Download or read book The Imperial Russian Project written by Alfred J. Rieber and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneer in the field of Russian and Soviet studies in the West, Alfred J. Rieber’s five decade career has focused on increasing our understanding of the Russian Empire from Peter the Great to the coming of the First World War. The Imperial Russian Project is a collection of Rieber’s lifetime of work, focusing on three interconnected themes of this time period: the role of reform in the process of state building, the interaction of state and social movements, and alternative visions of economic development. This volume contains Rieber’s previously published, classic essays, edited and updated, as well as newly written works that together provide a well-integrated framework for reflection on this topic. Rieber argues that Russia’s style of autocratic governance not only reflected the personalities of the rulers but also the challenges of overcoming economic backwardness in a society lacking common citizenship and a cohesive ruling class. The Imperial Russian Project reveals how during the nineteenth century the tsar was obliged to operate within a changing and more complex world, reducing his options and restricting his freedom of action.
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 Imperial Russian Army in Peace War and Revolution 1856 1917 written by Roger R. Reese and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 1917, nine months after the disintegration of the Russian monarchy, the army officer corps, one of the dynasty’s prime pillars, finally fell—a collapse that, in light of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, historians often treat as inevitable. The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856–1917 contests this assumption. By expanding our view of the Imperial Russian Army to include the experience of the enlisted ranks, Roger R. Reese reveals that the soldier’s revolt in 1917 was more social revolution than anti-war movement—and a revolution based on social distinctions within the officer corps as well as between the ranks. Reese’s account begins in the aftermath of the Crimean War, when the emancipation of the serfs and consequent introduction of universal military service altered the composition of the officer corps as well as the relationship between officers and soldiers. More catalyst than cause, World War I exacerbated a pervasive discontent among soldiers at their ill treatment by officers, a condition that reached all the way back to the founding of the Russian army by Peter I. It was the officers’ refusal to change their behavior toward the soldiers and each other over a fifty-year period, Reese argues, capped by their attack on the Provisional Government in 1917, that fatally weakened the officer corps in advance of the Bolshevik seizure of power. As he details the evolution of Russian Imperial Army over that period, Reese explains its concrete workings—from the conscription and discipline of soldiers to the recruitment and education of officers to the operation of unit economies, honor courts, and wartime reserves. Marshaling newly available materials, his book corrects distortions in both Soviet and Western views of the events of 1917 and adds welcome nuance and depth to our understanding of a critical turning point in Russian history.
Download or read book Imperial Russia written by Jane Burbank and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-22 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On the basis of the work presented here, one can say that the future of American scholarship on imperial Russia is in good hands." —American Historial Review " . . . innovative and substantive research . . . " —The Russian Review "Anyone wishing to understand the 'state of the field' in Imperial Russian history would do well to start with this collection." —Theodore W. Weeks, H-Net Reviews "The essays are impressive in terms of research conceptualization, and analysis." —Slavic Review Presenting the results of new research and fresh approaches, the historians whose work is highlighted here seek to extend new thinking about the way imperial Russian history is studied and taught. Populating their essays are a varied lot of ordinary Russians of the 18th and 19th centuries, from a luxury-loving merchant and his extended family to reform-minded clerics and soldiers on the frontier. In contrast to much of traditional historical writing on Imperial Russia, which focused heavily on the causes of its demise, the contributors to this volume investigate the people and institutions that kept Imperial Russia functioning over a long period of time.
Download or read book Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia written by Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier's mix of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic peoples. The immediate catalyst of the events that Agnes Nilufer Kefeli chronicles in Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia was the collective turn to Islam by many of the region's Krashens, the Muslim and animist Tatars who converted to Russian Orthodoxy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.The traditional view holds that the apostates had really been Muslim all along or that their conversions had been forced by the state or undertaken voluntarily as a matter of convenience. In Kefeli’s view, this argument vastly oversimplifies the complexity of a region where many participated in the religious cultures of both Islam and Orthodox Christianity and where a vibrant Krashen community has survived to the present. By analyzing Russian, Eurasian, and Central Asian ethnographic, administrative, literary, and missionary sources, Kefeli shows how traditional education, with Sufi mystical components, helped to Islamize Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples in the Kama-Volga countryside and set the stage for the development of modernist Islam in Russia.Of particular interest is Kefeli’s emphasis on the role that Tatar women (both Krashen and Muslim) played as holders and transmitters of Sufi knowledge. Today, she notes, intellectuals and mullahs in Tatarstan seek to revive both Sufi and modernist traditions to counteract new expressions of Islam and promote a purely Tatar Islam aware of its specificity in a post-Christian and secular environment.
Download or read book Imperial Russian Foreign Policy written by Hugh Ragsdale and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-10-29 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Russian Foreign Policy aims to demythologise a field hitherto dominated by suspicions of diabolical cunning, inscrutable motives, and international plots using unseen forces of the gigantic, fear-inspiring empire of the tsar. The contributors, leading historians from both Russia and the West, examine Imperial foreign policy from its origins to the October Revolution, revealing a policy that, as in other countries, had a complex of motives - commerce, nationalism, the interests of various social groups - but an unusual origin, coming almost exclusively from the entourage of the tsar. The work is based largely on original research in Soviet archives, which only became possible after Soviet glasnost.
Download or read book Of Religion and Empire written by Robert P. Geraci and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building, with geographic coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska.
Download or read book Unmaking Imperial Russia written by Serhii Plokhy and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unmaking Imperial Russia examines Hrushevsky's construction of a new historical paradigm that brought about the nationalization of the Ukrainian past and established Ukrainian history as a separate field of study.
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 Russian Eurasianism written by Marlène Laruelle and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been marginalized at the edge of a Western-dominated political and economic system. In recent years, however, leading Russian figures, including former president Vladimir Putin, have begun to stress a geopolitics that puts Russia at the center of a number of axes: European-Asian, Christian-Muslim-Buddhist, Mediterranean-Indian, Slavic-Turkic, and so on. This volume examines the political presuppositions and expanding intellectual impact of Eurasianism, a movement promoting an ideology of Russian-Asian greatness, which has begun to take hold throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Eurasianism purports to tell Russians what is unalterably important about them and why it can only be expressed in an empire. Using a wide range of sources, Marlène Laruelle discusses the impact of the ideology of Eurasianism on geopolitics, interior policy, foreign policy, and culturalist philosophy.
Download or read book The Imperial Sublime written by Harsha Ram and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2006-03-31 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme simultaneous with the evolution of Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840—the century during which poets defined the main questions facing Russian literature and society. Harsha Ram shows how imperial ideology became implicated in an unexpectedly wide range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style, and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and the ruling monarch.
Download or read book Russian Citizenship written by Eric Lohr and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book to trace the Russian state’s citizenship policy throughout its history, Lohr argues that to understand the citizenship dilemmas Russia faces today, we must return to the less xenophobic and isolationist pre-Stalin period—before the drive toward autarky after 1914 eventually sealed the state off from Europe.
Download or read book The Ukrainian Question written by Alexei Miller and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.
Download or read book Tatar Empire written by Danielle Ross and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1700s, Kazan Tatar (Muslim scholars of Kazan) and scholarly networks stood at the forefront of Russia's expansion into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. It was there that the Tatars worked with Russian agents, established settlements, and spread their own religious and intellectual cuture that helped shaped their identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kazan Tatars profited economically from Russia's commercial and military expansion to Muslim lands and began to present themselves as leaders capable of bringing Islamic modernity to the rest of Russia's Muslim population. Danielle Ross bridges the history of Russia's imperial project with the history of Russia's Muslims by exploring the Kazan Tatars as participants in the construction of the Russian empire. Ross focuses on Muslim clerical and commercial networks to reconstruct the ongoing interaction among Russian imperial policy, nonstate actors, and intellectual developments within Kazan's Muslim community and also considers the evolving relationship with Central Asia, the Kazakh steppe, and western China. Tatar Empire offers a more Muslim-centered narrative of Russian empire building, making clear the links between cultural reformism and Kazan Tatar participation in the Russian eastward expansion.
Download or read book Russian Peasants Go to Court written by Jane Burbank and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... will challenge (and should transform) existing interpretations of late Imperial Russian governance, peasant studies, and Russian legal history." -- Cathy A. Frierson "... a major contribution to our understanding both of the dynamic of change within the peasantry and of legal development in late Imperial Russia." -- William G. Wagner Russian Peasants Go to Court brings into focus the legal practice of Russian peasants in the township courts of the Russian empire from 1905 through 1917. Contrary to prevailing conceptions of peasants as backward, drunken, and ignorant, and as mistrustful of the state, Jane Burbank's study of court records reveals engaged rural citizens who valued order in their communities and made use of state courts to seek justice and to enforce and protect order. Through narrative studies of individual cases and statistical analysis of a large body of court records, Burbank demonstrates that Russian peasants made effective use of legal opportunities to settle disputes over economic resources, to assert personal dignity, and to address the bane of small crimes in their communities. The text is enhanced by contemporary photographs and lively accounts of individual court cases.
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 Russian Journal written by Andrea Lee and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A subtly crafted reflection of both the bleak and golden shadings of Russian life . . . Its tones belong more to the realm of poetry than journalism.” –The New York Times Book Review At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters–and the book that launched Lee’s career as a writer–Russian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic. “[Lee] takes us wherever she is, conveying a feeling of place and atmosphere that is the mark of real talent.” –The Washington Post Book World “A book of very great charm . . . [Lee] records what she saw and heard with unassuming delicacy and exactness.” –Newsweek
