Political Ideas And Institutions In Imperial Russia

Marc Raeff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000307214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Credits
• Introduction
• ONE Russia After the Emancipation: Views of a Gentleman-Farmer
• TWO A Reactionary Liberal: M. N. Katkov
• THREE Some Reflections on Russian Liberalism
• FOUR Russian Youth on the Eve of Romanticism: Andrei I. Turgenev and His Circle
• FIVE At the Origins of a Russian National Consciousness: Eighteenth Century Roots and Napoleonic Wars
• SIX The Russian Autocracy and Its Officials
• SEVEN Introduction to Plans For Political Reform in Imperial Russia, 1730-1905
• EIGHT Russia's Autocracy and Paradoxes of Modernization
• NINE Patterns of Russian Imperial Policy Toward the Nationalities
• TEN Uniformity, Diversity, and the Imperial Administration in the Reign of Catherine II
• ELEVEN In the Imperial Manner
• TWELVE The Domestic Policies of Peter III and His Overthrow
• THIRTEEN The Empress and the Vinerian Professor: Catherine II's Projects of Government Reforms and Blackstone's Commentaries
• FOURTEEN Pugachev's Rebellion
• FIFTEEN State and Nobility in the Ideology of M. M. Shcherbatov
• SIXTEEN Muscovy Looks West
• SEVENTEEN The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment
• EIGHTEEN The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach
• NINETEEN Transfiguration and Modernization: The Paradoxes of Social Disciplining, Paedagogical Leadership, and the Enlightenment in 18th Century Russia
• TWENTY Literacy, Education, and the State in 17th-18th Century Europe
• Marc Raeff: A Bibliography (1946-1993), compiled by Molly Molloy and Edward Kasinec
• About the Book and Author