Faberge Eggs Treasures of the World
© Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
◦ Mementos of a Doomed Dynasty
◦ Nicholas and Romanov Russia
◦ Nicholas and Alexandra
◦ The tragic events that followed the coronation of Nicholas II
◦ Bloody Sunday
◦ Signs of revolution
◦ The inventive young Faberge
◦ Faberge's growing fame
◦ The Faberge Imperial Easter eggs featured in the Series
◦ The House of Faberge
◦ The workshops and workmasters
◦ Faberge the man
◦ Outrageous opulence
◦ Fragile remembrances
◦ The fate of the eggs ◦
Bloody Sunday
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Excerpts from a letter written by Leo Tolstoy
to Nicholas II in 1902 asking that the Czar heed the cry of his people:
"A third of Russia is in a state of emergency... The army
of police – open and secret – is constantly growing... the prisons,
places of exile, and labor camps are overflowing... The censorship has
descended to nonsensical prohibitions... Religious persecutions were
never so frequent and cruel as now... Armed forces are... sent out against
the people with live cartridges. In many places there has already been
bloodshed between brothers, and further and more cruel bloodshed is
imminent everywhere..."
"...the people who work on the land – those one hundred million
people on whom the power of Russia is based – despite the excessive
growth of the state budget or, more likely, because of this growth,
become more impoverished every year, so that famine has become a normal
occurrence. And general discontent with the government among all classes
and a hostile attitude towards it has become just as normal an occurrence."
"There is one cause of all this and it is manifestly evident:
namely that your advisors tell you... that just as Orthodoxy and autocracy
were once natural to the Russian people, so they are natural to them
now and will be natural to them till the end of time, and that therefore
for the good of the Russian people it is necessary at all costs to maintain
these two interconnected forms... but it is amazing that you, a free
man not lacking for anything, and a reasonable and good man, can believe
them and follow their terrible advice to do or allow to be done so much
evil for the sake of such an impracticable purpose as halting the eternal
movement of mankind from evil to goodness, from darkness to light."
But Nicholas continued to ignore the worsening conditions of his country,
refusing to meet the grievances of his people. On Sunday, January 22,
1905, over one hundred thousand demonstrators marched peacefully to
the Winter Palace to present the Czar with a list of complaints concerning
working conditions in the factories. When the Czar failed to appear,
tension mounted. In a moment of panic, soldiers opened fire on the crowd.
Hundreds were killed or injured in what would become known as "the
massacre of Bloody Sunday." To the peasants, the Batiushka Czar
– benevolent Father of the Russian people – had become a cruelly indifferent
ruler.
His hand forced by the resulting outrage, Nicholas reluctantly consented
to a constitutional monarchy, though he continued to believe he was
responsible only to God: "I have the firm and absolute faith
that the destiny of Russia, my own fate and that of my family are in
the hands of Almighty God, who has placed me where I am. Whatever may
happen, I shall bow to His will, conscious that I have never had any
other thought but that of serving the country He has entrusted to me."
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