Tsar
(pronounced zahr)
(1) An emperor or king.
(2) Title of the former emperors of Russia and several
Slavonic states.
(3) Slang term for an autocratic ruler or leader.
(4) Slang term for a person exercising great authority or
power in a particular field.
1545-1555: From the Old Russian tsĭsarĭ (emperor or king), akin to the Old
Church Slavonic tsěsarĭ, the Gothic kaisar and the Greek kaîsar, all ultimately derived from the Latin Caesar (an emperor, a ruler, a dictator) while the Germanic form of the word was the source
of the Finnish keisari and the Estonian keisar. The prehistoric Slavic was tsesar, Tsar first adopted as an imperial title by Ivan IV (Ivan Vasilyevich, 1530–1584 and better remembered as Ivan the Terrible, Grand Prince of Moscow and all Russia 1533-1584 & Tsar of all Russia 1547-1584) in 1547. There’s a curious history to spelling tsar as
czar.
Spelled thus, it’s contrary to the usage of all Slavonic languages; the
word was so spelt by the Carniolan diplomat & historian Baron Siegmund Freiherr von Herberstein (1486–1566) in his work (in Latin) Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Notes on Muscovite Affairs (1549)) which was such a seminal early source of knowledge of Russia
in Western Europe that "czar" passed into the Western languages; despite that history, "tsar" definitely is the proper Latinization. It still
appears and some linguistic academics insist the lineage means it should be regarded
as archaic use rather than a mistake and, as a fine technical point, that’s correct in that,
for example, the female form czarina is
from 1717 (from Italian czarina and
German zarin). In Russian, the female form is tsaritsa and a
tsar’s son is a tsarevitch, his daughter a tsarevna.
Nicholas II (Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov, 1868–1918; last Tsar of Russia, 1894-1917). He cut an imposing figure for the portraitists but his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941; German Emperor & King of Prussia 1888-1918) reckoned the tsar's mental abilities rendered him most suitable to "a cottage in the country where he can grow turnips". Wilhelm got much wrong in his life but historians seem generally to concur in this he was a fair judge of things.
Tsar and its variants were the official titles of (1) the First
Bulgarian Empire 913–1018, (2) the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396), (3) the Serbian
Empire (1346–1371), (4) the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721) (technically replaced in
1721 by imperator, but remaining in use outside Russia (also officially in
relation to certain regions until 1917) and (5) the Tsardom of Bulgaria
(1908–1946). So, although most
associated with Russia, the first ruler to adopt the title was Simeon I (usually written as Simeon the Great; circa 865-927, ruler of Bulgaria 893-927) and that was about halfway through his reign and nobody since Simeon II (Simeon Borisov Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, b 1937; (last) Tsar of the Kingdom of Bulgaria 1943-1946) has been a tsar. The transferred sense of "person with
dictatorial powers" seems first to have appeared in English in 1866 as an adoption in American
English, initially as a disapproving reference to President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875;
US President 1865-1869) but it has come to be applied neutrally (health tsar,
transport tsar) and use does sometimes demand deconstruction: drug tsar has been
applied both to organised crime figures associated with the distribution of
narcotics and government appointees responsible for policing the trade. In some countries, some overlap between the two roles has been noted.
Volgograd, the southern Russian city was between 1925-1961
named Stalingrad (Stalin + -grad).
Grad (град in Cyrillic) was from
the Old Slavic and translates variously as "town, city, castle or fortified
settlement"; it once existed in many languages as gord and can be found
still as grad, gradić, horod or gorod in many place-names. Before it was renamed in honour of comrade Stalin
(1878-1953, leader of the USSR 1924-1953), between 1589-1925, the city, at the
confluence of the Tsaritsa and Volga rivers was known as Tsaritsyn, the name
from the Turkic-related Tatar dialect word sarisin
meaning "yellow water" or "yellow river" but because of
the similarity in sound and spelling, came in Russia to be associated with Tsar. Stalingrad is remembered as the scene of the epic and savage battle which culminated in the destruction in February 1943 of the German Sixth Army, something which, along with the strategic failure of the Wehrmacht in the offensive (Unternehmen Zitadelle (Operation Citadel) in the Kursk salient five months later, marked what many military historians record as the decisive moment on the Eastern Front. It has become common to refer to comrade Stalin as the "Red Tsar" whereas casual comparisons of Mr Putin (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999) don't often reach to Russia's imperial past; they seem to stop with Stalin.
Caesar (an emperor, a ruler, a dictator) was from the late
fourteenth century cesar (from Cæsar) and was originally a surname of
the Julian gens in Rome, elevated to a title after Caius Julius Caesar (100-44
BC) became dictator and it was used as a title of emperors down to Hadrian
(76–138; Roman emperor 117-138). The
name ultimately is of uncertain origin, Pliny the Elder (23–79) suggested it came from the
Latin caesaries (head of hair) because
the future dictator was born with a lush growth while others have linked it to
the Latin caesius (bluish-gray), an
allusion to eye color. The "probity of Caesar's" wife (the phrase first recorded in English in the 1570s) as the figure of a person who should be above suspicion comes from the biography of Julius Caesar written by the Greek Middle Platonist priest-philosopher & historian Plutarch (circa 46–circa 123). Plutarch related the story of how Julius Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia because of rumors of infidelity,
not because he believed the tales of her adultery but because, as a political
position, “the wife of Caesar must not even be under suspicion”. That’s the origin of the phrase “the probity
of Caesar’s wife, a phrase which first appeared in English in the 1570s.
In late nineteenth century US slang, a sheriff was "the great seizer" an allusion to the office's role in seizing property pursuant to court order. The use of Caesar to illustrate the distinction between a subject’s
obligations to matters temporal and spiritual is from the New Testament: Matthew
22:21.
They say unto him,
Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things
which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.
Christ had been answering a question posed by the Pharisees
to trap Him: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar (Matthew 22:15–20)? To answer, Jesus held up a denarius, the coin with
which pay the tax and noted that on it was the head of Caesar, by then Caesar
had become a title, meaning emperor of Rome and its empire. It was a clever answer; in saying "render unto
Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's", Jesus
dismisses the notion of believers being conflicted by the demands of the
secular state as a false dilemma because, one
can fulfil the requirements of the sate by a mere payment of coin without any
implication of accepting its doctrines or legitimacy. Over the years much has been made of what is or should be "rendered unto
Caesar", but more interesting is inference which must be drawn: if we owe
Caesar that which bears his image, what then do we owe God? It can only be that we owe God that which
bears the image of God, an impressive inventory listed in the book of Genesis and now interpreted by some Christians as "the whole universe". To Caesar we can only ever owe money; to
God we owe ourselves.
In the Old English the spelling was casere, which would under the expected etymological process have
evolved into coser, but instead,
circa 1200, it was replaced in the Middle English by keiser, from the Norse or Low German, and later by the French or
Latin form of the name. Cæsar also is
the root of German Kaiser, the Russian
tsar and is linked with the Modern
Persian shah. Despite the common assumption, "caesar" wasn’t
an influence on the English "king". King was from the Middle English king & kyng, from the
Old English cyng & cyning (king), from the Proto-West
Germanic kuning, from the Proto-Germanic
kuningaz & unungaz (king), kin being
the root. It was cognate with the Scots keeng (king), the North Frisian köning (king), the West Frisian kening (king), the Dutch koning (king), the Low German Koning & Köning (king), the German König
(king), the Danish konge (king), the Norwegian
konge (king), the Swedish konung & kung (king), the Icelandic konungur
& kóngur (king), the Finnish kuningas (king) and the Russian князь (knjaz) (prince) & княги́ня (knjagínja) (princess). It eclipsed the non-native Middle English roy (king) and the Early Modern English roy, borrowed from Old French roi, rei & rai (king).
The Persian Shah was
from the Old Persian xšāyaθiya (king), once thought a borrowing from the Median
as it was compared to the Avestan xšaϑra- (power; command), corresponding
to the Sanskrit (the Old Indic) kṣatra- (power; command), source of kṣatriya (warrior).
However, recent etymological research
has confirmed xšāyaθiya was a genuine, inherited Persian formation meaning “pertaining
to reigning, ruling”. The word, with the origin suffix -iya was from
a deverbal abstract noun xšāy-aθa- (rule,
ruling) (Herrschaft), from the Old
Persian verb xšāy- (to rule, reign). In
the Old Persian, the full title of the Achaemenid rulers of the First Empire
was Xšāyaθiya Xšāyaθiyānām (or in Modern Persian, Šāhe Šāhān (King of Kings)), best as "Emperor",
a title with ancient, Near Eastern and Mesopotamian precedents. The earliest known instance of such a title
dates from the Middle Assyrian period as šar
šarrāni, used by the Assyrian ruler Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243–1207 BC).
Tsar Bomba: the Tsar bomb
Tupolev Tu-95 in flight (left) and a depiction of the October 1961 test detonation of the Tsar Bomb.
Царь-бомба (Tsar Bomba (Tsar-bomb)) was the Western nickname
for the Soviet RDS-220 hydrogen bomb (Project code: AN602; code name Ivan or Vanya), the most
powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. The test on 30 October 1961 remains the biggest man-made explosion in history and was rated with a yield of 50-51 megatons although
the design was technically able to produce maximum yield in excess of 100. For a long time the US estimated the yield at 54 megatons and the Russians at 58 but after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was confirmed the true yield was 50-51 megatons. Only one was ever built and it was detonated on
an island off the Russian arctic coast. The decision to limit the size blast was related to the need to ensure (1) a reduced nuclear fall-out and (2) the aircraft dropping the thing would be able to travel a safe distance from the blast radius (the Kremlin's attitude to the lives of military personnel had changed since comrade Stalin's time). No nuclear power has since expressed any interest in building weapons even as large as the Tsar Bomb and for decades the trend in strategic arsenals has been more and smaller weapons, a decision taken on the pragmatic military grounds that it's pointless to destroy things many times over. It's true that higher yield nuclear weapons would produce "smaller rubble" but to the practical military mind such a result represents just "wasted effort".
Progress 1945-1961.
The Tupolev Tu-95 (NATO reporting name: Bear) which dropped
the Tsar Bomb was a curious fork in aviation history, noted also for its
longevity. A four-engined
turboprop-powered strategic bomber and missile platform, it entered service in
1956 and is expected still to be in operational use in 2040, an expectation the
United States Air Force (USAF) share for their big strategic bomber, the Boeing
B-52 which first flew in 1952, the first squadrons formed three years later. Both airframes have proven
remarkably durable and amenable to upgrades; as heavy lift devices and delivery systems they could be improved upon with a clean-sheet design but the relatively small advantages gained would not justify the immense cost, thus the ongoing upgrade programmes. The TU-95's design was, inter-alia, notable for being one of the few propeller-driven aircraft
with swept wings and is the only one ever to enter large-scale production. It's also very loud, the tips of those
counter-rotating propellers sometimes passing through the sound barrier.
Footage of the Tsar Bomb test de-classified and released after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1922-1991).
The
Tsar Bomb was in a sense the “ultimate” evolution of the centuries long history
of the bomb although it wasn’t the end of innovation, designers seemingly never
running out of ideas to refine the concept of the device, the purpose of which
is to (1) blow stuff up and (2) kill people.
Bomb was from the French bombe,
from the Italian bomba, from the Latin
bombus (a booming sound), from the Ancient
Greek βόμβος (bómbos) (booming,
humming, buzzing), the explosive imitative of the sound itself. Bomb was used originally of “projectiles; mortar
shells etc”, the more familiar “explosive device placed by hand or dropped from
airplane” said by many sources to date from 1908 although the word was in the
former sense used when describing the anarchist terrorism of the late
nineteenth century. As a footnote, the
nickname of Hugh Trenchard (1873-1956), the first Marshal of the Royal Air
Force (RAF) was “boom” but this was related to his tone of voice rather than an
acknowledgement of him being one of the earliest advocates of strategic
bombing.
The
figurative uses were wide, ranging from “a dilapidated car” (often as “old bomb”,
the use based presumably on the perception such vehicles are often loud). The bombshell was originally literally a
piece of military equipment but it was later co-opted (most memorably as “blonde
bombshell) to describe a particularly fetching young women. So, used figuratively, “bomb” could mean
either “very bad” or “very good” and in his weekly Letter from American (broadcast by the BBC World Service 1946-2004),
Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) noted a curious trans-Atlantic dichotomy. In the world of showbiz, Cooke observed, “bomb”
was used in both the US & UK to describe the reaction to a play, movie or
whatever but in the US, if called “a bomb”, the production was a flop, a
failure whereas in the UK, if something was called “quite a bomb”, it meant it
was a great success.
I Know Who Killed Me (2007)I Know Who Killed Me bombed (in the traditional US sense) but in the way these things sometimes happen, the film has since enjoyed a second life with a cult-following and screenings on the specialized festival circuit. Additionally, DVD & Blu-Ray sales (it's said to be a popular, if sometimes ironic, gift) meant eventually it generated a profit although it has never exactly become a "bomb" (in the UK sense). However, while it now enjoys a following among a small sub-set of the public, the professional critics have never softened their view.
