Tag: Caucasus

Black City by Boris Akunin

Black City by Boris Akunin

A rare blunder by Erast Fandorin, Imperial Russia’s foremost detective, puts him on the trail of an assassin and revolutionary in the summer of 1914, a trail that leads to Baku, oil-spattered boomtown and possible crucible of a plot against the very order that Fandorin upholds. The city itself is a bubbling pool of money, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/13/black-city-by-boris-akunin/

Let Our Fame Be Great by Oliver Bullough

Review in brief: Encounters between Russia and the peoples of the Northern Caucasus have not been happy ones, and have generally ended badly for the smaller nations involved. From the Nogai driven into the Black Sea in the 1700s to the Circassians mostly slaughtered or removed to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s to the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/06/07/let-our-fame-be-great-by-oliver-bullough/

Sentence of the Day

For a small break from Brussels and the economic crisis: Nothing fades so quickly or so tackily as a Soviet resort. One of the lighter observations (on p. 139) from The Spirit-Wrestlers by Philip Marsden, a journey across southern Russia and the Caucasus in search of various religious non-conformists who fell afoul of both Russian …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2009/03/01/sentence-of-the-day/