Sentences with phrase «ineffectual tsar»

It is a strange and engrossing work, written in a manner that many have compared to Tolstoy: stories within stories, huge chunks of raw material gleaned from the newspapers and agitprop pamphlets of the time, seemingly endless speeches by would - be rulers in the doomed Duma, and all against the background of a weak and ineffectual Tsar dominated by his wife and «our Friend,» Rasputin, with Lenin seething and scheming in Switzerland, waiting for his time to come round at last.