Tsar Alexander I; Paternalistic Reformer

Tsar Alexander I; Paternalistic Reformer PDF Author: Allen McConnell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description

Tsar Alexander I; Paternalistic Reformer

Tsar Alexander I; Paternalistic Reformer PDF Author: Allen McConnell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description


Tsar Alexander I.

Tsar Alexander I. PDF Author: Allen MacConnell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Alexander I

Alexander I PDF Author: Marie-Pierre Rey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609090659
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
Alexander I was a ruler with high aspirations for the people of Russia. Cosseted as a young grand duke by Catherine the Great, he ascended to the throne in 1801 after the brutal assassination of his father. In this magisterial biography, Marie-Pierre Rey illuminates the complex forces that shaped Alexander's tumultuous reign and sheds brilliant new light on the handsome ruler known to his people as "the Sphinx." Despite an early and ambitious commitment to sweeping political reforms, Alexander saw his liberal aspirations overwhelmed by civil unrest in his own country and by costly confrontations with Napoleon, which culminated in the French invasion of Russia and the burning of Moscow in 1812. Eventually, Alexander turned back Napoleon's forces and entered Paris a victor two years later, but by then he had already grown weary of military glory. As the years passed, the tsar who defeated Napoleon would become increasingly preoccupied with his own spiritual salvation, an obsession that led him to pursue a rapprochement between the Orthodox and Roman churches. When in exile, Napoleon once remarked of his Russian rival: "He could go far. If I die here, he will be my true heir in Europe." It was not to be. Napoleon died on Saint Helena and Alexander succumbed to typhus four years later at the age of forty-eight. But in this richly nuanced portrait, Rey breathes new life into the tsar who stood at the center of the political chessboard of early nineteenth-century Europe, a key figure at the heart of diplomacy, war, and international intrigue during that region's most tumultuous years.

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I PDF Author: Patrick O’Meara
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1788315677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The reign of Alexander I was a pivotal moment in the construction of Russia's national mythology. This work examines this crucial period focusing on the place of the Russian nobility in relation to their ruler, and the accompanying debate between reform and the status quo, between a Russia old and new, and between different visions of what Russia could become. Drawing on extensive archival research and placing a long-neglected emphasis on this aspect of Alexander I's reign, this book is an important work for students and scholars of imperial Russia, as well as the wider Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period in Europe.

The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture

The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture PDF Author: Jay Bergman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019258037X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
Because they were Marxists, the Bolsheviks in Russia, both before and after taking power in 1917, believed that the past was prologue: that embedded in history was a Holy Grail, a series of mysterious, but nonetheless accessible and comprehensible, universal laws that explained the course of history from beginning to end. Those who understood these laws would be able to mould the future to conform to their own expectations. But what should the Bolsheviks do if their Marxist ideology proved to be either erroneous or insufficient-if it could not explain, or explain fully, the course of events that followed the revolution they carried out in the country they called the Soviet Union? Something else would have to perform this function. The underlying argument of this volume is that the Bolsheviks saw the revolutions in France in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 as supplying practically everything Marxism lacked. In fact, these four events comprised what for the Bolsheviks was a genuine Revolutionary Tradition. The English Revolution and the Puritan Commonwealth of the seventeenth century were not without utility-the Bolsheviks cited them and occasionally utilized them as propaganda-but these paled in comparison to what the revolutions in France offered a century later, namely legitimacy, inspiration, guidance in constructing socialism and communism, and, not least, useful fodder for political and personal polemics.

Russia And The Soviet Union

Russia And The Soviet Union PDF Author: John M Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000310566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book is a brief, lucid account of Russian and Soviet history from ancient Kievan Rus' to the present day. Equal attention is paid to the early and the modern periods of Russian history. The author has revised this new edition to include the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and its foreign policy during Gorbachev's first five years in office. The text is supplemented with maps and illustrations and includes bibliographies at the end of each chapter. Designed for use by students in either a one- or two-semester introductory course in Russian history, Russia and the Soviet Union will also be valuable to any reader seeking to become acquainted with the story of the Russian people—their tribulations and courage, tragedies and triumphs, and their remarkable contribution to world culture.

Political Ideas And Institutions In Imperial Russia

Political Ideas And Institutions In Imperial Russia PDF Author: Marc Raeff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000307212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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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.

‘Pre-Islamic Survivals’ in Muslim Central Asia

‘Pre-Islamic Survivals’ in Muslim Central Asia PDF Author: R. Charles Weller
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811956979
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
The book traces the conceptual lens of historical-cultural ‘survivals’ from the late 19th-century theories of E.B. Tylor, James Frazer, and others, in debate with monotheistic ‘degenerationists’ and Protestant anti-Catholic polemicists, back to its origins in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions as well as later more secularized forms in the German Enlightenment and Romanticist movements. These historical sources, particularly the ‘dual faith’ tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, significantly shaped both Tsarist and later Soviet ethnography of Muslim Central Asia, helping guide and justify their respective religious missionary, social-legal, political and other imperial agendas. They continue impacting post-Soviet historiography in complex and debated ways. Drawing from European, Central Asian, Middle Eastern and world history, the fields of ethnography and anthropology, as well as Christian and Islamic studies, the volume contributes to scholarship on ‘syncretism’ and ‘conversion’, definitions of Islam, history as identity and heritage, and more. It is situated within a broader global historical frame, addressing debates over ‘pre-Islamic Survivals’ among Turkish and Iranian as well as Egyptian, North African Berber, Black African and South Asian Muslim Peoples while critiquing the legacy of the Geertzian ‘cultural turn’ within Western post-colonialist scholarship in relation to diverging trends of historiography in the post-World War Two era.

Hagiography and Modern Russian Literature

Hagiography and Modern Russian Literature PDF Author: Margaret Ziolkowski
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The heritage of medieval hagiography, the diverse and voluminous literature devoted to saints, was much more important in nineteenth-century Russia than is often recognized. Although scholars have treated examples of the influence of hagiographic writing on a few prominent Russian writers, Margaret Ziolkowski is the first to describe the vast extent of its impact. Some of the authors she discusses are Kondratii Ryleev, Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Fedor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Leskov, Gleb Uspenskii, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, and Maksimilian Voloshin. Such writers were often exposed to saints' lives at an early age, and these stories left a deep impression to be dealt with later, whether favorably or otherwise. Professor Ziolkowski identifies and analyzes the most common usages of hagiographic material by Russian writers, as well as the variety of purposes that inspired this exploitation of their cultural past. Tolstoy, for instance, employed hagiographic sources to attack the organized church and the institution of monasticism. Individual chapters treat the influence of hagiography on the poetry of the Decembrists, reworkings of specific hagiographic legends or tales, and the application of hagiographic conventions and features to contemporary characters and situations. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Information and Empire

Information and Empire PDF Author: Simon Franklin
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 178374376X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Russia was transformed from a moderate-sized, land-locked principality into the largest empire on earth. How did systems of information and communication shape and reflect this extraordinary change? Information and Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 brings together a range of contributions to shed some light on this complex question. Communication networks such as the postal service and the gathering and circulation of news are examined alongside the growth of a bureaucratic apparatus that informed the government about its country and its people. The inscription of space is considered from the point of view of mapping and the changing public ‘graphosphere’ of signs and monuments. More than a series of institutional histories, this book is concerned with the way Russia discovered itself, envisioned itself and represented itself to its people. Innovative and scholarly, this collection breaks new ground in its approach to communication and information as a field of study in Russia. More broadly, it is an accessible contribution to pre-modern information studies, taking as its basis a country whose history often serves to challenge habitual Western models of development. It is important reading not only for specialists in Russian Studies, but also for students and non-Russianists who are interested in the history of information and communications.