This book explores the long-term reasons for the demise of Imperial Russia, examining the failure of the autocratic state to strengthen its own political position while economic change transformed Russian society. It seeks to explain its debilitating internal tensions and to link these to the pressures exerted by Russia's repeated failure in war and by the empire's continuing expansion. Lastly, it analyzes what led to Russia being governed, only eight months after the collapse of Tsarism, by the Bolsheviks' revolutionary regime.
Waldron explores the long-term reasons for the demise of Imperial Russia and examines the failure of the autocratic state to strengthen its own political position while economic change transformed Russian society.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.
A history and analysis of Bashkiria and its transformation into a Russian imperial region of the course of three and a half centuries. Threads of Empire examines how Russia’s imperial officials and intellectual elites made and maintained their authority among the changing intellectual and political currents in Eurasia from the mid-sixteenth century to the revolution of 1917. The book focuses on a region 750 miles east of Moscow known as Bashkiria. The region was split nearly evenly between Russian and Turkic language speakers, both nomads and farmers. Ufa province at Bashkiria’s core had the largest Muslim population of any province in the empire. The empire’s leading Muslim official, the mufti, was based there, but the region also hosted a Russian Orthodox bishop. Bashkirs and peasants had different legal status, and powerful Russian Orthodox and Muslim nobles dominated the peasant estate. By the twentieth century, industrial mining and rail commerce gave rise to a class structure of workers and managers. Bashkiria thus presents a fascinating case study of empire in all its complexities and of how the tsarist empire’s ideology and categories of rule changed over time. “An original and well-researched study of the incorporation of the Bashkir lands and their transformation into a Russian imperial region over the course of three and a half centuries. Steinwedel argues that the history of Bashkiria exposes a number of the empire’s achievements as a multiethnic society. . . . He draws out both important shifts and abiding continuities in the history of the region [and] by employing a multi-dimensional approach, covering a range of intersecting topics, provides a fuller appreciation for the region. He also does a nice job pointing out the useful commonalities and differences between the Bashkir lands and other parts of the empire, making a compelling case for Bashkiria’s importance for understanding larger processes.” —Willard Sunderland, author of Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe “With its solid grounding in Russian archival and printed sources and its sophisticated comparative approach, Steinwedel’s work will serve as a point of departure for historians of the Russian Empire, and will become a book of reference for any future study of empires in global history.” —American Historical Review “[Steinwedel’s] book is both a skilful exercise in local and regional history, and an important contribution to the history of Imperial Russia as a whole.” —Slavonic and East European Review
Exam Board: AQA Level: AS/A-level Subject: History First Teaching: September 2015 First Exam: June 2016 AQA approved Enhance and expand your students' knowledge and understanding of their AQA breadth study through expert narrative, progressive skills development and bespoke essays from leading historians on key debates. - Builds students' understanding of the events and issues of the period with authoritative, well-researched narrative that covers the specification content - Introduces the key concepts of change, continuity, cause and consequence, encouraging students to make comparisons across time as they advance through the course - Improves students' skills in tackling interpretation questions and essay writing by providing clear guidance and practice activities - Boosts students' interpretative skills and interest in history through extended reading opportunities consisting of specially commissioned essays from practising historians on relevant debates - Cements understanding of the broad issues underpinning the period with overviews of the key questions, end-of-chapter summaries and diagrams that double up as handy revision aids
A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter. In the wake of Russia's "Great Reforms," Nathans writes, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire. Nathans's conclusions about the effects of selective integration and the Russian-Jewish encounter during this formative period will be of great interest to all students of modern Jewish and modern Russian history.
Ò . . . a marvelous source for the social history of Russian peasant society in the years before the revolution. . . . The translation is superb.Ó ÑSteven Hoch Ò . . . one of the best ethnographic portraits that we have of the Russian village. . . . a highly readable text that is an excellent introduction to the world of the Russian peasantry.Ó ÑSamuel C. Ramer Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia provides a unique firsthand portrait of peasant family life as recorded by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, an ethnographer and painter who spent four years at the turn of the twentieth century observing the life and customs of villagers in a central Russian province. Unusual in its awareness of the rapid changes in the Russian village in the late nineteenth century and in its concentration on the treatment of women and children, SemyonovaÕs ethnography vividly describes courting rituals, marriage and sexual practices, childbirth, infanticide, child-rearing practices, the lives of women, food and drink, work habits, and the household economy. In contrast to a tradition of rosy, romanticized descriptions of peasant communities by Russian upper-class observers, Semyonova gives an unvarnished account of the harsh living conditions and often brutal relationships within peasant families.
