Цитаты из книги Николай и Александра

Incredibly, before he died, Rasputin had struggled with sufficient strength to free one of his hands from the ropes around him. The freed arm was raised above the shoulder; the effect was that Rasputin's last gesture on earth had been a sign of benediction.

Gregory Rasputin, his bloodstream filled with poison, his body punctured by bullets, had died by drowning.

The size of the Yussoupov fortune was estimated fifty years ago as 350$ million to 500$ million. What the same possessions would be worth today, no one can guess. The family's coal and iron mines, like fields, mills and factories churned out wealth which exceeded even the wealth of the tsars.

Alexandra: " 32 years agoy child's heart already went out to you in deep love... I know I ought not to say this, and for an old married woman it may seem ridiculous, but I cannot help it. With the years, love increases and the time without your sweet presence is hard to bear. Oh, could but our children be equally blessed in their married lives.

Beneath the Victorian surface of reserve, she (Empress) revealed the extravagant, flowery emotions of the Victorian poets.

There were no great balls that winter (1915) in the gray, snow-covered cities of Russia; the young men who danced two winters before lay dead in the forests of East Prussia or on the slopes of the Caprathians.

Each of the Russian armies individually was larger than the German force.

The Kaiser characteristically expressed the German plan more crudely: 'Lunch in Paris, dinner in St. Petersburg'.

During the Word War the First Russian industry was small and primitive. For every factory in Russia, there were 150 in Great Britain.

Witte said: No one here, no thinking man at least, cares a fig for these turbulent and vain Balkan who have nothing Slav about them and are only Turks christened by the wrong name.

In a second burst of enthusiastic patriotism, after returning from Moscow, Nicholas suddenly changed the name of his own capital. On August 31, 1914, the German St. Petersburg was changed to the Slav Petrograd.

Every day, numbers of admiring women came to Rasputin's apartment to sit in his dining room, sip wine or tea, gossip and listen to the Father's wisdom.

You may think that your child is the more helpless. This is not so. A child can do nothing in his weakness. A man can do much.

For an eight-year-old boy, it was a matter to ponder that his father was autocrat over millions of men and the master of the largest empire on earth, and yet had no power to spare him the pain he had felt in his leg.

There was always the nagging thought that, at any monemt, the train might be blown up by revolutionaries. To make this less likely, two identical Imperial trains made every trip, travelling a few miles apart; potential assassins could never know on which the Tsar and his family were riding.

Ironically, exactly such a town was Simbirsk on the Middle Volga, the childhood home of two men who in succession would play major roles in the overthrow of the Russia of Nickolas and Alexandra. One was Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky. The other, eleven years Kerensky's senior, was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, called Lenin.

Serge (Uncle of Nickolas), a man so narrow and despotic that he forbade his wife to read 'Anna Karenina' for fear of arousing 'unhealthy curiosity and violent emotions'

That night the entire city of Moscow glowed with the light of special illuminations. Within the Kremlin itself, the churches and public buildings were lit by thousands of electric light bulbs which all flashed on when Alexandra pressed a button hidden in a bouquet of roses.

By tradition, a tsar crowned himself, taking the crown from the nahds of the Metropolitan and placing it on his own head.