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In the Michael church, until the accession of Peter the Great, the Rurik and Romanoff dynasties were buried; while another church witnessed their baptism, and marriage. What a wonderful amount of gold and jewels are visible in the churches and chapels of the Kremlin! The floor of one is of jasper and agate; pearl and amethyst and onyx adorn the inner walls of another.
Nevertheless his crusade for destruction appealed to no small part of the sensitive peoples of the Slavonic race, who, differing in many details, yet all have a dislike of repression and a longing to have their "fling ." A union in a Panslavonic League for the overthrow of the Houses of Romanoff, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern promised to satisfy the vague longings of that much-baffled race, whose name, denoting "glorious," had become the synonym for servitude of the lowest type.
If ever son of woman died of a broken heart it was Alexander Romanoff, last of the tyrants of Russia. Never had the avenging hand of Nemesis, though long-delayed, fallen with more precise and terrible justice.
The arctic blasts from the Tundras, the forced march, the chain and the scourge had done their work, and more than half the exile-convicts had found in nameless graves along the road respite from the long horrors of the fate which awaited the survivors. The first name called in the last muster was Alexander Romanoff.
"I am Emperor!" cried the Tsar at last, angrily, in a high, shrill tone, "and I refuse to be thus dictated to!" Next second there was a loud crash of glass, and I heard Rasputin shout: "Thou refuseth to listen to good counsel! As I have smashed that bowl, so will the people, I tell thee, rise and smash the House of Romanoff!"
The Polish intruders and pretenders were driven out, and then a great National Assembly gathered at Moscow to elect a Tsar. The name of Romanoff was unstained by crime, and was by maternal ancestry allied to the royal race of Rurik. The newly awakened patriotism turned instinctively toward that, as the highest expression of their hopes; and Mikhail Romanoff, a youth of 16, was elected Tsar.
Then was America conquered in Germany, and not only was Frederic so assisted as to be able to contend successfully against the three great houses of Bourbon, Habsburg, and Romanoff, and a horde of lesser dynasties, but British armies, at Minden and Creveldt, renewed on the fields of the continent recollections of the island skill and the island courage.
So cards went to my friends from "Pte. Ivan Romanoff" or "Pte. Paul Rogowski," saying he was quite well and had seen M. C. Simmons to-day, who was grateful for parcel and had not been able to write lately, but would soon. These rather mystified some of the people who received them, who could not understand why I did not write directly. My cousin, Mamie Simmons, and Mrs.
Then the frequent contests and varying fortunes of the principalities into which the country was divided the invasions of the Tartar hordes, under the successors of Chenjez Khan, destroying every living thing, and deliberately making a desert of every populous place, that grass might more abound for their horses and their flocks the long and weary domination of these desolating masters; the gradual relaxation of the iron gripe with which they crushed the country; the pomp and power of the Russian church, even in the worst times of Tartar oppression; the first gathering together of the nation's strength as its spirit revived; the first great effort to cast off the load under which its loins had been breaking for more than two centuries, and the desperate valour with which the Russians fought their first great battle for freedom and their faith, and shook the Tartar supremacy, under the brave and skilful Dimítri, on the banks of the Don the cautious wisdom and foresight with which he created an aristocracy to support the sovereignty he had made hereditary the pertinacity with which, in every change of fortune, his successors worked out slowly, and more by superior intelligence than by prowess, the deliverance of their country the final triumph of this wary policy, under the warlike, but consummately able and dexterous management of Iván the Great the rapidity and force with which the Muscovite power expanded, when it had worn out and cast off the Tartar fetters that had bound it the cautious and successful attempts of Iván to take from the first a high place amongst the sovereigns of Europe the progress in the arts of civilized life which was made in his reign the accession of weight and authority which the sovereign power received from the prudent and dignified demeanour of his son and successor the sanguinary tyranny with which Iván IV., in the midst of the most revolting atrocities and debaucheries, broke down the power of the aristocracy, prostrated the energies of the nation, and paved the way for successive usurpations the skilful and crafty policy, and the unscrupulous means by which Boris raised himself to the throne, after he had destroyed the last representatives of the direct line of Rurik, which, in all the vicissitudes of Russian fortune, had hitherto held the chief place in the nation the taint of guilt which poisoned and polluted a mind otherwise powerful, and not without some virtues, and made him at length a suspicious and cruel tyrant, who, having alienated the good-will of the nation, was unable to oppose the pretensions of an impostor, and swallowed poison to escape the tortures of an upbraiding conscience the successful imposture of the monk who personated the Prince Dimítri, one of the victims of Boris' ambition, and who was slaughtered on the day of his nuptials at the foot of the throne he had so strangely usurped, by an infuriated mob; not because he was known to be an impostor, but because he was accused of a leaning to the Latin church the season of anarchy that succeeded and led to fresh impostures, and to the Polish domination the servile submission of the Russian nobility to Sigismund, king of Poland, to whom they sold their country; the revival of patriotic feelings, almost as soon as the sacrifice had been made the bold and determined opposition of the Russian church to the usurpation of a Latin prince, the persecutions, the hardships, the martyrdom it endured; the ultimate rising of the Muscovite people at its call the sanguinary conflict in Moscow; the expulsion of the Poles; the election of Michael Romanoff, the first sovereign of his family and of the reigning dynasty the whole history of the days of Peter, of Catharine, and of Alexander, and even the less prominent reigns of intermediate sovereigns are full of the interest and the incidents which are usually considered most available to the writers of historical romance.
Russia, that wanted to be freed from the Romanoff rule and its bureaucratic system of fraud, waste, and cruelty, today groans under a system of despotism which is just as, if not more, wasteful, fraudulent and cruel. There are sincere people who might think that because the Bolsheviks have kept themselves in power, that they must be right. We can not agree with the reasoning.
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