The Winter Palace Feeds on Its Own by Svetlana Boreyko

Between the death of Peter the Great in January 1725 and the accession of Catherine the Great in 1762, the Russian Empire changed hands six times. Tsars and tsarinas rose and fell with astonishing speed, some through cunning, some through violence, and some through the quiet devastation of a cup of tea handed at precisely the right moment by precisely the right hand. In *The Winter Palace Feeds on Its Own*, historian Svetlana Boreyko brings this electrifying and treacherous era to life through seven meticulously researched, novelistically rendered stories drawn from the margins of official history.

Each story centers on a figure who stood close to power without quite holding it: physicians, translators, ladies-in-waiting, minor functionaries, and foreign advisors whose proximity to the throne made them both essential and expendable. Through their eyes, Boreyko reconstructs the machinery of imperial favor in all its seductive brutality — the midnight summonses, the whispering antechambers, the poisoned alliances that could elevate a family for generations or destroy it before morning.

What distinguishes this book from conventional historical narrative is its intimate, almost forensic attention to lived detail. Boreyko is as interested in the smell of a sickroom as in the contents of a succession decree, as attentive to a trembling hand holding a pen as to the geopolitical consequences of the letter it writes. The result is history that breathes, that unsettles, that refuses to keep a safe distance from its subjects.

Readers who admire the work of Simon Sebag Montefiore or Orlando Figes will find in Boreyko a writer of comparable seriousness and considerably sharper menace. *The Winter Palace Feeds on Its Own* is not a comfortable book, but it is an essential one — a portrait of an empire devouring itself with extraordinary elegance.