Eliseyevskiy

This guide to Eliseyevskiy in Moscow opens at the store's lavish nineteen-oh-one opening gala, then turns to what was happening behind the scenes: owner Grigory Eliseev falling for a married woman, and his wife Maria Andreevna's desperate attempts to stop the marriage. You'll hear how Maria took her own life in nineteen fourteen, how Grigory's five sons responded, and how revolution swept away the family's stores and fortune soon after. The shop itself was nationalized in nineteen seventeen and kept trading for decades as Gastronom Number One.