War and Enlightenment in Russia

War and Enlightenment in Russia PDF Author: Eugene Miakinkov
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148751820X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
War and Enlightenment in Russia explores how members of the military during the reign of Catherine II reconciled Enlightenment ideas about the equality and moral worth of all humans with the Russian reality based on serfdom, a world governed by autocracy, absolute respect for authority, and subordination to seniority. While there is a sizable literature about the impact of the Enlightenment on government, economy, manners, and literature in Russia, no analytical framework that outlines its impact on the military exists. Eugene Miakinkov’s research addresses this gap and challenges the assumption that the military was an unadaptable and vertical institution. Using archival sources, military manuals, essays, memoirs, and letters, the author demonstrates how the Russian militaires philosophes operationalized the Enlightenment by turning thought into reality.

War and Enlightenment in Russia

War and Enlightenment in Russia PDF Author: Eugene Miakinkov
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148751820X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
War and Enlightenment in Russia explores how members of the military during the reign of Catherine II reconciled Enlightenment ideas about the equality and moral worth of all humans with the Russian reality based on serfdom, a world governed by autocracy, absolute respect for authority, and subordination to seniority. While there is a sizable literature about the impact of the Enlightenment on government, economy, manners, and literature in Russia, no analytical framework that outlines its impact on the military exists. Eugene Miakinkov’s research addresses this gap and challenges the assumption that the military was an unadaptable and vertical institution. Using archival sources, military manuals, essays, memoirs, and letters, the author demonstrates how the Russian militaires philosophes operationalized the Enlightenment by turning thought into reality.

Russia in War and Revolution

Russia in War and Revolution PDF Author: Gary M. Hamburg
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817923667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 770

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Book Description
Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff (1885&–1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905&–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Olferieff wrestles with moral and political questions, wondering whether his own advantages could be justified—and whether, if born a peasant, he might have thrown himself into the revolution. As Gary Hamburg writes in an illuminating companion essay, Olferieff wrote "to understand himself and to record his broken life for posterity" as a privileged observer of a bloody, historically pivotal era.

Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia

Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia PDF Author: Brian J. Horowitz
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295997915
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (OPE) was a philanthropic organization, the oldest Jewish organization in Russia. Founded by a few wealthy Jews in St. Petersburg who wanted to improve opportunities for Jewish people in Russia by increasing their access to education and modern values, OPE was secular and nonprofit. The group emphasized the importance of the unity of Jewish culture to help Jews integrate themselves into Russian society by opening, supporting, and subsidizing schools throughout the country. While reaching out to Jews across Russia, OPE encountered opposition on all fronts. It was hobbled by the bureaucracy and sometimes outright hostility of the Russian government, which imposed strict regulations on all aspects of Jewish lives. The OPE was also limited by the many disparate voices within the Jewish community itself. Debates about the best type of schools (secular or religious, co-educational or single-sex, traditional or "modern") were constant. Even the choice of language for the schools was hotly debated. Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia offers a model of individuals and institutions struggling with the concern so central to contemporary Jews in America and around the world: how to retain a strong Jewish identity, while fully integrating into modern society.

Catherine & Diderot

Catherine & Diderot PDF Author: Robert Zaretsky
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb. In October 1773, after a grueling trek from Paris, the aged and ailing Denis Diderot stumbled from a carriage in wintery St. Petersburg. The century’s most subversive thinker, Diderot arrived as the guest of its most ambitious and admired ruler, Empress Catherine of Russia. What followed was unprecedented: more than forty private meetings, stretching over nearly four months, between these two extraordinary figures. Diderot had come from Paris in order to guide—or so he thought—the woman who had become the continent’s last great hope for an enlightened ruler. But as it soon became clear, Catherine had a very different understanding not just of her role but of his as well. Philosophers, she claimed, had the luxury of writing on unfeeling paper. Rulers had the task of writing on human skin, sensitive to the slightest touch. Diderot and Catherine’s series of meetings, held in her private chambers at the Hermitage, captured the imagination of their contemporaries. While heads of state like Frederick of Prussia feared the consequences of these conversations, intellectuals like Voltaire hoped they would further the goals of the Enlightenment. In Catherine & Diderot, Robert Zaretsky traces the lives of these two remarkable figures, inviting us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.

War and Enlightenment in Russia

War and Enlightenment in Russia PDF Author: Eugene Miakinkov
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487503547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
War and Enlightenment in Russia explores how members of the military during the reign of Catherine II reconciled Enlightenment ideas about the equality and moral worth of all humans with the Russian reality based on serfdom, a world governed by autocracy, absolute respect for authority, and subordination to seniority. While there is a sizable literature about the impact of the Enlightenment on government, economy, manners, and literature in Russia, no analytical framework that outlines its impact on the military exists. Eugene Miakinkov's research addresses this gap and challenges the assumption that the military was an unadaptable and vertical institution. Using archival sources, military manuals, essays, memoirs, and letters, the author demonstrates how the Russian militaires philosophes operationalized the Enlightenment by turning thought into reality.

Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin

Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin PDF Author: Andrei P. Tsygankov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139537008
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Since Russia has re-emerged as a global power, its foreign policies have come under close scrutiny. In Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin, Andrei P. Tsygankov identifies honor as the key concept by which Russia's international relations are determined. He argues that Russia's interests in acquiring power, security and welfare are filtered through this cultural belief and that different conceptions of honor provide an organizing framework that produces policies of cooperation, defensiveness and assertiveness in relation to the West. Using ten case studies spanning a period from the early nineteenth century to the present day - including the Holy Alliance, the Triple Entente and the Russia-Georgia war - Tsygankov's theory suggests that when it perceives its sense of honor to be recognized, Russia cooperates with the Western nations; without such a recognition it pursues independent policies either defensively or assertively.

Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia

Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia PDF Author: Joseph Bradley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674053605
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
On the eve of World War I, Russia, not known as a nation of joiners, had thousands of voluntary associations. Joseph Bradley examines the crucial role of voluntary associations in the development of civil society in Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Russia under Western Eyes

Russia under Western Eyes PDF Author: Martin E Malia
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.

Desolation and Enlightenment

Desolation and Enlightenment PDF Author: Ira Katznelson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552394
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
During and especially after World War II, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war’s devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology, and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West’s moral bearing. In light of their epoch’s calamities, these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. Confronting dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity but also which Enlightenment we should wish to have.

Strategiya

Strategiya PDF Author: Ofer Fridman
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1787387313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In recent years, Western experts have generally portrayed the Kremlin’s actions as either strategic or tactical. Yet this proposition raises a very important question: how closely does the West’s interpretation of Russian strategy reflect the country’s own definitions? While many military historians have sought to interpret Russian strategy, Strategiya takes a different approach. It brings together, in English, the classic works of the Russian art of strategy, which were rediscovered after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead of explaining his analysis of Russia’s contemporary strategy, Ofer Fridman offers his translation of and commentary upon the founding texts of Russia’s own Clausewitzes, Baron Jominis and Liddell Harts, who have been inspiring Russian strategic thinking—both its conceptualisation and its implementation—from the moment Moscow rejected the exclusive role of Marxism-Leninism in strategic affairs. Russian contemporary strategists draw their inspiration from three main schools of thought. While works by Soviet military thinkers have already been translated into English, those by both Imperial strategists and military thinkers in exile have remained almost inaccessible to the Western reader. Filling this lacuna, Strategiya offers a fascinating glimpse inside the foundations of Russian strategic thought and practice.