Moscow
Russia
Capital of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The city Napoleon failed to conquer, where Tolstoy and Dostoevsky set their greatest works, and where the Cold War was directed.
Associated figures
Napoleon Bonaparte
A Corsican-born military genius who rose from artillery officer to Emperor of the French, Napoleon conquered much of Europe before his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. His Napoleonic Code reformed legal systems across Europe, and his wars redrew the map of the continent.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russian novelist who plumbed the darkest depths of the human psyche with unmatched intensity. Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot are among the most profound explorations of guilt, faith, freedom, and suffering in world literature.
Leo Tolstoy
Russian novelist whose War and Peace and Anna Karenina are widely considered the greatest novels ever written. In later life he became a moral philosopher and advocate of nonviolent resistance whose ideas influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.