Download or read book Slavophile Empire written by Laura Engelstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations, lacked the basic features of the Western liberal model: the rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that had an enduring impact on Russian political life. Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a political culture that are still in evidence today.

Download or read book Slavophile Empire written by Laura Engelstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations, lacked the basic features of the Western liberal model: the rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that had an enduring impact on Russian political life. Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a political culture that are still in evidence today.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought written by Caryl Emerson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive collection exploring the role of ideas, institutions, and movements in the evolution of Russian religious thought, Contains cutting-edge scholarship that expands understanding of one of the richest aspects of Russian cultural and intellectual life, Considers the influence of Russian religious thought in the West and the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art, film, and the novel, An authoritative reference for students and scholars Book jacket.

Download or read book Intimate Empire written by Alexa von Winning and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire struggled to reassert its position as a global power. A small noble family returned from the siege of Sevastopol and joined the rulers' efforts to advance Russian standing in the decades before 1917. Leaving Home tells the story of the Mansurovs, who were known to nineteenth-century observers as resourceful imperial agents and staunch supporters of Orthodoxy. In close interplay with scholarship and the media, they built churches and pilgrim hostels to increase Russian dominance within its borders and in the Ottoman Empire. They facilitated communication between the Russian Empire and the wider Orthodox world and expanded its institutional infrastructure in areas of religion and scholarship outside Russia. Some of the family's achievements stand to this day: the Russian complex in Jerusalem and an impressive Orthodox convent in Riga. When the Revolution came, they faced stigmatization as former nobles, believers, and monarchists. Impoverishment and arrests became part of their daily lives in Soviet Russia. Leaving Home is a study of the momentous role played by elite families in Russia's international involvement in the age of empire. It shows how three generations of a mobile noble family advanced the intertwined causes of the Russian Empire and Orthodoxy, using family resources and tools of intimacy. Women were crucial for the family's efforts, both behind the scenes and in public. Russia, Orthodoxy, and noble family life emerge as part of the European trans-imperial scene." --

Download or read book A Public Empire written by Ekaterina Pravilova and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects—rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics—should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.

Download or read book The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia written by George Gilbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolutionary movements in late tsarist Russia inspired a reaction by groups on the right. Although these groups were ostensibly defending the status quo, they were in fact, as this book argues, very radical in many ways. This book discusses these radical rightist groups, showing how they developed considerable popular appeal across the whole Russian Empire, securing support from a wide cross-section of society. The book considers the nature and organisation of the groups, their ideologies and polices on particular issues and how they changed over time. The book concludes by examining how and why the groups lost momentum and support in the years immediately before the First World War, and briefly explores how far present day rightist groups in Russia are connected to this earlier movement.

Download or read book A History of Russia and Its Empire written by Kees Boterbloem and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clear and focused text provides an introduction to imperial Russian and Soviet history from the crowning of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 to Vladimir Putin’s new term. Through a consistent chronological narrative, Kees Boterbloem considers the political, military, economic, social, religious, and cultural developments and crucial turning points that led Russia from an exotic backwater to superpower stature in the twentieth century. The author assesses the tremendous price paid by those who made Russia and the Soviet Union into such a hegemonic power, both locally and globally. He considers the complex and varied interactions between Russians and non-Russians and investigates the reasons for the remarkable longevity of this last of the colonial powers, whose dependencies were not granted independence until 1991. He explores the ongoing legacies of this fraught decolonization process on the Russian Federation itself and on the other states that succeeded the Soviet Union. The only text designed and written specifically for a one-semester course on this four-hundred-year period, it will appeal to all readers interested in learning more about the history of the people who have inhabited one-sixth of the earth’s landmass for centuries.

Download or read book Empires of Eurasia written by Jeffrey Mankoff and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the collapse of empires helps explain the efforts of China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey to challenge the international order "This is a must read to understand the backstory of conflicts from Crimea to Xinjiang."--Fiona Hill, author of There Is Nothing for You Here Eurasia's major powers--China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey--increasingly intervene across their borders while seeking to pull their smaller neighbors more firmly into their respective orbits. While analysts have focused on the role of leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in explaining this drive to dominate neighbors and pull away from the Western-dominated international system, they have paid less attention to the role of imperial legacies. Jeffrey Mankoff argues that what unites these contemporary Eurasian powers is their status as heirs to vast terrestrial empires, whose collapse left all four states deeply entangled with the lands and peoples along their peripheries but outside their formal borders. Today, they have all found new opportunities to project power within and beyond their borders in patterns shaped by their respective imperial pasts.

Download or read book Alexei Khomiakov written by Artur Mrowczynski-Van Allen and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-07-10 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860), a great Russian thinker, one of the founders of the Slavophile school of thought, nowadays might be seen as one of the precursors of critical thought on the dangers of modern political ideas. The pathologies that Khomiakov attributes to Catholicism and Protestantism--authoritarianism, individualism, and fragmentation--are today the fundamental characteristics of modern states, of the societies in which we live, and to a large extent, of the alternatives that are brought forth in an attempt to counter them. Khomiakov's works therefore might help us take on the challenge of rescuing Christian thought from modern colonization and offer a true alternative, a space for love and truth, the living experience of the church. This book serves as a step on the path toward recovering the church's reflection on its own identity as sobornost', as the community that is the living body of Christ, and can be the next step forward toward recovering the capacity for thought from within the church.

Download or read book Liberalism in Pre revolutionary Russia written by Susanna Rabow-Edling and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals were faced with a dilemma. They had to choose between modernizing their country, thus imitating the West, or reaffirming what was perceived as their country's own values and thereby risk remaining socially underdeveloped and unable to compete with Western powers. Scholars have argued that this led to the emergence of an anti-Western, anti-modern ethnic nationalism. In this innovative book, Susanna Rabow-Edling shows that there was another solution to the conflicting agendas of modernization and cultural authenticity – a Russian liberal nationalism. This nationalism took various forms during the long nineteenth century, but aimed to promote reforms through a combination of liberalism, nationalism and imperialism.

Download or read book Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland 1864 1915 written by Malte Rolf and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated by Cynthia Klohr After crushing the Polish Uprising in 1863–1864,Russia established a new system of administration and control. Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864–1915 investigates in detail the imperial bureaucracy’s highly variable relationship with Polish society over the next half century. It portrays the personnel and policies of Russian domination and describes the numerous layers of conflict and cooperation between the Tsarist officialdom and the local population. Presenting case studies of both modes of conflict and cooperation, Malte Rolf replaces the old, unambiguous “freedom-loving Poles vs. oppressive Russians” narrative with a more nuanced account and does justice to the complexity and diversity of encounters among Poles, Jews, and Russians in this contested geopolitical space. At the same time, he highlights the process of “provincializing the center,” the process by which the erosion of imperial rule in the Polish Kingdom facilitated the demise of the Romanov dynasty itself.

Download or read book The Origins of the First World War written by James Joll and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoroughly revised edition has been updated to incorporate recent case studies, biographies, syntheses, journal articles and scholarly conferences that appeared in conjunction with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014. The original version of this work, published by James Joll in 1984, quickly became established as the authoritative introduction to the subject of the war’s origins. Significantly expanded by Gordon Martel in 2007, this volume continues to offer a careful, clear, and comprehensive evaluation of the multitude of explanations advanced to explain the causes of the cataclysm of 1914, addressing each of the major interpretive approaches to the subject, with essay-like chapters addressing the alliance system, militarism and strategy, the international economy, imperial rivalries, the role of domestic politics and the ‘mood’ of 1914. This edition offers an extensive new introduction, a new conclusion (including ‘ten fateful choices’ that led to war), an entirely new chapter on the July Crisis, and a vastly expanded Guide to Further Reading. Covering over a century of controversy and scholarship, The Origins of the First World War is a valuable resource for all students and scholars interested in this major conflict.

Download or read book Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia written by Heather J. Coleman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From sermons and clerical reports to personal stories of faith, this book of translated primary documents reveals the lived experience of Orthodox Christianity in 19th- and early 20th-century Russia. These documents allow us to hear the voices of educated and uneducated writers, of clergy and laity, nobles and merchants, workers and peasants, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians. Orthodoxy emerges here as a multidimensional and dynamic faith. Beyond enhancing our understanding of Orthodox Christianity as practiced in Imperial Russia, this thoughtfully edited volume offers broad insights into the relationship between religious narrative and social experience and reveals religion's central place in the formation of world views and narrative traditions.

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: The Russian conquest of Central Asia was perhaps the nineteenth century's most dramatic and successful example of European imperial expansion, adding 1.5 million square miles and at least 6 million people - most of them Muslims - to the Tsar's domains. Alexander Morrison provides the first comprehensive military and diplomatic history of the conquest to be published for over a hundred years. From the earliest conflicts on the steppe frontier in the 1830s to the annexation of the Pamirs in the early 1900s, he gives a detailed account of the logistics and operational history of Russian wars against Khoqand, Bukhara and Khiva, the capture of Tashkent and Samarkand, and the bloody subjection of the Turkmen, as well as Russian diplomatic relations with China, Persia and the British Empire. Based on archival research in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and India, memoirs and Islamic chronicles, this book explains how Russia conquered a colonial empire in Central Asia, with consequences that still resonate today.

Download or read book The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia written by Thomas Marsden and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about an unprecedented attempt by the government of Russia's Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) to eradicate what was seen as one of the greatest threats to its political security: the religious dissent of the Old Believers. The Old Believers had long been reviled by the ruling Orthodox Church, for they were the largest group of Russian dissenters and claimed to be the guardians of true Orthodoxy; however, their industrious communities and strict morality meant that the civil authorities often regarded them favourably. This changed in the 1840s and 1850s when a series of remarkable cases demonstrated that the existing restrictions upon the dissenters' religious freedoms could not suppress their capacity for independent organisation. Finding itself at a crossroads between granting full toleration, or returning to the fierce persecution of earlier centuries, the tsarist government increasingly inclined towards the latter course, culminating in a top secret 'system' introduced in 1853 by the Minister of Internal Affairs Dmitrii Bibikov. The operation of this system was the high point of religious persecution in the last 150 years of the tsarist regime: it dissolved the Old Believers' religious gatherings, denied them civil rights, and repressed their leading figures as state criminals. It also constituted an extraordinary experiment in government, instituted to deal with a temporary emergency. Paradoxically the architects of this system were not churchmen or reactionaries, but representatives of the most progressive factions of Nicholas's bureaucracy. Their abandonment of religious toleration on grounds of political intolerability reflected their nationalist concerns for the future development of a rapidly changing Russia. The system lasted only until Nicholas's death in 1855; however, the story of its origins, operation, and collapse, told for the first time in this study, throws new light on the religious and political identity of the autocratic regime and on the complexity of the problems it faced.

Download or read book The Imperial Nation written by Josep M. Fradera and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, The Imperial Nation offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Josep Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects. Fradera argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings. Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows.

Download or read book The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance written by Elena I. Campbell and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A major contribution to the history of nationality, religious identity, and governance in late imperial Russia.” —William G. Rosenberg, coauthor of Processing the Past From the time of the Crimean War through the fall of the Tsar, the question of what to do about the Russian empire’s large Muslim population was a highly contested issue among educated Russians both inside and outside the government. As formulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Muslim Question comprised a complex set of ideas and concerns that centered on the problems of reimagining and governing the tremendously diverse Russian empire in the face of the challenges presented by the modernizing world. Basing her analysis on extensive research in archival and primary sources, Elena I. Campbell reconstructs the issues, debates, and personalities that shaped the development of Russian policies toward the empire’s Muslims and the impact of the Muslim Question on the modernizing path that Russia would follow. “Readable, original, and endlessly interesting, Campbell’s book deserves the very highest praise.” —Journal of Islamic Studies “Campbell’s book shows how profound official Islamophobia paradoxically led to the preservation of earlier confessional structures, grudging non-interference with the spiritual and social life of most Muslim communities, a restraining hand on the actions (if not the rhetoric) of Orthodox missionaries, and a certain uneasy toleration.” —Slavonic and East European Review “A major contribution to the understanding of Russia’s ‘Muslim Question’—past and present . . . Recommended.” —Choice