Tag Archives: Cossacks

IT BEGAN in the Russian capital, in the city which had been called St. Petersburg and was now called Petrograd. Bread had been rationed and on March 8, 1917, crowds of women and boys formed into long lines at the bakeries to get their share. Russians were used to waiting in line and usually they were patient, but on this day they were hungry. Besides, they were tired of the war, tired of the tsar, tired of living without hope. When they learned that there was no bread to be had, they lost their patience. They suspected that the bread …

SOME DAY there would be no tsars, but there was little sign of that during the last years of the nineteenth century. Alexander III still held Russia in a firm grip. When he died in 1894, his son Nicholas II came to the throne. Nicholas was twenty-six years old. He was a handsome young man and a few months after his father’s death he was married to a German princess. They were in love and it looked as though Nicholas would be a popular ruler. His reign began badly. In 1896, a great crowd gathered on a field in Moscow …

IT WAS a Sunday in January of 1905 and snow lay on the ground and rooftops of St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia. Although winters were cold in this northern city and it seemed like a day to sit indoors before a warm fire, many people were hurrying through the streets. About 200,000 men, women and children gathered in huge crowds, their breath making puffs of vapour in the frosty air. Soon they formed processions and began marching across the hard-packed snow. As they tramped along in ragged lines, they sang the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” Many of …

On December 2, 1804, in a ceremony of great pomp and splendour at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. Pope Pius VII was there. He had come from Rome to offer his blessing and to place the crown on the head of the new emperor but Napoleon did not do what was expected of him. Instead of kneeling, he took the crown from the Pope’s hands and put it on himself. He also placed a crown on the head of his wife, Josephine. Only twelve years had passed since …