|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
This is a comprehensive interpretive history of Russia from the
defeat of Napoleon to the eve of World War I. It is the first such
work by a post-Soviet Russian scholar to appear in English. Drawing
on the latest Russian and Western historical scholarship, Alexander
Polunov examines the decay of the two central institutions of
tsarist Russia: serfdom and autocracy. Polunov explains how the
major social groups - the gentry, merchants, petty townspeople,
peasants, and ethnic minorities - reacted to the Great Reforms, and
why, despite the emergence of a civil society and capitalist
institutions, a reformist, evolutionary path did not become an
alternative to the Revolution of 1917. He provides detailed
portraits of many tsarist bureaucrats and political reformers,
complete with quotations from their writings, to explain how the
principle of autocracy, although significantly weakened by the
Great Reforms in mid-century, reasserted itself under the last two
emperors. Polunov stresses the relevance, for Russians in the
post-Soviet period, of issues that remained unresolved in the
pre-Revolutionary period, such as the question of private property
in land and the relationship between state regulation and private
initiative in the economy.
This is a comprehensive interpretive history of Russia from the
defeat of Napoleon to the eve of World War I. It is the first such
work by a post-Soviet Russian scholar to appear in English. Drawing
on the latest Russian and Western historical scholarship, Alexander
Polunov examines the decay of the two central institutions of
tsarist Russia: serfdom and autocracy. Polunov explains how the
major social groups - the gentry, merchants, petty townspeople,
peasants, and ethnic minorities - reacted to the Great Reforms, and
why, despite the emergence of a civil society and capitalist
institutions, a reformist, evolutionary path did not become an
alternative to the Revolution of 1917. He provides detailed
portraits of many tsarist bureaucrats and political reformers,
complete with quotations from their writings, to explain how the
principle of autocracy, although significantly weakened by the
Great Reforms in mid-century, reasserted itself under the last two
emperors. Polunov stresses the relevance, for Russians in the
post-Soviet period, of issues that remained unresolved in the
pre-Revolutionary period, such as the question of private property
in land and the relationship between state regulation and private
initiative in the economy.
|
|