Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

There is a tradition in Russia for wedding parties on the way from the registry office to the wedding breakfast to stop off at various sites of historical or local interest. If it is a war memorial, the bride may even lay her bouquet there. A separate superstition is to rub or touch a part of a bronze statue for luck.

https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2016/12/12/70870-utomlennye-eltsinym. Burnt by Yeltsin (in Russian), 12 December 2016.

The Church on the Blood was built in 2000–3 on the site where the Ipatiev House stood. Fearing that the House could become a focus for royalist sentiment, in 1977 the Soviet Communist Party ordered it to be knocked down. As First Secretary of the local Party Committee, Yeltsin saw to it that the order was carried out.

An obsolete Russian unit of measurement, equivalent to a little over a kilometre.

In 1773–4, the Cossack, Yemelyan Pugachev, led a peasant revolt to try to seize the throne from the Empress Catherine II.

This is an oft-cited quote from Alexander Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev Rebellion , ‘God save us from seeing a Russian riot, senseless and merciless’.

‘The People’s Will’ (Russ: Narodnaya Volya ) was a nineteenth-century revolutionary political organization that used terrorism in an attempt to promote reforms in the country. It is best known for killing Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

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In both Tsarist and Soviet times prisoners were divided into two groups: criminals (who had broken the law) and ‘politicals’, who were arrested for their political views. This is also a feature of Putin’s regime.