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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Russia
  • Cited by 22
  • Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917
  • Edited by Dominic Lieven, London School of Economics and Political Science
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
2006
Online ISBN:
9781139055437
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521815291
Subjects:
Area Studies, British History: General Interest, European History: General Interest, History, European Studies, Russian and East European History
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - British & European History
Series:
The Cambridge History of Russia
Information

Book description

The second volume of The Cambridge History of Russia covers the imperial period (1689–1917). It encompasses political, economic, social, cultural, diplomatic, and military history. All the major Russian social groups have separate chapters and the volume also includes surveys on the non-Russian peoples and the government's policies towards them. It addresses themes such as women, law, the Orthodox Church, the police and the revolutionary movement. The volume's seven chapters on diplomatic and military history, and on Russia's evolution as a great power, make it the most detailed study of these issues available in English. The contributors come from the USA, UK, Russia and Germany: most are internationally recognised as leading scholars in their fields, and some emerging younger academics engaged in cutting-edge research have also been included. No other single volume in any language offers so comprehensive, expert and up-to-date an analysis of Russian history in this period.

Reviews

'This book has been published at a time when interest in the Russian state and its society is highly likely to grow owing to the recent series of events relating to Russia's more independent stand in the international arena. The volume will, no doubt, meet the demands of the next generation of scholars for up-to-date views and interpretations of imperial Russia. I recommend this book without reservation, to both academics and students of Russian history.'

A. A. Fedorov - University of Derby

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 23 - Peter the Great and the Northern War
    pp 487-503
  • View abstract

    Summary

    From the end of the fifteenth century to Peter's time the main preoccupation of Russian foreign policy was the competition with Poland-Lithuania for territory and power on the East European plain. Peter's new war was also a surprise because Russian foreign policy after 1667 had been preoccupied with the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean vassal. In Peter's time, from the 1670s to 1719, the population grew from some 11 million to about 15.5 million. Russia's foreign trade grew throughout the century, primarily through Archangel. The final war of Peter's life was in a totally different direction, and seems to have been entirely commercial in inspiration. Peter's dreams and Russia's new position demanded not only a better army and navy, it demanded a new diplomatic corps. Russian culture changed rapidly after about 1650, with knowledge of Polish and Latin spreading among the elite and much geographic knowledge in translation as well.
  • 24 - Russian foreign policy, 1725–1815
    pp 504-529
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The first period following Peter's reign was most conspicuous for the instability of the throne and the resultant inconsequence that it inflicted on Russian foreign policy. Russian foreign policy of the era of palace revolutions, then, had cost the country a good deal and gained it little but unrealised potential influence. Enlightened despotism as a paradigm of modernisation conceived and driven by the state was as unpopular in eighteenth-century Russia as it was imperative. Catherine II discovered early the force of conservative reaction, it spoiled her Legislative Assembly and her plans to improve the lot of the serfs. The notoriously expansionist nature of Catherine's foreign policy underwent decisive changes in the decade of the 1790s. Once the crisis of conflict with Britain had passed, Alexander circulated to Russian embassies abroad his first general exposition of foreign policy.
  • 25 - The imperial army
    pp 530-553
  • View abstract

    Summary

    It was the army that conquered the territories of the empire, defended them, policed them and maintained internal security all at the same time. It was the army that transformed Russia into a great power, for it was the army that built the Russian state. Russia did manage some successful expansion in the seventeenth century, such as the acquisition of left-bank Ukraine. The key element in Russia's transition from military debility to military capability was learning how better to mobilise both material resources and human beings in the service of the army. If it was military success that built up the Russian Empire, it was military defeat that helped to bring the empire down. Russia's great victory over Napoleon seemingly validated the military system as it was and had closed the eyes of many to its defects. Nicholas I was personally devoted to the army, frequently turned to military officers to fill the most important posts in the civil administration.
  • 26 - Russian foreign policy: 1815–1917
    pp 554-574
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During the final century of Romanov rule, Russian foreign policy was motivated above all by the need to preserve the empire's hard-won status as a European Great Power. The only real arena for Russian expansion after 1815 was in Asia. The Vienna Conference of 1814-15 set the European diplomatic order of the nineteenth century. Summoned in the wake of Napoleon's defeat, statesmen of the leading powers and a host of lesser monarchies assembled in the Austrian capital to rebuild the peace. The first decade of Nicholas II's rule was dominated by events on the Pacific. More than in any other era, between 1815 and 1917 Russia was firmly anchored in the European state system. During the eight decades that followed the Congress of Vienna, Russian foreign policy displayed a remarkable degree of consistency and, with two major exceptions in the Near East, and it achieved the empire's principal geopolitical objectives.
  • 27 - The navy in 1900: imperialism, technology and class war
    pp 575-590
  • View abstract

    Summary

    At the turn of the twentieth century the Russian navy was in a difficult position. Traditionally, its main theatre of operations was the Baltic Sea. By 1896, a new threat and a new potential theatre of naval operations had emerged in the Pacific. Between 1876 and 1915 roughly one-quarter of the world's land surface was annexed by the European imperialist powers and the United States. The Russian Ministry of Finance insisted that the new naval construction programme should be completed in 1905, although the rival Japanese programme was intended to reach fruition significantly earlier. As a result of the naval construction programmes, by the first years of the twentieth century Russia had moved into third place among the world's navies, with 229 ships as against Britain's 460 and France's 391. The structure and governance of the fleet and the Naval Ministry were defined by the laws of 1885 and 1888.
  • 28 - The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?
    pp 593-616
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The abolition of serfdom in 1861, under Alexander II, and the reforms which followed, local government reforms, the judicial reform, the abolition of corporal punishment, the reform of the military, public education, and censorship, were a 'watershed', 'a turning point' in the history of Russia. This chapter discusses the reasons and preconditions for the abolition of serfdom. Tsar Alexander II himself was the initiator of the transformations in Russia. Alexander II embarked on the emancipation reforms not because he was a reformer in principle but as a military man who recognised the lessons of the Crimean War, and as an emperor for whom the prestige and greatness of the state took precedence over everything. The weakest link in the chain of reforms was finances, and it was only after the war of 1877-78, against a background of financial crisis, social and political discontent, and terrorist acts, that Alexander II and the government acknowledged the need to continue the Great Reforms.
  • 29 - Russian workers and revolution
    pp 617-636
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The number of freely hired factory workers in Russia expanded considerably in the 1830s and the decades that followed, though mainly in the growing textile sector. With the abolition of serfdom, the way was open in Russia to new spurts of industrial growth, a modest one in the 1870s and early 1880s, and a major one in the 1890s. Labour unrest among industrial workers began to be taken more seriously by Russian officials, publicists, and political activists of all stripes only in the 1870s. From 1872 until the fall of the tsarist regime some forty-five years later, the interaction between workers and members of the radical intelligentsia would be a central element in the evolution of the revolutionary movement in Russia. By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonising competition for worker allegiance had begun between radicals of various persuasions, liberals, social and religious organisations, and the government, for working-class political support.
  • 30 - Police and revolutionaries
    pp 637-654
  • View abstract

    Summary

    As the close association between government and educated public began to break down, in the 1840s, increased European influences and the wave of European revolutions in 1848, the police sought to maintain the status quo, driving into internal or external exile prominent intellectuals like Alexander Herzen and Fedor Dostoevsky. In 1866 in the midst of the Great Reforms, which created an independent judiciary and institutions of local self-government, a terrorist attempt against Alexander II led to minor police reforms: the creation of a forty-man security force to protect the emperor and of special bureaus for security policing and regular criminal investigation. The Police Department co-ordinated the information sent in from provincial gendarme stations, mail interception offices and the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and in Paris. A court security police report spoke of a 'food crisis', and on 1917 the Petrograd security bureau warned of coming hunger riots that could lead to 'the most horrible kind of anarchistic revolution'.
  • 31 - War and revolution, 1914–1917
    pp 655-669
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter outlines Russia's involvement in the First World War, concentrating on the specific ways in which it caused the end of the old regime. It focuses on explaining the more specific political end point of regime change when the tsar abdicated and representatives of the national parliament, in consultation with representatives of worker and soldier councils, formed a new provisional government. The first proximate cause, the bread shortage in Petrograd, is inextricably linked to a larger question about the significance of relative Russian economic backwardness as an underlying cause of the revolution. Patriotic motives much less equivocally lay at the core of an explanation of the actions of the army commanders during the February crisis. The crucial turning point in the rise of the political opposition was the abandonment of the 'internal peace' and the creation of a united opposition to the government in the form of the 'Progressive Bloc' a broad coalition of parties in the Duma.

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