Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Russian Empire 1869–1916 ✕ Murdered

The Siberian “holy man” who reached the imperial bedchamber

November 1, 1905. Nicholas II wrote in his diary: "At 4 o'clock we went to Sergiyevka. We drank tea with Militsa and Stana. We made the acquaintance of a man of God — Grigori from Tobolsk province."

A Siberian peasant mystic. His ability to calm the heir's haemophilia won the Empress's absolute trust, and during the war he swayed ministerial appointments. Murdered in December 1916 by aristocrats hoping to save the monarchy. The dynasty collapsed two months later.

Political and party leadership Russian Empire 1878–1976 ○ Natural causes

The Duma monarchist who took the tsar's abdication and became an ideologue of the White movement

At the tsar's train in Pskov, Shulgin — unwashed and unshaven for four days — appeared before Nicholas II in a dirty jacket. A member of the suite told him: 'We will not forget this little jacket of yours.'

Vasily Shulgin was a leading conservative politician in the late Russian Empire, a deputy in the II, III, and IV State Dumas and editor of Kievlyanin, who championed Russian nationalism and constitutional monarchy. In March 1917 he traveled to Pskov with Alexander Guchkov and personally received Nicholas II's abdication, but could not avert the revolutionary catastrophe. During the Civil War he served as an ideologue of the White movement, then emigrated to Yugoslavia; in 1944 he was arrested by Soviet forces and spent 12 years in Vladimir Central Prison. Amnestied in 1956, he remained in the USSR, wrote memoirs, and appeared in the 1965 documentary The Verdict of History, a living witness to the old order who was defeated but never submitted.