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Quotes About Tsar

decided to massacre subjects indiscriminately in Red Square. According to some accounts, the tsar himself participated in the executions. On one occasion, he is said to have cut off eighty-four rebel heads with a sword. In all, over twelve hundred streltsy were exterminated, and many of their heads were left in the streets of Moscow over winter in order to terrorize the population.
~ Abraham Ascher
Russians are a paternalistic people. They believe in the Orthodox Church, the State, the Tsar. They associate democracy with chaos. Our president and the siloviki understand this. They use words like 'managed democracy' and 'State capitalism,' but they're just euphemisms for something more sinister: fascism.
~ Daniel Silva
Venice….I think you may promise the Tsar what you like, for I do not think for a moment that Mary Tudor will agree. The Tsar needs munitions, but he needs trade and communication with the west even more.
~ Dorothy Dunnett
Monika answered for her father. Giving Walter a conspiratorial grin, she said: "Daddy used to say that if the tsar had been born to a different station in life, he might, with an effort, have become a competent postman.
~ Ken Follett
There had to be order. Grigori did not want to go back to the old days, of course. The tsar had given them bread queues, brutal police, and soldiers without boots. But there had to be freedom without chaos.
~ Ken Follett
My fate is in the hands of two monarchs, Walter thought, the tsar and the emperor. One is foolish, the other geriatric; yet they control the destiny of Maud and me and countless millions more Europeans. What an argument against monarchy!
~ Ken Follett
My fate is in the hands of two monarchs, Walter thought, the tsar and the emperor. One is foolish, the other geriatric; yet they control the destiny of Maud and me and countless millions more Europeans. What an argument against monarchy! He
~ Ken Follett
Grigori had encountered such bands before. They were called the Black Hundreds, part of the Union of the Russian People, a right-wing group that wanted to return to the golden age when the tsar was the unchallenged father of his people and Russia had no liberals, no socialists, and no Jews. Their
~ Ken Follett
Why not?" Grigori shrugged. "Cowardice. The tsar ordered Ivanov to march on Petrograd and set up a military dictatorship, but Ivanov's men became mutinous and the expedition was canceled." Katerina frowned. "Has the old ruling
~ Ken Follett
My fate is in the hands of two monarchs, Walter thought, the tsar and the emperor. One is foolish, the other geriatric; yet they control the destiny of Maud and me and countless millions more Europeans.
~ Ken Follett
The great popular insurrections that broke out from time to time in Russian history show that the peasant, even at his most rebellious, tended to preserve a loyalty to the tsar or to the idea of being ruled by a tsar.
~ Robert C. Tucker
In no case did the leaders proclaim the movements to be in opposition to the tsar. They held, rather, that the tsar was on their side, or that some other member of the royal family was with them, or that they themselves were the tsar.
~ Robert C. Tucker
hope in a dictatorship of the tsar, acting for the people and against the nobles.
~ Robert C. Tucker
What is remarkable is that Herzen, in the earlier years of Alexander II's reign (1855–81), combined this "Russian socialism," as it came to be called, with the theory of progressive autocracy. He called upon Alexander to be a "crowned revolutionary," and a "tsar of the land," and to continue Peter the Great's cause of reform by breaking with the Petersburg period as resolutely as Peter had broken with the Moscow period.
~ Robert C. Tucker
Our family discussed the Revolution of 1905 constantly. I was born after that, but the stories deeply affected my imagination. When I was older, I read much about how it all had happened. It think that it was a turning point -- the people stopped believing in the tsar. The Russian people are always like that -- they believe and they believe and then suddenly it comes to an end. And the ones the people no longer believe in come to a bad end.
~ Dmitri Shostakovich
In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married.
~ Robert K. Massie
Most of the Streltsy were simple Russians, living by the old ways, revering both tsar and patriarch, hating innovation and opposing reforms.
~ Robert K. Massie
Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.
~ Robert K. Massie
Khmelnytsky's Pereyaslav Treaty had not, in the Cossacks' eyes at least, made Ukraine east of the Dnieper part of Russia, but simply given it Russian protection. Though subject to increasing Russian interference, the Cossacks still chose their own hetmans (subject to the tsar's approval), ran their own army, and collected their own taxes.
~ Anna Reid
If I were the Tsar I'd eat nothing but bread and watermelon all year round. I don't even mind the seeds. Give your melon a shake and they fall right out and you can eat all you want. Boy oh boy!
~ Sholom Aleichem
The ladies of the minor bureaucratic set took tea with each other in the afternoon, carrying each her little gold or silver or jewelled sugar-box, and half a loaf of bread in her muff, and wished that the Tsar were back, or that the Germans would come, or anything that would solve the servant problem…. The daughter of a friend of mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her "Comrade!
~ John Reed
Moujiks. Right. What's a moujik?" the Tsar asked. "Peasants, your majesty." "Pheasants?" "No! Peasants.
~ Eric Metaxas
Given the gruesome fate of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, and the fact that five of the previous 12 Romanov rulers were also murdered, it is easy to regard Russia's imperial dynasty as cursed.
~ Saul David
Trump wants to be the first American tsar. With his hero worship of Putin, his admiration for the apparent omnipotence of the Kremlin, schoolboyish crush on Putin's gangster swagger and his contempt for democracy, Trump wants to rule with his family, taking decisions purely because he's right about everything like a tsar.
~ Simon Sebag Montefiore