The Last of the Tsars the First World War, where he served in the Russian Army. When Tsar Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, he did so in favour of Grand Duke Michael, who himself abdicated some 48 hours later. So Michael was in fact 'the last of the Tsars.' The play was commissioned by the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1966, after another play on the same subject, "Nicholas Romanov" by William Kinsolving, had been tried out by the Stratford Festival Company at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in February, 1966, and found insufficiently dramatic. In spite of the shared general theme,
Chinese in the Russian Revolution and in the Russian Civil War 2,000 Chinese workers were employed in the construction of Russian fortifications around the Gulf of Finland. A significant number of them were convicted robbers ("honghuzi", "Red Beards", transliterated into Russian as "khunkhuzy", хунхузы) transferred from "katorga" labor camps in Harbin and other locations in the Far Eastern regions of the Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution, some of them stayed in Finland and took part as volunteers in the Finnish Civil War on the allied communist side. After 1917 many of these Chinese workers joined the Red Army. The vast majority of these Chinese were apolitical and become soldiers solely