As his relations with the tsarina Eudoxia Lopukhina gradually worsened, Anna Mons took the place as his permanent and semi-official royal mistress.
She became the mistress of the Russian police chief Mesentzov who took her to St. Petersburg and, when she was forced to leave Russia by special order of the Tsarina, to Wiesbaden.
Count Orlov had spent time in France and was associated with the favourites of Tsarina Catherine the Great during this period.
She extensively researched the Tsarist era, the political upheavals and long-drawn revolutions that led to the rise of the Bolsheviks, fall of the Romanovs, and the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children.
English writer Horace Walpole, in his Memoirs, gives a vivid description of the duke's character, accuses him of having caused the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), as a revenge on tsarina Catherine II, and says of his foreign policy: "he would project and determine the ruin of a country, but could not meditate a little mischief or a narrow benefit. ... He dissipated the nation's wealth and his own; but did not repair the latter by plunder of the former".
Irina Godunova, tsarina of tsar Fyodor I Ivanovich and sister of tsar Boris Godunov
Grigori Rasputin, a friend of the tsar Nicholas II of Russia and the Tsarina, was visiting his wife and children in his village, along the Tura River, in Siberia.
In 1791, Mr Gálves, the Spanish ambassador in Moscow, presented the Tsarina and Empress of Russia, Catherine II, with some cases of Málaga wine, and such was the pleasure she experienced that she exempted all shipments of wine controlled by the Fraternity of Vintners from Russian taxes.
The novel picks up on the brink of the Russian Revolution, depicting characters from all walks of life — from soldiers and peasants to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, and Lenin.
Chebotaryova grew fond of the grand duchesses and had personal sympathy for the Tsarina, but also blamed Alexandra and her reliance on Grigori Rasputin for the political upheaval that followed.