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The Tsars and their Palaces

 

 

As indicated above Peter the Great (ruled 1682 - 1725) founded St Petersburg and built the first of its palaces he also provided material and other incentives to aristocratic families to build in the new city.  

To encourage country houses to be built along the bay, he built Peterhof where he indulged his enthusiasm for fountains.  Later Tsars extended the fountains and as at other palaces these have been repaired and renovated since WW2.  They are now a major tourist attraction.

 

hof1 hof2
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Peterhof  - some of the fountains

 

Initially with his brother, Peter expanded the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire and replaced the traditionalist and medieval social and political system with a modern, scientific, Europe-oriented, and rationalist system; albeit one that still depended on serfs.  He was succeeded by his wife Catherine I as Tsarina who built the first Catherine Palace in Pushkin 25 km due south of St Petersburg. 

 

Catherine Palace

 

Catherine I was succeeded by Peter II and Anna under who's rule the country went into decline until Catherine's daughter Elizabeth (by Peter the Great) sized power in a coup in 1741.  

Russia recovered and grew under her intelligent rule, but like her namesake Elizabeth I of England she remained unmarried.  Elizabeth was a woman of extravagant tastes who demolished and then rebuilt Catherine Palace on the grand scale we see today; with 100 kg of gold decorating the façade alone.  

 

Catherine 2

 

She liked to party and variously posed naked or dressed as a man for portraits.  She produced no heir and so nominated one of her nephews, a grandson of Peter the Great, as her successor.  This young man became Peter III.  She also arranged his marriage to a young German princess who took the name Catherine when she was received into the Orthodox Church.  The young couple did not get on, Catherine despising him as an 'idiot drunkard from Holstein and good-for-nothing'.  They lived apart and both took lovers.  Elizabeth initially brought up their son Paul.

When Elizabeth died in 1761 Peter III, who disliked Russians and admired the Prussians, succeeded but was immediately at odds with the aristocracy and the army.  He lasted six months before being toppled then killed in a coup. Paul was still a child and so Catherine became Empress Catherine II.  Under her reign Russia became one of the great powers of Europe with a series of military victories and conquests spreading her influence from the black sea and across Asia; all the way to Alaska.  The Empress became known as Catherine the Great.

 

Catherine II
Catherine II - Catherine the Great

 

While Catherine was notorious for her numerous influential and/or capable lovers, she lacked Elizabeth's garish taste, or love of dancing, and built palaces that were plain and more tasteful as venues for State occasions.  Like Peter the Great she was happy to live in quite modest dwellings when not entertaining.  She is regarded as a true enlightenment ruler who founded the Hermitage Museum; numerous schools and cultural institutions; and commissioned the beautiful and restrained Marble Place that now forms part of the Hermitage; along with Winter Palace and the Vladimir Palace. 

Upon Catherine's death Paul succeeded but he wanted to vindicate his father's memory.  With some justification, he believed his mother to have been complicit in his father's murder.  He immediately reversed a number of military strategies Catherine and her generals had initiated. He had inherited his father's fetish for uniforms and military trivia and was said to dismiss even generals for minor infringements of the uniform like leaving buttons undone.  He was widely disliked but lasted five years before being assassinated; compared to his father's six months. 

From there it was pretty well a down-hill ride.  His sons Alexander I (no heir) then Nicholas I succeeded, followed by Alexander II (assassinated see - Church of Spilled Blood - above) followed by Alexander III and finally by Nicholas II; the last Tsar.  Almost all built or modified palaces and most have churches built in their name.

 

interior

 

It is alarming that Russia seems to have a culture that traditionally craves an autocratic leader; perhaps endowed with divine authority. 

It's said that the last Tsar, Nicholas II, refused to endorse the constitution that would hand effective power to the Assembly/Parliament, and chose to abdicate instead, because he genuinely believed that he was God's appointed ruler and that to do so would be a mortal sin; better to die in a coup than to risk his immortal soul.

How could any sane person, particularly with his family history of numerous coup d'état, think they were really appointed by God; as opposed to seizing by force or acquiring by accident of birth, a position that carries that epithet? 

 

 

 

ancestors
From: The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker

 

Did he, like Abraham, get a personal visit?  Even the Pope knows perfectly well that he is appointed by a political process; election by his peers.  The faithful are simply encouraged to believe that the Holy Spirit directs the motives of the Cardinals. 

Nicholas apparently genuinely believed in 'higher powers'; 'auras' and other such magic so that he and his wife Alexandra were easily duped by the con-man, mystic Grigori Rasputin who for a period seemed to be ruling Russia through his hold over them; because of their haemophiliac son.  Rasputin was a truly bizarre footnote to their history -  read more.

Nicholas was appropriately nicknamed Bloody Nicholas. Right at the beginning of his reign an ill planned 'banquet for the people', to celebrate his coronation, resulted in 1,389 being trampled to death in the rush for food.  But he later earned this sobriquet rather more deliberately through his anti-Semitic pogroms, during which as many as a quarter of a million Jews are estimated to have been killed; and on 'Bloody Sunday' when in January 1905 his guards shot down hundreds of peaceful petitioners carrying thousands of signatures in favour of his signing a constitution; followed by the violent suppression of an attempted revolution in the same year. Then he then lived up to it through his ill planned military campaign that lost almost the entire Russian fleet and 130 thousand sailors, in 1904-05, in the disastrous war with Japan, and his later military meddling in the early years WW1 that resulted in a further 3.3 million Russian soldiers killed; helping to precipitate the successful 1917 revolutions. 

So, Nicholas probably got what he deserved. It was a pity about his complicit but otherwise innocent family; but so it was for: the several hundred killed on Bloody Sunday; the millions killed through his military posturing and incompetence; and his religious/racial intolerance that was a pre-cursor to Hitler's. 

 

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Travel

South Korea & China

March 2016

 

 

South Korea

 

 

I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website.  Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited.  This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen.  It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.

A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ. 

Read more: South Korea & China

Fiction, Recollections & News

More on 'herd immunity'

 

 

In my paper Love in the time of Coronavirus I suggested that an option for managing Covid-19 was to sequester the vulnerable in isolation and allow the remainder of the population to achieve 'Natural Herd Immunity'.

Both the UK and Sweden announced that this was the strategy they preferred although the UK was soon equivocal.

The other option I suggested was isolation of every case with comprehensive contact tracing and testing; supported by closed borders to all but essential travellers and strict quarantine.   

New Zealand; South Korea; Taiwan; Vietnam and, with reservations, Australia opted for this course - along with several other countries, including China - accepting the economic and social costs involved in saving tens of thousands of lives as the lesser of two evils.  

Yet this is a gamble as these populations will remain totally vulnerable until a vaccine is available and distributed to sufficient people to confer 'Herd Immunity'.

In the event, every country in which the virus has taken hold has been obliged to implement some degree of social distancing to manage the number of deaths and has thus suffered the corresponding economic costs of jobs lost or suspended; rents unpaid; incomes lost; and as yet unquantified psychological injury.

Read more: More on 'herd immunity'

Opinions and Philosophy

Medical fun and games

 

 

 

 

We all die of something.

After 70 it's less likely to be as a result of risky behaviour or suicide and more likely to be heart disease followed by a stroke or cancer. Unfortunately as we age, like a horse in a race coming up from behind, dementia begins to take a larger toll and pulmonary disease sees off many of the remainder. Heart failure is probably the least troublesome choice, if you had one, or suicide.

In 2020 COVID-19 has become a significant killer overseas but in Australia less than a thousand died and the risk from influenza, pneumonia and lower respiratory conditions had also fallen as there was less respiratory infection due to pandemic precautions and increased influenza immunisation. So overall, in Australia in 2020, deaths were below the annual norm.  Yet 2021 will bring a new story and we've already had a new COVID-19 hotspot closing borders again right before Christmas*.

So what will kill me?

Some years back, in October 2016, at the age of 71, my aorta began to show it's age and I dropped into the repair shop where a new heart valve - a pericardial bio-prosthesis - was fitted. See The Meaning of Death elsewhere on this website. This has reduced my chances of heart failure so now I need to fear cancer; and later, dementia.  

More fun and games.

Read more: Medical fun and games

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