Czar Alexander III once decreed that a certain prisoner be sent to the Siberian gulag. "Pardon impossible," he wrote in a letter, "to be sent to Siberia."

The czarina Maria Fedorovna, famed for her philanthropic nature, altered her husband's missive and secured the man's freedom. The new reading? "Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia."

[The man was soon released.]