Download or read book Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia written by Theodore R. Weeks and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If one were to pick a single explanation for the fall of the tsarist and Soviet empires, it might well be Russia's inability to achieve a satisfactory relationship with non-Russian nationalities. Perhaps no other region demonstrates imperial Russia's "national dilemma" better than the Western provinces and Kingdom of Poland, an extensive area inhabited by a diverse group of nationalities, including Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Russians, and Lithuanians. Taking an in-depth look at this region during an era of intensifying national feeling. Weeks shows that the Russian government, even at the height of its empire, never came to terms with the question of nationality. Drawing upon little-known Russian and Polish archives, Weeks challenges widely held assumptions about the "national policy" of late imperial Russia and provides fresh insights into ethnicity in Russia and the former Soviet Union. He demonstrates that, rather than pursuing a plan of "russification," the tsarist government reacted to situations and failed to initiate policy. Extensively researched and path-breaking in its findings, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia will interest historians, social scientists, and general readers concerned with national identity in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Making Russians written by Darius Staliūnas and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Russians is a valuable and insightful examination, based on a solid archival foundation, of the nationalities policies in tsarist Russia's northwestern borderlands of Lithuania and Belarus. Making Russians explores the various strategies of Russification that the imperial government pursued largely unsuccessfully in this region. The book is essential reading for all students of imperial Russia. It has applications for the present as well, when issues of national identity continue to engage the citizens of both Russia and the states of the Former Soviet Union.John Klier, University College London
Download or read book Empire written by D. C. B. Lieven and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Tsarist and Soviet empires of Russia, Lieven reveals the nature and meaning of all empires throughout history. He examines factors that mold the shape of the empires, including geography and culture, and compares the Russian empires with other imperial states, from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States. Illustrations.
Download or read book Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland 1855 1914 written by Edward C. Thaden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accompanying the gradual systematization of government and modernization of society in Russia during the reforms of the 1860s was a policy of Russification toward Finland and the Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland, and Kurland. From a variety of group and national perspectives, five scholars here depict the formulation, implementation, and effect of this policy. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire written by Liliana Riga and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new interpretation of the Russian Revolution, finding that nearly two-thirds of the Bolsheviks were ethnic minorities.
Download or read book Imperial Borderland written by Tuomo Polvinen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1904 the Russian Governor-General in Helsinki, Nikolai Ivanovich Bobrikov, was assassinated by a Finnish nationalist. In this study by Finland's leading diplomatic historian, Tuomo Polvinen examines the tense and troubled relationship of Finland to the tsarist empire and the nature of Russian nationality policy at the turn of the century. Bobrikov's appointment to the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1898 by Nicholas II led to a policy of intensified Russification that ended nearly a century of political equilibrium between the two states. With access to previously unavailable Russian archival material, Polvinen provides a uniquely balanced and informed view of this dramatic new phase in Russian-Finnish relations. Presenting Bobrikov in the overall context of Russian policy toward Finland, Polvinen investigates such issues as Bobrikov's goals for Finland, the effect of Russian politics on its Finnish policy, and the influence of Russian journalists during this crucial period. Offering insight into the workings of the Russian government and its borderland policy during a time of rising international tension, Imperial Borderland will attract readers of Baltic, Finnish, Russian, and Scandinavian history. Those with an interest in the continuing importance of nationalism and nationalities policy in this region of the world will also find this book valuable.
Download or read book The Russian Empire 1450 1801 written by Nancy Shields Kollmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. It tracks the emergence of an 'Imperial nobility' and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire's many peoples and cultures.
Download or read book The Romanov Empire and Nationalism written by Alekse? I. Miller and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian historiography has focused on the power of the central state. The national historiographies of the peoples that were once part of the empire, on the other hand, concentrate on their own nation, and the empire for them is only a burdensome context in which a particular nation was "waking up," and fighting for independence. Miller addresses the fabric of interaction between the imperial authority and local communities in the Romanov empire. How did the authorities structure the space of the empire? What were the economic relations between the borderlands and the centre? How was the use of different languages regulated? How did the central authorities and local officials implement policies regarding different population groups? How did the experience, acquired in particular borderlands, influence the policies elsewhere--among others--through officials who often changed their place of service during their careers? How did the local elites and communities react to the policies of the imperial authorities? How did they uphold their special interests if the empire encroached on them, but also--how did they collaborate with the empire and how did they use imperial resources for local interests?
Download or read book The Nationalities Factor In Soviet Politics And Society written by Lubomyr Hajda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editors express their gratitude to the John M. Olin Foundation for its financial assistance and to the Harvard University Russian Research Center for the facilities and staff support that made this project possible. We wish to thank those who contributed their invaluable scholarly advice, including Vernon Aspaturian, Abram Bergson, Steven Blank, Walker Connor, Robert Conquest, Murray Feshbach, Erich Goldhagen, Richard Pipes, and Marc Raeff. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver with Soviet demographic data used throughout the volume. Susan Zayer and Karen Taylor-Brovkin provided able administrative help. For skillful technical assistance with the manuscript we are indebted to Jane Prokop, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alison Koff. Catherine Reed, Susan Gardos-Bleich, Christine Porto, and Alex Sich helped generously in diverse ways. Finally, the editors profited at every stage from the congenial working atmosphere and the encouragement of colleagues at the Russian Research Center too numerous to mention. To all of them goes our deep appreciation.
Download or read book Asiatic Russia written by Tomohiko Uyama and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the Russian Empire has traditionally been viewed as a European borderland, most of its territory was actually situated in Asia. Imperial power was huge but often suffered from a lack of enough information and resources to rule its culturally diverse subjects, and asymmetric relations between state and society combined with flexible strategies of local actors sometimes produced unexpected results. In Asiatic Russia, an international team of scholars explores the interactions between power and people in Central Asia, Siberia, the Volga-Urals, and the Caucasus from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, drawing on a wealth of Russian archival materials and Turkic, Persian, and Tibetan sources. The variety of topics discussed in the book includes the Russian idea of a "civilizing mission," the system of governor-generalships, imperial geography and demography, roles of Muslim and Buddhist networks in imperial rule and foreign policy, social change in the Russian Protectorate of Bukhara, Muslim reformist and national movements. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of Russian, Central Eurasian, and comparative imperial history, as well as imperial and colonial studies and nationalism studies. It may also provide some hints for understanding today’s world, where "empire" has again become a key word in international and domestic power relations.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Russia Volume 1 From Early Rus to 1689 written by Maureen Perrie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative history of Russia from early Rus' to the reign of Peter the Great.
Download or read book Imperial Russia s Muslims written by Mustafa Tuna and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Russia's Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.
Download or read book The Russian Conquest of Central Asia written by Alexander Morrison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive diplomatic and military history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, spanning the whole of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Window on the East written by Robert Geraci and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Geraci presents an exceptionally original account of both the politics and the lived experience of diversity in a society whose ethnic complexity has long been downplayed. For centuries, Russians have defined their country as both a multinational empire and a homogeneous nation-state in the making, and have alternately embraced and repudiated the East or Asia as fundamental to Russia's identity. The author argues that the city of Kazan, in the middle Volga region, was the chief nineteenth-century site for mediating this troubled and paradoxical relationship with the East, much as St. Petersburg had served as Russia's window on Europe a century earlier. He shows how Russians sought through science, religion, pedagogy, and politics to understand and promote the Russification of ethnic minorities in the East, as well as to define themselves. Vivid in narrative detail, meticulously argued, and peopled by a colorful cast including missionaries, bishops, peasants, mullahs, professors, teachers, students, linguists, orientalists, archeologists, and state officials, Window on the East uses previously untapped archival and published materials to describe the creation (sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional) of intermediate and new forms of Russianness.
Download or read book The Baron s Cloak written by Willard Sunderland and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921) was a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in Eastern Siberia during the Russian Civil War. From there he established himself as the de facto warlord of Outer Mongolia, the base for a fantastical plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war drew to a close. In The Baron’s Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire’s final decades through the arc of the Baron’s life, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia. Tracking Ungern’s movements, he transits through the Empire’s multinational borderlands, where the country bumped up against three other doomed empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by war, revolution, and imperial collapse was particularly vicious. In compulsively readable prose that draws on wide-ranging research in multiple languages, Sunderland re-creates Ungern’s far-flung life and uses it to tell a compelling and original tale of imperial success and failure in a momentous time. Sunderland visited the many sites that shaped Ungern’s experience, from Austria and Estonia to Mongolia and China, and these travels help give the book its arresting geographical feel. In the early chapters, where direct evidence of Ungern’s activities is sparse, he evokes peoples and places as Ungern would have experienced them, carefully tracing the accumulation of influences that ultimately came together to propel the better documented, more notorious phase of his career. Recurring throughout Sunderland’s magisterial account is a specific artifact: the Baron’s cloak, an essential part of the cross-cultural uniform Ungern chose for himself by the time of his Mongolian campaign: an orangey-gold Mongolian kaftan embroidered in the Khalkha fashion yet outfitted with tsarist-style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived across the Russian Empire, combined its contrasting cultures, fought its wars, and was molded by its greatest institutions and most volatile frontiers. By the time of his trial and execution mere months before the decree that created the USSR, he had become a profoundly contradictory figure, reflecting both the empire’s potential as a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.
Download or read book Beyond Crimea written by Agnia Grigas and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How will Russia redraw post-Soviet borders? In the wake of recent Russian expansionism, political risk expert Agnia Grigas illustrates how—for more than two decades—Moscow has consistently used its compatriots in bordering nations for its territorial ambitions. Demonstrating how this policy has been implemented in Ukraine and Georgia, Grigas provides cutting-edge analysis of the nature of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy and compatriot protection to warn that Moldova, Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, and others are also at risk.
Download or read book From the Shadow of Empire written by Olga Maiorova and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2010-08-17 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As nationalism spread across nineteenth-century Europe, Russia’s national identity remained murky: there was no clear distinction between the Russian nation and the expanding multiethnic empire that called itself “Russian.” When Tsar Alexander II’s Great Reforms (1855–1870s) allowed some freedom for public debate, Russian nationalist intellectuals embarked on a major project—which they undertook in daily press, popular historiography, and works of fiction—of finding the Russian nation within the empire and rendering the empire in nationalistic terms. From the Shadow of Empire traces how these nationalist writers refashioned key historical myths—the legend of the nation’s spiritual birth, the tale of the founding of Russia, stories of Cossack independence—to portray the Russian people as the ruling nationality, whose character would define the empire. In an effort to press the government to alter its traditional imperial policies, writers from across the political spectrum made the cult of military victories into the dominant form of national myth-making: in the absence of popular political participation, wars allowed for the people’s involvement in public affairs and conjured an image of unity between ruler and nation. With their increasing reliance on the war metaphor, Reform-era thinkers prepared the ground for the brutal Russification policies of the late nineteenth century and contributed to the aggressive character of twentieth-century Russian nationalism.
