Bear with me while I let my ignorance show for a moment. Now for me, a black person living in 18th Century Russia simply does not compute. Throw in an African slave that goes on to become the greatest engineer and military man in 18th Century Russia and...mind blown! But, that is the story we have in Abram Petrovich Hannibal, whose name came to me from a friend, who had stumbled upon his story while reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Written in History: Letters that Changed the