The Russian monarchy was on the brink of collapse, and to Yusupov and his fellow aristocrats, the holy man they'd invited to dinner was the single cause of it all.
Augustus Caesar had by the time of Christ started something called the principate. The principate was basically one man rule cloaked in the window dressing, the fa? ade if you will, of the Republic.
The most recent, The Monarchy of Fear, is an engaging consideration of our current political crisis from the perspective of emotion- how anger, disgust and envy have been used, since antiquity, to divide people.
There's a dark reason why the spoon is so much older than all the other elements of the coronation regalia: The monarchy was temporarily abolished during the English Civil Wars.
What the lawyer said and what students said soon after was the first time in modern Thai history that the monarchy has been talked about publicly in a critical way.
Whether the downfall of the Russian monarchy was a product of the monk's curse, or the result of political tensions decades in the making, well, we may never know.