Regio Imperialis

02/10/2025

Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna

30/09/2025

Who can truly feel the weight of an empire?

This 1897 work by Vasnetsov shows us Ivan the Terrible in all his majesty and cruelty. His golden robe contrasts sharply with the gloom of his soul. Russian history and art at its finest.

30/09/2025

Romanovs and Swedish cousins on board the yacht Standart

30/09/2025

In Spala, 1912. The Tsar and his Empress, shrouded in the illusory quiet of their forest. Little did they know that fate, more relentless than any Russian winter, was already closing in. The beauty of a moment captured just before History opened fire.

30/09/2025

Something like this looked like Peterhof at the end of the 19th century.

29/09/2025

Prince Felix Yussopov and Prince Christopher of Greece

28/09/2025

28/09/2025

A group of soldiers ‘guarding’ the Alexander Palace during the family’s house arrest, c.1917

28/09/2025

"My father’s mind was continually occupied with the thought of liberating the serfs. In full sympathy with this idea, already in 1856, before my coronation, when in Moscow I called the attention of the leaders of the nobility of the province of Moscow to the necessity of taking it upon themselves to improve the life of the serfs, I added that serfdom could not continue indefinitely and that, therefore, it was better for the transformation to take place from above rather than from below"

Tsar Alexander II on the Emancipation of the Serfs (1861)

27/09/2025

С фонарём обшарьте
Весь подлунный свет!
Той страны на карте
Нет, в пространстве, нет.

Той, где на монетах
Молодость моя,
Той России нету.

Как и той меня.

"Marina Tsvetaeva"

24/09/2025

Nicholas II and Alexandra with their 5 children

23/09/2025

Nicholas II: the reluctant ruler who loved the chase.
For Nicholas, hunting was a habit, an imperial pastime and a reprieve: elaborate expeditions to imperial preserves, weekend dachas converted into hunting lodges, and weeks spent in forests with hounds, beaters and large entourages.
The 1892 Hunting Regulations law meets field
Long before Nicholas’s reign, a comprehensive hunting statute was adopted in 1892 (under Alexander III), it remained the core legal framework for hunting in Imperial Russia into Nicholas’s time. The code regulated seasons, who could hunt where, and even how to manage “nuisance” animals. Scholars and contemporary sources note provisions (sometimes cited as Article 19) that allowed large-scale measures for exterminating predatory animals and stray dogs and cats in fields and forests a striking reminder that hunting law mixed sport, pest control, and state interest.
Beyond policy and pageantry, the hunts reveal something unmistakably human: a man seeking solace outdoors, ritualizing leisure in the only language he trusted protocol. Whether you see Nicholas as tragic or merely habit-bound, the hunt was his theater of normalcy.