© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 23 May, 2012

In October 2011, I published a short biography about myself on Royal Russia. I felt that as both the Founder and Web-Site Administrator of Royal Russia that it would be a perfect opportunity to introduce myself to both old and new visitors to my web site and blog. I receive many emails, letters and phone calls from people all over the world with their questions about the Russian Imperial family, their legacy, and Imperial Russia. I always think it nice to be able to put a face to a name. My biography has recently been updated, and includes some new photographs. I hope this article will give you some idea of my background, as well as my goals and aspirations for Royal Russia.

|||Click Here to Read Introducing Paul Gilbert, Son of Old Russia|||

© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 23 May, 2012

I am pleased to announce that our highly anticipated new title,  A Romanov Diary: The Autobiography of the Grand Duchess Marie Georgievna was received from the printers on Friday, 11th May.

For those of you who took advantage of the Pre-Publication Order promotion back in February and March of this year, these orders have now been packed and shipped. No further orders will be accepted until my return from Russia on Monday, 4th June. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience that this may cause some of you. 

This title will be made available at our online bookshop beginning Tuesday, 5th June. You are then welcome to order this title securely online using PayPal or credit card, or by telephone with a Visa or MasterCard. The price is $25.00 CAD + postage.

Mail orders are also accepted! Click on the link below, download and print a copy of our Order Form and mail it to our office along with your payment.

This title can also be purchased from Booksellers Van Hoogstraten (The Hague, Netherlands) and Librairie Galignani (Paris, France).

|||Click Here for More Information About This Book |||

© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 23 May, 2012

The Alferaki Palace at Taganrog and Emperor Alexander I 

The Alferaki Palace at Taganrog is the venue for the new exhibition, Emperor Alexander I, The Reign That Ended in Taganrog.

Its opening is timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 in which Russia, led by Alexander I defeated Napoleon's armies.

On display will be a collection of weapons and medals from the War of 1812, documents bearing the Russian Emperor's signature, and a unique collection of furniture, and objects of decorative art from Alexander I's palace at Taganrog. Also on display is a unique vase with the portrait of Alexander I, donated by his brother and successor, Emperor Nicholas I.

The Alferaki Palace is a beautiful example of the Russian Empire style. It was built in 1848 by the famous Russian architect Andrei Stakenschneider, for the merchant N.D. Alferaki.

© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 23 May, 2012

Treasures stolen from a Russian museum during WWII have found their way back home. Two crates with hundreds of rare exhibits stolen in 1941 were voluntarily returned to Russia by a Wehrmacht doctor’s son, Russia Today reports.
 
A museum in the city of Tver, north of Moscow, received the unexpected parcel. The 480 objects including a collection of crosses, archeological findings and icons stunned employees – many of the objects are extremely rare and valuable.

“We are still opening the parcels and are already bowled over,” Tver State United Museum leading scientific employee Svetlana Gerasimova told KP daily. “The collection of crosses alone has around 100 items… We are still exploring the contents.”

Before the outbreak of WWII, the museum stored its exhibits in a local cathedral. In 1941 when the city was captured by Nazi troops, the collection disappeared.

According to KP Daily, a Wehrmacht doctor who was with the troops, got access to the storage and saw that the museum’s objects were real treasures. He sent them to Germany. The man died in Russia in 1942, yet the treasures survived.

The doctor’s widow asked her son to return the stolen objects where they belonged. It took him a while however to settle all legal issues and complete the deed. The man who returned the treasures to the Russian museum wished to remain anonymous.

© Russkiy Mir Information Service. 23 May, 2012

After two years of large-scale restoration work, the city’s historic Summer Gardens, which will reopen to the public on Monday, have been changed beyond recognition.

The total cost of the work was 2.3 billion rubles ($74 million); restoration work on the sculptures and green areas were the most expensive, according to representatives of the State Russian Museum, of which the Summer Gardens are part.

“The main goal was to reconstruct those items that would emphasize the regular layout of the garden and demonstrate its formal splendor,” said Sergei Renni, head of the Summer Gardens, Mikhailovsky Gardens and Green Areas department recently established within the Russian Museum.

Eight fountains, four boskets, newly rebuilt structures and many new trees and bushes are among the most significant changes. All the new constructions were created from historical sketches, according to the museum, and the garden’s iconic railings have been fully restored.

Four fountains are now situated on the main alley, as they were during the era of Peter the Great, when the gardens were first laid out. Another three fountains are located inside the boskets, and an eighth does not work, but is covered with a glass box set to show the development of the technology behind fountains throughout several centuries.

“This will be one of the most attractive parts of the renewed Summer Gardens,” said Renni.

Ninety of the 91 original sculptures have been replaced with copies made of marble aggregate and polyester. The originals have been restored and moved to the Mikhailovsky (Engineers’) Castle for permanent exhibition. The only sculpture to remain in its historic place — diagonally opposite from the Summer Palace, at the intersection of the Neva and Fontanka rivers — is an allegorical statue of the Treaty of Nystad, which was made at the request of Peter the Great to celebrate the end of the Great Northern War. The total cost of restoring the original sculptures and creating new copies of them was 700 million rubles ($22.5 million).

Sable cages and a dovecote have been recreated, but will not be inhabited. “There will be no animals in the garden, except for a couple of white swans,” said Renni.

Cultural and historic preservationists have, however, expressed criticism of the restored Summer Gardens.

“Tourists pay money and they want to see certain things, even if they are crude imitations,” said Alexander Kobak, executive director of the Likhachev Foundation. “It is a European-wide tendency that we must resist.”

“The notion of ‘restoration’ is absent in the Russian legislative system, and all restoration work is classified as ‘reconstruction’. All our efforts to change this situation have been unsuccessful for the last 20 years,” said Alexander Margolis, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments, which didn’t support the restoration plan.

“Businesses actively lobby their interests through the government,” he said. “The Summer Gardens are one such example. The mentality of Russian people is based on a fundamentally pejorative attitude to the original works,” he added.

Beata Nykiel, deputy director of the Research Institute of European Heritage at the International Cultural Centre in Krakow, emphasized that the problem of originals and fakes is one faced by most European countries.

“We can’t rely on self-development from society,” he said. “We need to instil a sense of originality in people.”

Renni acknowledged that parts of the Summer Gardens restoration project had elicited a mixed reaction.

“But in our opinion, the Summer Gardens have now regained that historic formal splendor that they possessed in the past,” he said.

© St. Petersburg Times. 23 May, 2012

A selection of the photographs, documents and other items from the exhibit in Moscow 

The States Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow will host a new exhibit on the death of Tsar Nicholas II and his family starting May 25th.

The exhibit which opens in the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Archives focuses on the deaths of the last Russian Imperial family, along with their faithful retainers, and the investigative activities related to the search, identification and burial of their remains which lasted nearly a century - from 1918 to 2011.

This is the first time that an exhibition of this scale has been held. Included are the 1918 proceedings of the investigator of the Omsk District Court, Nikolai Sokolov; the photo reports of the "secret" archaeological expedition carried out by Geli Ryabov and Dr. Alexander Avdonin in 1978; investigative materials of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation; the Government Commission on the disposal of the royal remains in 1998; investigative materials from 2007; and the three-volumes of the Resolution of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to dismiss the criminal case number 18/123666-93 titled Clarifying the Circumstances of the Death of Members of the Russian Imperial Family and their Entourage between 1918-1918 in the Urals and Petrograd.

Items from the collections of the Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville, New York will also be displayed for the first time. For many years, Metrolpolitan Hilarion, the First Heirarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad collected and stored many items, including personal belongings of the Russian Imperial family. These included household items, clothing, icons, documents and photographs.

Also on display will be many rare items from other collections. Visitors will have the opportunity to examine facts relating to the shooting of the members of the Imperial family, including items used for the forensic and DNA tests carried out to help identify the remains. The blood-stained shirt worn by the Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich after the assassination attempt on his life in Japan in 1891 is on loan from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The blood stains from this shirt aided researchers and scientists in identifying the remains of the Tsesarevich Alexis.

The exhibit will also feature the stories of those who participated in the murders of the Imperial family, as well as vintage newsreel and documentary film footage depicitng the private lives of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, which is currently stored at the archives.

The exhibit runs until July 29th in the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Archives which is located at ul. B. Pirogovskaya, 17 in Moscow. Admission is free!

© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 22 May, 2012

Speech by Emperor Nicholas II on the opening of the State Duma (Artist: V. Polyakov)  

This magnificent painting by the Russian artist, V. Polyakov shows the speech from the throne by Emperor Nicholas II on the occasion of the opening of the First State Duma of the Russian Empire on 27 April, 1906. The painting is from the collection of the State Museum of Political History of Russia, which is housed in the former mansion of the famous Russian ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska in St. Petersburg.

The State Duma was created after a wave of attacks against Imperial officials and public upheaval, which culminated in a national strike in October 1905, paving the way for Russia's first parliament. With the nation's infrastructure all but paralyzed, Emperor Nicholas II signed the historic manifesto of October 17, 1905, promising civil rights to the population and creating Russia's first parliament.

Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna noted the event in her diary: "A day full of emotions!! And hopes for a better future!! Thank God, everything went off splendidly and with great solemnity - just as it should.

Mama got dressed upstairs, while Olga sat with us. Then we went to Nicky and Alix. The family were waiting in the rooms. The procession began at a quarter to two. Nicky walked alone, the crown and regalia were carried in front of him. In the Armoury Hall there were many society ladies with a large crowd of other people. From there the grand duchesses went through the Romanov gallery into the St. George Hall, where we took our places on a platform to the right of the throne. We were joined by the ladies-in-waiting, Mama, Alix and the duty guard. The Te Deum had already begun.

St. George's Hall in the Winter Palace (Artist: Konstantin Ukhtomsky, 1862) 

Directly opposite us were the members of the Council of State and high officials, to the left the members of the Duma, who included several men with repulsive faces and insolent disdainful expressions! They neither crossed themselves nor bowed, but stood with their hands behind their backs or in their pockets, looking sombrely at everyone and everything.

But among the peasants there were such wonderful faces, as well as several soldiers from the St. George cavlary, the Cossacks, etc. After the Te Deum Mama and Alix stood in front of us on the platform, with the grand dukes next to us on the steps of the throne - then Nicky mounted the steps and sat on the throne.

He did this with such simplicity, yet at the same time it was such a solemn moment! After this Count Fredericks handed him the speech, which he read standing, in a loud steady voice. Every word penetrated the sould - tears welled up in the throat.

We all experienced an incredible emotion, it's difficult to convey what we felt. It was a great historical moment, unforgettable for those who witnessed it. He spoke so well, saying just what was needed, asking everyone to come to his aid. When he finished, a cheer broke out, which was taken up by everyone including in the other halls - it sounded magnificent. The choir sang the anthem (it was all terribly emotional!)

We returned in the same order. I walked with Boris. Mama and Alix were crying and poor Nicky was standing there in tears - his self control finally overcome, he could not hold back his tears!"

© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 22 May, 2012

A bust of Tsar Nicholas II has been unveiled at the Church of St. Nicolas, located in Staroe Vagankovo near the Kremlin in central Moscow. The church was built at the place of the old chapel of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste in the 18th century. The church was closed in 1924 and turned it into a warehouse of the Lenin Library. It was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1992.

A bust of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II has been installed in the courtyard of the church.

© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 21 May, 2012

The White Flower Day, an event originally initiated by members of the last Russian Imperial family was held today at the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow.

Russia's first White Flower Day was originally held in 1911. The Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, aided by her four daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and her son, the Tsesarevich Alexis, all took an active role in the making of crafts which were then sold to the public. The funds raised from the sale of these items, including bunches of white flowers were then distributed to local charities, who helped alleviate the suffering of those in need. 

The grand duchesses and the tsesarevich during the White Flower Day festivities at Livadia 

Visitors to the Martha and Mary Convent were invited to attend a liturgy in the church, followed by the charity fair on the grounds of the Convent. A string quartet from the Bolshoi Theatre performed in the garden. Other musical events included a concert from children by the parish choir.

Guests could also view the private rooms of the founder of the monastery, Martyr Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. The monastery also hosted a unique photo exhibition entitled The Unknown Romanovs, which focused on the many deeds of charity work that Tsar Nicholas II and his family were involved in up until 1917. 

The charitable event was also held in other cities across Russia and the Ukraine, including Livadia in the Crimea, where it has become and annual event since 2005.

||| White Flower Day Returns to Livadia (2011) |||

© Paul Gilbert @ Royal Russia. 20 May, 2012