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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIX. THE TROUBETZKOI RAVELIN. On the banks of the Neva, over against the Imperial Palace, stands the Eussian Bastille--the Fortress of Peter and Paul. An immense building, wide and flat, surmounted by a meagre, tapering, attenuated spire like the end of a gigantic syringe. As it is situate between the two quarters of the town, the public may, during the day, pass through the fortress, entering by a narrow defile of sombre and tortuous vaults, occupied by sentinels, with the images of saints, holding burning tapers, in the niches. But at sunset all is closed, and when night broods over the capital, and thousands of lights illumine the quays of the swift-flowing Neva, the fortress alone remains in darkness, like a huge black maw ever open to swallow up all that is noblest and best in the unhappy city and country which it curses with its presence. No living sound comes to break the grim silence that hangs over this place of desolation. And yet the lugubrious edifice has a voice that vibrates far beyond this vast tomb of unknown martyrs, buried by night in the ditches, far beyond the oubliettes, where lie those whose turn is to come next. Every quarter of an hour the prison clock repeats a tedious irritating air, always the same--a psalm in praise of the Tzar. Here, indeed, is the altar of despotism. From its very foundation the Fortress of Peter and Paul has been the principal political prison of the empire. But there is a wide difference in the character and position of the unfortunates who have been its involuntary tenants. In past centuries the chief sojourners were court-conspirators on their way to Siberia or the scaffold. One of the first was the unhappy Prince Alexis, son of Peter the Great, presumptive heir to the crown....

Scholarly articles dealing with political events in Russia up to 1991.