In 1910, Europe and Russia were rocked by a sensational murder trial: three Russians stood accused of conspiring to murder one of their compatriots in Venice. Filmed and photographed, the lurid details of affairs and petty violence shocked the world. But what brought these Russians to such dire straits? And what did the trial reveal about how Europeans and Russians thought of one another?

This tale is heavily dependent on the interpretation and reconstruction of events in Louise McReynolds, Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).