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)
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...
Tales from Imperial Russia is a fortnightly podcast narrating ordinary and extraordinary lives from the Russian Empire. In short episodes, we will avoid the...
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...
