Russia : people and empire, 1552-1917
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Russia : people and empire, 1552-1917
Harvard University Press, c1997
- : cloth
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 493-530) and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: cloth ISBN 9780674781184
Description
Explores Russian history in light of the dissolution of the Soviet empire, focusing on the building of the empire as an obstruction to the flowering of a nation, which is more important than any other factor in explaining the country's "backwardness".
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780674781191
Description
The Soviet Union crumbles and Russia rises from the rubble, once again the great nation--a perfect scenario, but for one point: Russia was never a nation. And this, says the eminent historian Geoffrey Hosking, is at the heart of the Russians' dilemma today, as they grapple with the rudiments of nationhood. His book is about the Russia that never was, a three-hundred-year history of empire building at the expense of national identity.
Russia begins in the sixteenth century, with the inception of one of the most extensive and diverse empires in history. Hosking shows how this undertaking, the effort of conquering, defending, and administering such a huge mixture of territories and peoples, exhausted the productive powers of the common people and enfeebled their civic institutions. Neither church nor state was able to project an image of "Russian-ness" that could unite elites and masses in a consciousness of belonging to the same nation. Hosking depicts two Russias, that of the gentry and of the peasantry, and reveals how the gap between them, widened by the Tsarist state's repudiation of the Orthodox messianic myth, continued to grow throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here we see how this myth, on which the empire was originally based, returned centuries later in the form of the revolutionary movement, which eventually swept away the Tsarist Empire but replaced it with an even more universalist one. Hosking concludes his story in 1917, but shows how the conflict he describes continues to affect Russia right up to the present day.
Table of Contents
Maps The Expansion of Muscovy in the 16th and 17th Centuries The Expansion of the Russian Empire in the 18th Century Russian Expansion under Catherine the Great Russia at its Greatest Extent Acknowledgements Introduction The Russian Empire: How and Why State-Building The First Crises of Empire The Secular State of Peter the Great Assimilating Peter's Heritage The Apogee of the Secular State Social Classes, Religion and Culture in Imperial Russia The Nobility The Army The Peasantry The Orthodox Church Towns and the Missing Bourgeoisie The Birth of the Intelligentsia Literature as 'Nation-Builder' Imperial Russia under Pressure The Reforms of Alexander II Russian Socialism Russification The Revolution of 1905-7 The Duma Monarchy Conclusions Afterthoughts on the Soviet Experience Chronology Notes Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
