Terrible tsarinas

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Catherine’s Reign: A Flash of Flamboyance to the Duke of Holstein, that his presence in St. Petersburg was only a step on the road toward the conquest of Stockholm - as though, in his eyes, the throne of the late King Charles XII was more prestigious than that of the one who had defeated him, the late Peter the Great.

This raging ambition was no surprise to Menshikov. Wasn’t it due to a similar eagerness that he himself had arrived at a position that had been beyond his dreams back when he was only one of the tsar’s companions in battles, banquets and beds? Where would he stop, in his rise to honors and fortune? At the moment when his future son-in-law was being proclaimed sovereign autocrat of all the Russias, under the name of Peter II, he began to think that his own reign might perhaps be just beginning.

Terrible Tsarinas

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