In 1704, Colonel Rudolph Felix Bauer found himself involved in the siege of Tartu, one of the many battles of the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden. This tale tells of how Bauer came to be before the bloody walls of Tartu while also recounting the trevails of the siege itself.
Sources
M. Laidre, The Great Northern War and Estonia: The Trials of Dorpat 1700-1708, trans P. Ruustal (Tallinn: Argo, 2010)
R. Slavnitskii, ‘Deistviia Russikh voisk v khode osadnykh operatsii nachal’nogo perioda severnoi voiny 1700-1721’, Voennaia letopis’ otechestva, no. 6 (2018), 54-58
V. Berendsen, E. Küng, and M. Maiste, ‘Tartu rahvastik 17. sajandi lopul ja 18. sajandi algul’, Tuna, no. 1 (2010), 29-44
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...
In 1889, a small band of unlikely Russian colonists seized the abandoned fortress of Sagallo in today's Djibouti. Led by the would-be Cossack Nikolai...
Tales from Imperial Russia is a fortnightly podcast narrating ordinary and extraordinary lives from the Russian Empire. In short episodes, we will avoid the...
