Blind Eggs😎
Faberge / Romanov / Blind spot
Last week, I talked about The goose that laid golden eggs and in doing so, gave a couple of tricks for you to build your own golden nest. This week, I will discuss how the most expensive eggs changed history!
Or in other words, how the blindness of the Russian Czar and his love for Fabergé Eggs changed the world.
Lately, Russia has been in the news a lot. This prompted me to watch one of Netflix’s latest documentary series, The Last Czar, which depicts the last years of the Romanov Family prior to the Russian revolution of 1917. Spoiler alert, they all die at the end and the communists take over.
Today, I share the build-up to this tragic ending. But what is the link to the Faberge Eggs?
The Romanovs’ extravagant royal Easter egg tradition began with Czar Alexander III in 1885. In 1885, Alexander sought an Easter gift to surprise and delight his wife Maria Feodorovna. He turned to Peter Carl Fabergé, a master goldsmith. Instead of crafting a dazzling necklace or a breath-taking ring, Fabergé created something deceptively plain: a white enameled egg around two-and-a-half inches tall. But the real treasures were to be found inside. The egg twisted apart to reveal a golden yolk within. Inside the yolk was a golden hen sitting on golden straw. Hidden in the hen was a tiny diamond crown that held an even tinier ruby pendant.
This astonishing creation, known as the Hen Egg, was the first of an eventual 50 Fabergé imperial eggs commissioned annually by the Romanov family’s two final czars: Alexander III and, from 1894, Nicholas II. No two were even slightly similar, and each contained a surprise meaningful to the recipient.
All was shiny and beautiful in the imperial palaces, but at the dawn of the 20th century, Nicholas II was contending with international conflicts, nationwide poverty, a population boom, and a growing number of former serfs eager to overthrow a Czar they saw as oppressive and totally out of touch.
In 1904 and 1905, when Russia was at war with Japan, Nicholas suspended his annual Fabergé egg commission.
1905 coincided with the appearance of a mystic by the name of Gregori Rasputin (yes, the same one Boney M sings about!) who became a well-known figure and started to influence both the Emperor and his wife. A pivotal fact in the story is that the emperor’s son, Alexei, suffered from hemophilia, and no one except Rasputin could seem to heal the kid. Rasputin became a divisive figure at court, seen by some Russians as a mystic, visionary, and prophet, and by others as a religious charlatan, who had an overwhelmingly bad influence on the Emperor and Empress and caused them to make some very bad strategic decisions for the country. And Nicholas II was badly advised (or did not listen to good advisors) for most of his reign, so his decisions went from bad to worse.
The high point of Rasputin's power was in 1915 when Nicholas II left St. Petersburg to oversee the Russian armies fighting World War I, increasing both Empress Alexandra’s and Rasputin's influence. Russian defeats mounted during the war, however, and both Rasputin and Alexandra became increasingly unpopular. In the early morning of 30 December 1916, Rasputin was assassinated.
In 1906, Nicolas II resumed the tradition in Easter Egg tradition, though, and had one delivered every Easter until 1917. That year, the Bolshevik’s February Revolution arrived three months after Rasputin’s death, and Nicholas II was forced to abdicate the throne.
In 1918, the Bolsheviks, fanatics and eager for change, executed the entire Romanov family in the vilest way, in a cellar, gunned down.
Under the orders of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks packed up the eggs safely at the Kremlin in Moscow. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Russian economy tanked and famine affected millions. The country's new leaders, looking to make some quick rubbles, started selling the imperial eggs to international buyers. Today, those eggs can be found throughout the world.
What I found amazing in this tragic story is how out of touch with their people the royal family was, how far from reality they lived, how badly informed they were, how insanely opulent their lives were when people were starving or being killed in the trenches of WWI.
It is always easy to rewrite history, what if? Was he that blind? Would have we behaved like this? Would have we noticed things around us?
I am not a czar or a king in any way, but we all face those challenges in daily life:
What drives this decision?
What information do I search for?
What do I know?
What are my facts?
Who do I listen to?
Who is in my circle of trust?
With all their education and opulence, how could the Romanovs have unveiled their blind spot?
Question:
What are your blind spots?
And more importantly, who do you surround yourself with to unveil them?