The Fandorin novels, a glamorous romp through tsarist Russia, have been best-sellers since the 1990s.
But just remember what went before: 74 years of communism and centuries of tsarist despotism.
The church was a pillar of the tsarist state, hounding pre-revolutionary dissenters such as Leo Tolstoy.
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 promised to liberate all the subject peoples of the tsarist empire.
Tsarist Russia looked secure after the shock of 1905, but then fell to the Bolsheviks in 1917.
From tsarist times, living in Moscow has been a privilege rather than a right, even for Russians.
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Russians always want a warm-weather port and will always have a huddled, suspicious culture, whether Tsarist, Soviet, or Putinish.
The document is considered to be a forgery which originated in Tsarist Russia.
However the Tsarist government continued to exist even after the Tsar was gone.
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Even more than the Soviet monolith, the tsarist realm varied greatly in form.
Property rights and an independent judiciary were only weakly rooted under Tsarist absolutism.
It was the Provisional Government that the Bolshiviks overthrew and the remains of the Tsarist government in November of 1917.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky stayed there briefly, detesting the subversive pro-Polish sentiment of what was the third-largest city in the tsarist empire.
She was born Mona May Ratner in Bessarabia, a province of Tsarist Russia, part of which is now in Ukraine.
Who cares that Norway was once part of Sweden, or that Finland used to be a Grand Duchy of tsarist Russia?
Authoritarian habits left over from Soviet and tsarist days are so deeply rooted that they could be sprouting again of their own accord.
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Natalie Konstantinovna Mark was born in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a part of the tsarist empire that was close to the tastes of Western Europe.
To commemorate the historic rebirth, Iksanov chose the Michail Glinka opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, which was first performed in 1842 the height of tsarist opulence and dominance in the arts.
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One of the many things the Soviet and tsarist empires had in common, pace Papandreou, was that neither offered its subjects much of a middle way between brutishness and disinterested holiness.
Its Number Three candidate, Governor Vladimir Yakovlev of Petersburg, has clearly annoyed Mr Luzhkov by suggesting that the government might be moved from Moscow to his city, the old Tsarist capital.
Like many Jews tired of tsarist persecution he pulled up roots and came to New York to join a community that has probably done most to provide America with its culture.
Most strikingly, he has masterminded a series of grand projects, especially the vast Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a monument to tsarist splendour whose predecessor was blown up by Stalin in 1931.
The new Red Army commanders realised that there was a wealth of untapped military talent from which they could benefit, and soon ex-Tsarist officers were recruited to knock the new army into shape.
Creditors have been more patient with democratic governments than with other regimes, probably because the risk of abrupt changes of policy (like the repudiation of Tsarist debts by Russia in 1917) are reduced.
For the Soviet government and its tsarist predecessors (Tashkent was captured by the tsar's army in 1865) Central Asia was the Muslim south, a backyard (and a front-line against British mischief from India).
It is part of a broader search by the Kremlin for a whole new set of Russian heroes, including figures from the Tsarist past - an attempt, post-communism, to give the country a common identity.
But having read her wonderful evocation of Jewish Vitebsk, tsarist St Petersburg and modernist Paris, having lived as in a novel with the Hasidic families of Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld, his first wife, the reader will be hooked.
An early research project was to interview all the surviving members of the national governments that sprang up in 1917 amid the ruins of the tsarist empire, only to be snuffed out by the Bolsheviks a few years later.
Since the era of Ronald Reagan however, the Republicans have come to believe that they could obliterate the Democratic Party just as the Bolshiviks smashed the Tsarist state, and rule effectively, if not literally, as a one party system.
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What distinguished the Bolshiviks from other political parties, including other revolutionary parties, was that they did not have the goal of reforming Tsarist state, or even seizing control of the Tsarist state, but of smashing the Tsarist state and beginning again from scratch.
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