Russian history includes female rulers who were by turns brutal, bold, and bawdy - and sometimes all three.
Around A.D. 945 a dynamo named Queen Olga was having a dickens of a time. A Slavic tribe had just killed her husband, Igor. As new ruler, she methodically went after the guilty parties, wiping them out in ways designed to put the fear of Olga into the survivors. The first batch of 20 she buried alive; she parboiled the second batch inside their bathhouses. After that she hosted a massacre of 5,000, relying on more conventional sword-stabbing. By now her subjects were quite ready to pay annual tribute and let Olga reign. When she introduced the Greek Orthodox form of Christianity to Russia, peasants and aristocrats alike bought into it, no questions asked. For her outstanding slaughter-for-God work, she was declared a saint - one of only five women to ever win the halo from the Orthodox Church.
And that pretty much sums it up nicely.
Header: St. Olga by artist Gladsome Light via onlythatdotcom where you can purchase this beautiful icon for your shrine to St. Olga, equal-to-the-apostles... and ass kicker
