Author: Marc RaeffPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Understanding Imperial Russia
Author: Marc RaeffPublisher:
ISBN: 9780231058438
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Examines Russian history from the early eighteenth century until the Revolution, discusses the causes of the czars' decline, and describes the social and political forces in czarist Russia.
Understanding Imperial Russia
Author: Marc RaeffImperial Russia
Author: Jane BurbankPublisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253212412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
"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.
Icon and Devotion
Author: Oleg TarasovPublisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 186189550X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
Icon and Devotion offers the first extensive presentation in English of the making and meaning of Russian icons. The craft of icon-making is set into the context of forms of worship that emerged in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. Oleg Tarasov shows how icons have held a special place in Russian consciousness because they represented idealized images of Holy Russia. He also looks closely at how and why icons were made. Wonder-working saints and the leaders of such religious schisms as the Old Believers appear in these pages, which are illustrated with miniature paintings, lithographs and engravings never before published in the English-speaking world. By tracing the artistic vocabulary, techniques and working methods of icon painters, Tarasov shows how icons have been integral to the history of Russian art, influenced by folk and mainstream currents alike. As well as articulating the specifically Russian piety they invoke, he analyzes the significance of icons in the cultural life of modern Russia in the context of popular prints and poster design.
Understanding Russian Strategic Behavior
Author: Graeme P. HerdPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429537549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
This book examines the extent to which Russia’s strategic behavior is the product of its imperial strategic culture and Putin’s own operational code. The work argues that, by conflating personalistic regime survival with national security, Putin ensures that contemporary Russian national interest, as expressed through strategic behavior, is the synthesis of a peculiar troika: a long-standing imperial strategic culture, rooted in a partially imagined past; the operational code of a counter-intelligence president and decision-making elite; and the realities of Russia as a hybrid state. The book first examines the role of structure and agency in shaping contemporary Russian strategic behavior. It then provides a conceptual understanding of strategic culture, and applies this to Tsarist and Soviet historical developments. The book’s analysis of the operational code, however, demonstrates that Putinism is more than the sum of the past. At the end, the book assesses Putin’s statecraft and stress-tests our assumptions about the exercise of contemporary power in Russia and the structure of Putin’s agency. This book will be of interest to students of Russian politics and foreign policy, strategic studies and international relations.
Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia
Author: Agnès Nilüfer KefeliPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080145476X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 515
Book Description
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.
The Russian Empire 1450-1801
Author: Nancy Shields KollmannPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199280517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512
Book Description
Russia's imperial past has shaped modern Russian identity and historical experience. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys the empire's emergence and governance, exploring how the state maintained control of defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources, while tolerating local religions, languages, cultures, and institutions.
Political Ideas And Institutions In Imperial Russia
Author: Marc RaeffPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000307212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
Marc Raeff is one of the truly outstanding scholars of Russian history. This volume offers a sampling of the best essays from his prolific, forty-year career; they span the history of Russia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. In these essays, Raeff considers the problems of imperial Russian politics and administration, analyzes Russia's intellectual and social history as it relates to the governance of the multiethnic empire, and places the institutional and intellectual history of Russia in the context of other Western and Central European developments. Raeff's essays offer a sketch of the generation that came of age in the era of the Napoleonic Wars and the ensuing attempts at constitutional reform—the generation that laid the foundations of the modern Russian national consciousness. He explores modernization reform and liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, the acquisition and incorporation of Russia's multiethnic population, and the politics and administration of the reigns of Peter III and Catherine II. He examines how the Russian élites assimilated values from the Western and Central European Enlightenment and assesses the important intellectual and ideological effects the Enlightenment had on the nation. The volume concludes with a comparative look at the process of Westernization, focusing on issues of literacy, state leadership, and the role of the intelligentsia. Many of these seminal essays are long out of print and hard to find. This timely volume makes Marc Raeff's insights readily available as Russia reemerges as a nation-state facing "new" challenges that are often deeply rooted in its past.
The Twilight of Imperial Russia
Author: Richard CharquesPublisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1787203093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
The fateful twenty-three years following the accession of the last of the Romanov Tsars formed the prologue to the Russian Revolution, and foreshadowed the motives and mental attitudes of Russian policy today. Richard Charques’s detailed, vivid, and objective account of the reign of Nicholas II is based upon a wide study of Russian and other sources. It is given particular force and liveliness by the portrait gallery of the leading figures of the period; Nicholas II, the Tsaritsa Alexandra, Constantine Pobedonostsev, Sergius Witte, Lenin, Trotsky, Premier Stolypin, Miluikov, and Rasputin. “Striking phrases, fine judgments, flashes of deep perception, flicker through these pages, illuminating the sad, sombre story, which Mr. Charques is not afraid to extend, by implication, into the present.”—Observer (London) “Informative and well written, and the story of the last phase of the Romanovs is...movingly told.”—New Statesman (London) “Mr. Charques writes with great lucidity and elegance; he has also unusual discernment, a healthy sense of historical reality, and a penetrating mind...Scrupulously fair.”—Times Educational Supplement (London) “An uncommonly good book about the decline and fall of the Russian empire—lucid, incisive, well balanced, and extremely well written.”—Chicago Sunday Tribune
Author: Marc Raeff