tsars, the Bolsheviks were still killing each other in a witch hunt for non-existent traitors.

A long moment of debate. I looked at Zagaev's amulet, Alexander II with his impressive mustache. Though arguably the most liberal of the tsars, the emancipator of the serfs, he was assassinated by revolutionaries.

The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, murder and assassination.