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A broad, panoramic view of Russian imperial society from the era of Peter the Great to the revolution of 1917, Wirtschafter's study sets forth a challenging interpretation of one of the world's most powerful and enduring monarchies. A sophisticated synthesis that combines extensive reading of recent scholarship with archival research, it focuses on the interplay of Russia's key social groups with one another and the state. The result is a highly original history of Russian society that illuminates the relationships between state building, large-scale social structures, and everyday life. Beginning with an overview of imperial Russia's legal and institutional structures, Wirschafter analyzes ...
"The book analyzes Emperor Alexander I's foreign policy in the years 1815-23, a critical period in the European restorations that followed the victory over Napoleon. It highlights Russia's integration into European society, understanding of European order, contribution to peacemaking, and perspective on what it meant to act in concert"--
Here is the first social history devoted to the common soldier in the Russian army during the first half of the 19th-century--an examination of soldiers as a social class and the army as a social institution. By providing a comprehensive view of one of the most important groups in Russian society on the eve of the great reforms of the mid-1800s, Elise Wirtschafter contributes greatly to our understanding of Russia's complex social structure. Based on extensive research in previously unused Soviet archives, this work covers a wide array of topics relating to daily life in the army, including conscription, promotion and social mobility, family status, training, the regimental economy, military...
How did educated 18th-century Russians view society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality with the monarchical political structures in which they lived? In this study, historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Russians of the Enlightenment understood themselves.
Offering a broad interpretive history of the Russian Empire from the time of serfdom's codification until its abolition following the Crimean War, Wirtschafter considers the institution of serfdom, official social categories, and Russia's development as a country of peasants ruled by nobles, military commanders and civil servants.
A category of persons best defined by what they were not, the raznochintsy--"people of various ranks" or "people of diverse origins"--inhabited the shifting social territory between nobles and serfs in preindustrial Russia. Neither merchants nor clergy nor military servicemen, they may have been by occupation administrative clerks, teachers, artists, retired soldiers, or street vendors. In official society, they were outsiders. In this first major study of the raznochintsy, Wirtschafter draws on a rich array of archival, legal, administrative, and public sources to show how this important but elusive category functioned in Russian society from the time of Peter the Great to the late nineteen...
This valuable study explores the Russian Enlightenment with reference to the religious Enlightenment of the mid to late eighteenth century. Grounded in close reading of the sermons and devotional writings of Platon (Levshin), Court preacher and Metropolitan of Moscow, the book examines the blending of European ideas into the teachings of Russian Orthodoxy. Highlighting the interplay between Enlightenment thought and Orthodox enlightenment, Elise Wirtschafter addresses key questions of concern to religious Enlighteners across Europe: humanity's relationship to God and creation, the distinction between learning and enlightenment, the role of Christian love in authority relationships, the meani...
The first truly global history of the Napoleonic Wars, arguably the first world war.
Russia has a rich, huge, unwieldy cultural tradition. How to grasp it? This classroom reader is designed to respond to that problem. The literary works selected for inclusion in this anthology introduce the core cultural and historic themes of Russia's civilisation. Each text has resonance throughout the arts - in Rublev's icons, Meyerhold's theatre, Mousorgsky's operas, Prokofiev's symphonies, Fokine's choreography and Kandinsky's paintings. This material is supported by introductions, helpful annotations and bibliographies of resources in all media. The reader is intended for use in courses in Russian literature, culture and civilisation, as well as comparative literature.
This study demonstrates how Russian rightist organizations attempted to resolve the impasse between autocracy and constitutionalism in the Revolution of 1905. It concludes that they mobilized a substantial segment of public sentiment and helped induce the autocracy to reassert its authority.