https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borki_train_disaster#Investigation

In the preceding years, [Sergei] Witte had been regularly involved in managing imperial train journeys across his railroad and was well known to the tsar. Two months before the crash, Alexander, upset about Witte’s insistence on reducing train speed limits, had publicly chastised him and his railway, referring to its owners’ ethnicity:

Nowhere else has my speed been reduced; your railroad is an impossible one because it is a Jewish road.

According to Witte, he had warned the government earlier of the deficiencies in train setup, notably using paired steam engines and faulty saloon cars.

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    2 months ago

    In the view of the established religion, the salvation of the imperial family was hailed as divine intervention by the Sovereign. Pamphlets by clergymen linked the miraculous escape to the miracles of 17th-century icons at the end of the great plague of 1654–1655; the laity believed that prayers in front of these icons enabled the survival of the Tsar. A special icon of the God’s Grace on the 17th of October, made for the occasion, widely circulated in photographic copies. Moscow, the old shrine of Orthodoxy, was perceived as the source of the miracle; a contemporary pamphlet declared that the “power that Moscow had professed and that had exalted her revoked these laws [of Nature]”.