Creeping tsarism: who served as the prototypes of the famous deck of cards

Someone forgot, but someone did not know at all about the origin of the famous card deck, which was reproduced in millions of copies in the USSR and continues to circulate in modern Russia. But most of the playing cards depict participants in the grandiose costume ball, which took place in the Winter Palace during the 1903 Pancake Week. It was then that Empress Alexandra Feodorovna expressed the idea of capturing its participants dressed in historical costumes of the 17th century. And this idea was carried out by the best photographers of St. Petersburg, later their photographs were included in the luxurious Album of the Costume Ball in the Winter Palace, and 10 years later in 1913, on the eve of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov, they became the basis for the creation of the Russian Style card deck...

The sketches for these cards were made in 1911 at the German Dondorf Card Game Factory in Frankfurt am Main, and the deck itself was printed at the Imperial Card Factory. It was she who survived all the terrible events of the twentieth century and has safely reached our days.

Among the people depicted on it was the Emperor Nicholas II himself in a masquerade dress - this is the king of hearts:

“The emperor was wearing clothes that exactly reproduced the clothes that Tsar Alexey wore at one time - “crimson and white with gold embroidery”, wrote the empress.

True, the artist who redrew the portrait from the photograph deliberately distorted some of the tsar's features, since it would have looked daring to "play" poker as the ruler of a huge empire. So the king of hearts only partly resembles a king. Whereas the king of the peak is exactly the same as Tsar Ivan the Terrible from the famous painting by the artist Alexander Litovchenko "Ivan the Terrible shows the treasures to the English ambassador Gorsey". On the same canvas, ancient Russian weapons and armor are visible, the same as on the aces of the deck.

But, for example, the jack of diamonds is the Grand Duke Andrey Vladimirovich (falconer in festive attire), while the jack of clubs is another Grand Duke - the Tsar's younger brother Mikhail Alexandrovich, in the field dress of the Tsarevich of the 17th century.

A photograph of the Tsar's sister Xenia Alexandrovna in a 17th century boyarina costume was redrawn for the lady of hearts, and the elder sister of the empress and the wife of Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna in a 17th century princely dress, is a lady of clubs.

Etc...

It is striking that in the country of the victorious proletariat, built on the ruins of the "bloody" tsarist regime - everyone from young to old, and everywhere - from the Kremlin to the Magadan camps, every day saw the faces of feudal feudal lords on completely legal grounds.