Tarnished Icons

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A woman had been brutally murdered. She was the baroness Anastasia Volodov-Kronof.

The baroness was a woman of great wealth and social power who threw an annual celebration with wine, wild fowl, and an assortment of cakes in the park near the new Hermitage. All were invited. The tradition had begun eight years ago when her husband died. The celebration on the anniversary of the baron’s death was considered to be either a sign of respect for a loyal officer of the czar or a sign of relief that the widow was finally free of an abusive martinet. She had married the baron when she was a girl of fourteen and he an officer of thirty.

Her death did not sit well with the populace of Saint Petersburg in 1862. She was a benefactor, an emulator of the aristocracy of France that had repeatedly rejected her. Her husband was an official hero of his country. Though she lived like a grand dame of Western Europe, holding salons for young artists, she, in quite general but sincere terms, espoused the causes of justice, freedom for all, and an eventual abolition of some of the more unjust practices of the aristocracy.

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