ANNOTATION: Sergei Witte often expressed sympathy for the many non-Russians in his country. Jews, Poles, and other peoples who were not Russian or Orthodox Christian frequently faced discriminatory laws in the businesses, education, and government of the Russian Empire. But there were basic contradictions in Witte's political career. On the one hand, he held very progressive views and stood for abolishing laws that discriminated on the basis of ethnic origins. Such laws, he felt, hindered the growth of Russia's productivity. Yet this modern outlook contrasted with his admiration for the old traditions of the Russian monarchy, whose absolute powers were often the source of discriminatory laws in the first place. When the Russian emperor Alexander II was assassinated by terrorists in 1881, Witte briefly joined a secret society dedicated to seeking out and destroying terrorists...

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ANNOTATION: BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
A Siberian peasant and self-proclaimed holy man, Gregory Efimovich Rasputin entered the circle of personal acquaintances surrounding the Russian imperial family sometime after 1905. Tsar Nicholas and especially Empress Alexandra welcomed Rasputin because of the healing powers he supposedly possessed; he seemed to be able to treat the imperial couple's only son, Alexis, who suffered from hemophilia...

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ANNOTATION: "His rarest quality was a physical, intellectual and moral courage that set him absolutely apart from the rest of mankind, and because of this we understood each other perfectly." CATHERINE THE GREAT

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ANNOTATION: "I have great bundles of grain but I have no mill and there is not enough water close by to build one. But there is water enough at a distance if only I shall have time to build a canal, but the length of my life is uncertain. Therefore, I build the mill first and have only given the order to build the canal, which will better force my successors to bring water [to put the mill to use]. PETER THE GREAT

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ANNOTATION: Russian grand duke and prince...

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ANNOTATION: Russian general...

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ANNOTATION: Russian politician Yuri Luzhkov (born 1936) proved to be a popular mayor of Moscow. He ushered in reforms to the economy and infrastructure that increased the prosperity of the nation's capital...

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ANNOTATION: A former paratrooper in the Russian Army, General Alexander Lebed (born 1950) served briefly as Russia's national security chief under president Boris Yeltsin before moving on to become one of Yeltsin's most probable successors. He is regarded as a fierce nationalist and an outspoken critic of corruption in Russian business and government...

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ANNOTATION: Russia, was elected mayor of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) in 1990...

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ANNOTATION: Notable among the rulers of prerevolutionary Russia were Ivan III (the Great, 1440-1505), who established Moscow as a sovereign state; Peter I (the Great, 1672-1725), a key figure in the modernization of Russia; Alexander I (1777-1825), prominent both in the war against Napoleon and the political reaction that followed the war; and Alexander II (1818-81), a social reformer who freed the serfs. Mikhail Gorbachev (b.1931) came to power in 1985, initiated reforms of the old Communist system and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990...

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