I. Read the text and make up ten True/False statements for your group mates.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 536.

Legacy

Text 3

III. Single out the main directions of Nikolay's foreign policy and give details on each direction.

Nikolay died on 2 March 1855, during the Crimean War. He caught a chill, and refusing to rest and recuperate he continued with his usual heavy workload. His illness worsened; he contracted pneumonia and died.

There have been many damning verdicts on Nikolay' rule and legacy. At the end of his life, one of his most devoted civil servants, A.V. Nikitenko, opined that “The main failing of the reign of Nikolay Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake”. However, from time to time, some efforts are made to revive Nikolay' reputation. He believed, it is said, in his own oath and in respecting other people's rights as well as his own; witness Poland before 1831 and Hungary in 1849. He hated, it is said, serfdom at heart and would have liked to destroy it, as well as detesting the tyranny of the Baltic squires over their “emancipated” peasantry. Shortly before his death he made his son Alexander II promise to abolish serfdom.

According to Igor Vinogradov Nikolay and his Minister of Public Education Uvarov spread education through the Empire at all levels.

As a traveler in Spain, Italy and Russia, the Frenchman Marquis de Custine said in his widely read book entitled Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia that, inside, Nikolay was a good person, and only behaved as he did because he believed he had to. “If the Emperor, has no more of mercy in his heart than he reveals in his policies, then I pity Russia; if, on the other hand, his true sentiments are really superior to his acts, then I pity the Emperor.”

Nikolay is involved in an urban myth about the railroad from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. When it was to be constructed, the engineers proposed to Nikolay that he draw the path of the future railroad on the map himself. So he is said to have taken a ruler and put one end at Moscow, the other at Saint Petersburg, and then drawn a straight line – but his finger was slightly sticking out, and this left the railroad with a small curve. In fact, this curve was added in 1877, 26 years after the railway's construction, to circumvent a steep gradient that lasted for 15 km, and interfered with the railway's functionality. This curving had to be rectified in the early 2000s when the speed of the trains running between the two cities had to be increased.

II. Find the English equivalents for the following words and word combinations:

Простудиться; поправляться; ухудшаться; высказывать мнение; восстанавливать; питать отвращение; сквайр; милосердие; чувство; занимательная история; функциональность; выправлять; объем работы; неодобрительный.