Summary Of The Baron's Cloak

The speaker is Baron de Breteuil, a French diplomat from Moscow. The speaker is credible because even though he acknowledges how certain aspects of her reign will flourish and how her passion proves useful in Russian society, he does mention negative vices that will inflict havoc upon her sovereignty and ultimately lead to internal faults in her empire.

The last Tsar Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894 and was faced with a country that was trying to free itself from its autocratic regime. The serfs had recently been emancipated, the industry and economy was just starting to develop and opposition to the Tsar was building up. Russia was still behind Europe in terms of the political regime, the social conditions and the economy. Nicholas II who was a weak and very influenced by his mother and his wife had to deal with Russia’s troubles during his reign. In order to ascertain how successfully Russia dealt with its problems by 1914, this essay will examine the October Manifesto and the split of the opposition, how the Tsar became more reactionary after the 1905 revolution, Stolypin’s

Mikhail Lermontov’s ‘A Hero of our Time’ is set in the 1840s, a crucial time in Russian history. Pechorin was a revolutionary character in Russian literature due to his cynical and amoral personality that alienates him from all social strata. ‘A Hero of our Time’ generated a large amount of outrage from the public due to Lermontov, claiming Pechorin to be the ‘hero’ of our its time. ’Bela’ is a framed narrative portrayed from the views of an old friend, Maxim Maximych, however, the story told by Maxim Maximych suggests it is an unjust and biased view of our ‘hero’ thus we as readers are to depict the true ‘hero’ Pechorin is. Examining the chapter ‘Bela,’ his actions signify his capability to damage a society, demonstrating him to be the callous and manipulative character he is.

Ivan IV, also known as “Ivan the Terrible,” lived from 1530 to 1584 and was the first Tsar of Russia. He officially reigned from the age of three; however, he did not have any real power until he crowned himself “Tsar” of Russia in 1547. He went on to conquer vast amounts of neighboring territories, eventually controlling the largest empire in the world at the time. In addition to increasing the Russian Tsardom’s size, he also completely restructured the political system. He took away all power from the noble boyar elite, and became an absolute monarch. This was good because the boyars at the time had been corrupt, and more interested in their personal interests than the interests of the state (Ivan the Terrible).

Their reaction to the coming social conflict would be crucial – not least because peasant lads in grey coats were armed.’ While Prince Lvov and his cronies did inherit everything the old regime had deserted in chaos and acknowledged ‘the solution of the problem requires, if not years, at least several months.’ The Provisional Government failed to identify growing areas of concern within the Russian empire, proving fatal to the common perception of the government. ‘Industrial chaos, ineffective

In a burgeoning climate of autocracy, the Romanov dynasty was firmly established in the societal framework of early 20th-century Russia. Having been in varying degrees of absolute political control over an approximate time period of four hundred years, their eventual undoing marked a power shift polarising the imperial regime laid out by countless Tsars beforehand. Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, is recognised to have a degree of personal responsibility for the downfall of the Romanovs, yet the extent to which his decision-making skills can be held accountable is questioned by some historians. Despite this, multiple political, social, and military facets of Nicholas II’s reign were handled with instability, and his perceived lack of legitimacy due to this poor decision-making ultimately was a major causative factor to the downfall of his family’s vast dynasty.

The first of these tsars, Ivan III, also known as “Ivan the Great”, defied Mongol control and declared the autonomy of Moscow. Ivan III was soon followed by Ivan IV, also known as “Ivan the Terrible”, who declared his power by pushing aside his advisors, crowning himself tsar and crushing boyars, who were Russian nobles. At first, Ivan’s reign was successful as he added vast new territories to the Russian empire. Later, after his wife’s death, Ivan’s power and prosperity declined because he started persecuting those whom he believed opposed him. This resulted in the execution of many nobles and their families, friends, servants and peasants, in which he replaced with a new service nobility, whose loyalty was “guaranteed by their dependent on the state for land and titles.” [1] Ivan the Terrible nor Ivan III were never absolute rulers- their ways of ruling just helped lay the foundation for Russian absolutism. After Ivan IV and his successor died, Russia entered a “Time of Troubles”, which lasted from 1598-1613, in which the peasant warrior bands known as Cossacks, rebelled against their nobles who fought back and defeated the Cossacks. Ivan’s grand-nephew, Michael Romanov, was soon elected by the Zensky Sober- a body of nobles, and placed efforts toward state-building. He was succeeded by “Peter the Great”, the Russian king that truly consolidated Russian

Russia emerged as a significant power during the 1500s through war. It fought its neighbors and expanded its territory aimlessly. Ivan the Terrible’s expansion brought him into contact with both Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Aiming to gain a port and outlet to the Baltic,

4-5). “Surrounded by German and Russian power,” Greta’s trials and tribulations are aptly placed by Eksteins within a broader context, elucidating not merely the diurnal struggles of his great-grandmother’s life but the broader sense of powerlessness in the region (pg. 7). Although Ekstein’s prose is often beautifully executed, the general structure of the work, and particularly his fixation with his familial case-study, quickly becomes overbearing. His traditional historical recollection is interrupted often with a flimsy, unsubstantiated extrapolations, analyzing the life of Grieta, who even Eksteins concedes he knows “little about” (pg. 24-25). Ekstein’s fixation with utilizing a personal account entirely devoid of detail and with a substantial dearth of evidence to draw from, begins to feel oddly detached from the time period he intends to analyze.

In The Reforming Tsar: The Redefinition of Autocratic Duty in Eighteenth  Century Russia, Cynthia Whittaker argues that depending on the historical, cultural and contextual period, there can be demarcated two types, both distinctive and contrasting, of Russian sovereigns, namely the “good tsar” and the “reforming tsar”. The scholar juxtaposes the two models of monarchs against the backdrop of “medieval” versus “modern” type of governance. According to it the “good tsar” typology, which is typical for the earlier Muscovy realm, defines the ruler as pious and inert, characterized by its liturgical form and static nature of the rule. The “good tsar” is bound to uphold Orthodoxy, preserve and control public order, help the poor and the underdogs

Ivan IV was a complicated man, with a complicated past, in a complicated country, in a complicated time; his story is not an easy one. Ivan the terrible, the man, could never be completely understood in a few words, nor in a few pages, and only perhaps in a few volumes. A man of incredible range his dreadfulness could only be matched by his magnificence, his love by his hatred.

Hadji Murat, Tolstoy's second book with the Caucasus as its setting can be considered a work of historical fiction that is a beautiful tale of resistance, and a window into not only the Caucasian War of the mid-nineteenth century, but also the culture of the Russian Empire during this period. As a work of fiction the reader must be wary of depictions of actual persons such as Tsar Nicholas I, whom Tolstoy was not enamored with, to say the least, but many insights about the period and its people can be gleaned from the story. The novel is one of great contrasts between Chechens and Russians and also of what life was like during this time.

Ungern is famous for the Mongolian Campaign in which he captured the city of Kiakhta and tried to use it as a base to restore both the Chinese Emperor and the Russian Tsar. He was captured by the Red Army in 1921 and shot shortly after. Sunderland focuses not on the campaign cause it does not tell how the intersections of spatial multiculturalism affected Ungern’s perspective. Being a Baltic German with notions of elitism, who studied in Russian schools and was in the Russian army, he cared more for ideology than identity. He saw different identities and cultures as compatible if the superior one was in control. The Russian Empire, encompassing the many groups within were best under the watchful eye of the tsar. He saw the empire’s people interact,

On the right of the nobility to hunt, the Baron resigns himself to not but rather to allow others of ignoble birth to do so. Additionally, rather than leaving any substantial inheritance for his family, he squanders his wealth on frivolous lawsuits and the repainting of old family portraits (Mason and Rizzo 1999: 36). It is as if the only thing truly noble of the man is his name suggests Charriere, though in not so many words. The Baron’s son also seems far removed from a gentleman in his actions. Charriere notes “…he drank heavily and gambled every evening with his lackeys. His person was unpleasing, and keen eyes would have been needed to discern in him those characteristics which, according to some, are the infallible signs of noble birth” (Mason and Rizzo 1999: 37). All these traits stand in contrast with the recently ennobled Valaincourt, who as she notes “…more closely resembled his father than Baron d’Aronville resembled his thirtieth ancestor” (Mason and Rizzo 1999: 38).

February 15, 1894, was the most interesting afternoon in the otherwise dreary history of Greenwich Observatory. Earlier in the day, Martial Bourdin, a skinny anarchist, traveled by train from Westminster to Greenwich, concealing a small bomb. As he ominously ambled through Greenwich Park, towards the Observatory, something happened - no one knows exactly what - and he blew most of himself to shreds. The British, who loved to quantify in the late nineteenth century, noted that the explosion spread bits of flesh over a distance of sixty yards. Martial Bourdin remained alive for another half hour, but gave no hint as to the reason for his choice of such a bizarre