Tales from Imperial Russia

Abandoning his job as a domestic servant in 1735, Ivan Osipov, AKA Van'ka Kain, became one of imperial Russia's most legendary criminals, performing an array of daring heists and audacious gambits over the course of six years. However, in 1741, Kain turned coat, ratting out most of his former accomplices and establishing himself as Moscow's preeminent criminal investigator. In this episode, we fol...

A ghost was plaguing the household of Father Ioann Solov'ev, the parish priest of the tiny hamlet of Lychentsy, in November 1900...floating objects, strange fires, disembodied voices, fleshy masses materialising in beds. Exorcisms, guards, the police...nothing seemed to work.  In this special Halloween episode, we look at other haunted house stories from the late Russian Empire, explaining their p...

Everyone in the late Russian Empire was in agreement: the country had a vodka problem. But what were its causes and how should it be dealt with? For answers, many turned to Ivan Churikov, a peasant who became a St Petersburg faith healer after suffering personal tragedy. But his attempts to form a sobriety movement involved him in an endless struggle with the Orthodox Church, one that occasionally...

In 1704, Colonel Rudolph Felix Bauer found himself involved in the siege of Tartu, one of the many battles of the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden. This tale tells of how Bauer came to be before the bloody walls of Tartu while also recounting the trevails of the siege itself.  Sources M. Laidre, The Great Northern War and Estonia: The Trials of Dorpat 1700-1708 , trans P. Ruustal (Tall...

Between 1905 and 1912, the monk Iliodor (Trufanov) set Russia ablaze with his inflammatory right-wing rhetoric, causing scandal after scandal. In this episode, we follow Iliodor's remarkable life from humble beginnings to would-be assassin of Grigorii Rasputin. Sources S. Dixon, ‘The “Mad Monk” Iliodor in Tsaritsyn’ in S. Dixon, ed., Personality and Place in Russian Culture: Essays in Memory of Li...

In 1796, the merchant Ivan Tolchenov was secreted in his magnificent mansion in Dmitrov, hiding from his creditors. This episode seeks to understand how Ivan lost his enormous fortune, along the way shedding light into the lives of Russian merchants in the second half of the eighteenth century. Source David L. Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s Tale. The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov...

The colour photographs of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii fascinated the imperial public of the early 20th century, persuading Emperor Nicholas II to sponsor expeditions across the empire to chronicle in glorious colour daily life in his realm. In this episode, we follow the life of Prokudin-Gorskii, while also considering the development of photography in the Russian Empire. Photographs For the Library o...

Andrei and Natalia Chikhachev, middling nobles, spent their lives running their small estate of Dorozhaevo in Vladimir province and raising their family. In this episode, we use their copious notes and diaries to understand what it meant to be a 'normal' provincial noble in the Russian Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, considering their work lives, their past-times, and their relationship with...

Abandoned in 1852 when scarcely two weeks old, Vasilii Gerasimov ultimately became a child worker at the Kreenholm cotton factory, where he worked for 8 years. In 1872, he was a participant in a labour strike at this plant. After leaving, he became a revolutionary propagandist in St Petersburg before being sentenced to exile and hard labour in Siberia. In this episode, we chart Gerasimov's life, p...

The 1804/1818 song collection of Kirsha Danilov introduced the Russian reading public, in many ways for the first time, to the people's immensely rich tradition of fairy tales, historical legends, and bawdy satires: these stories and their motifs have gone not only to influence great writers, poets, painters, and composers, but generation after generation of children. But who was Kirsha Danilov? I...

On 1 December 1911, the priest's wife Zinaida Troitskaia was found murdered in the backwoods village of Alajõe in eastern Estland province. This episode charts the scandalous details found by the investigation and asks what they tell us about the private lives of the rural Russian Orthodox clergy. This episode is based on my article for the website Deep Baltic. This can be found at: https://deepba...

In this episode, we examine the history of lèse-majesté (insulting the honour of the tsar, his family, and his image) in imperial Russia through the story of Vasilii Zverev, an unfortunate factory worker who took the tsar's name in vain during a heated quarrel in 1908. Tracing the history of these crimes back to the early eighteenth century, we ask what these affronts to imperial virtue tell us ab...

In this episode, we look at the story of the oddly refined peasant wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, who was claimed by many to be the dead tsar Alexander I. The myth and its staying power are rooted in several sources, not least the peculiar circumstances of the emperor's death and popular conceptions of monarchy. Source M. P. Rey, Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon (trans. S. Emanuel. DeKalb: NIU...

On Easter morning 1831, Joseph Major was murdered in his Urals home. A Scottish engineer, he had lived for 26 years in the gateway to Siberia, producing that most modern of devices, the steam engine, for a variety of Russian enterprises. In this episode, I talk about how foreign technology, Russian ingenuity, and massive industrial colonization created the conditions in which Major lived and worke...

From the 1890s, the Russian Empire saw an outburst of interest in vegetarianism, especially since it was being propounded by famous figures like the novelist Leo Tolstoi and the painter Il'ia Repin. In this episode, I talk about the spread of vegetarianism, the opening of new vegetarian eateries, splits within the movement, and its external opponents. Sources for information and quotes: J. Malitsk...

As is well known, Grigorii Rasputin wielded a considerable and scandalous level of influence over Tsar Nicholas II. What is less well known is that this was not the first time that a holy man managed to worm his way into the good graces of an emperor and create destructive consequences. This episode follows the life and career of Fotii (Spasskii), a monk who was able to persuade Tsar Alexander I t...

In 1817, Agustín José Pedro del Carmen Domingo de Candelaria de Betancourt y Molina (known in Russian as Avgustin Betankur) surveyed the site of one of his most important engineering projects, the future Nizhnii Novgorod Trade Fair. In this episode, we move from Betankur's impressive architectural designs to daily life at the fair, tracing the ribaldry, revelry, and rampuctiousness that made this...

In August 1702, the serving girl Marta came into the possession of a Russian general following a siege. Some twenty-two years later, she was crowned Empress Catherine I of all Russia. In this episode, we follow the remarkable story of this woman and the men who fell in love with her, especially Peter the Great. Source: I. Pavlenko, Ekaterina I (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2004)

Between 1770 and 1772, Moscow saw a virulent outbreak of the Black Death, one of the most feared diseases in European history: Dr Afanasii Shafonskii was tasked with battling this epidemic. In this episode, we follow the plague's progress as it caused death, deprivation, and revolt in Russia's biggest city. The principal source for this episode and all of the quotes is: J. T. Alexander, Bubonic Pl...

In the 1890s, the tiny village of Ashchepkovo in western Russia was struck by an epidemic of demonic possession. This episode attempts to understand this and other cases of malign spells by entering the mystical and magical world of the Russian peasantry. Sources: C. Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Illinois University Press, 2003) V. Kivelson, Desperate M...

In the early nineteenth century, Raffaele Scassi, Genoese gambler and ne'er-do-well, found himself in the newly founded Black Sea port of Odessa. This was the beginning of a remarkable career in Russian service that led to adventures in the Caucasian mountains, the rebuilding of a ruined Crimean town, and the preservation of ancient Greek relics. This episode explores his life and Russia's expansi...

In 1889, a small band of unlikely Russian colonists seized the abandoned fortress of Sagallo in today's Djibouti. Led by the would-be Cossack Nikolai Ashinov, they triggered an international incident. But how did all this come to pass? The answer lies in Ashinov's career of skullduggery, deceipt, and falsehood. Sources: A. V. Lunochkin, “Ataman vol’nykh kazakov” Nikolai Ashinov i ego deiatel’nost...

In 1852, the novelist and government bureaucrat Ivan Goncharov set sail on the frigate Pallada for a mission to closed-off Japan. This episode follows Goncharov as he encountered Africans and Asians across an imperial world dominated by the British, Dutch, and Spanish. This episode is based on translations and information provided by Edyta M. Bojanowska, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of t...

From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the First World War's eastern front massacred men by the thousand. Father Dimitrii Smirnov, along with hundreds of other religious officials, tried to offer spiritual solace to the fighting and the dying, all while suffering hardships himself and witnessing the horrors of modern warfare. Father Dimitrii's experiences were made all the more arduous by the fact that...

In 1910, Europe and Russia were rocked by a sensational murder trial: three Russians stood accused of conspiring to murder one of their compatriots in Venice. Filmed and photographed, the lurid details of affairs and petty violence shocked the world. But what brought these Russians to such dire straits? And what did the trial reveal about how Europeans and Russians thought of one another? This tal...