21 Quotes by Helen Rappaport

The wish to capture evanescent reflections, is not only impossible, as has been shown by thorough German Investigation, but the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy. God created man in His own image, and no man-made machine may fix the image of God. Is it possible that God should have abandoned His eternal principles, and allowed a Frenchman in Paris to give to the world an invention of the Devil.

I now have to choose between son and husband. But I have made my decision and I have to be strong. I must leave my boy and share my life – or my death – with my husband.17.

History may have condemned him many times over for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt, the most exemplary of royal fathers.

Happy voices, smiling faces, golden memories of a summer afternoon, of a world that could still laugh and talk of war as something far away.

The tsar twice went to visit Stolypin again, but on both occasions Stolypin’s wife Olga, blaming him for the attack, refused to allow Nicholas to see him.45 On 5 September Stolypin died of sepsis and Olga Stolypina declined to accept the tsar’s condolences. With martial law declared in Kiev and 30,000 troops on alert, fears spread of an anti-Jewish pogrom in retaliation, prompting many of the Jewish residents to flee the city.

Show kindness to all, be gentle and loving, then all will love you.

The mysterious healer was a strannik – a semi-literate, thirty-seven-year-old lay pilgrim – named Grigory Rasputin, who had been gaining a reputation in St Petersburg as a mystic and healer since his arrival there during Lent 1903.

St Petersburg society looked upon Grand Duchess Vladimir as the real Empress of Russia, for Alexandra now hardly ever emerged from her retirement at Tsarskoe Selo.

Who else is there to marry?’ she asked a friend; she at least had the great good fortune to be marrying for love.