A Social History of the Russian Empire 1796-1917

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research is about persistence rather than change. The object of the work is to present the history of the later Russian empire as a coda rather than an overture. Although it would obviously be wrong to say that there was no social change whatever in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian Empire, the extent of social change was less, and its effect less destructive, than we might be tempted to suppose in the light of the revolutions of 1917. Hypotheses underpinning the research include the following: modes of employment diversified only slowly in the Russian Empire; regional centrifugalism was insufficient to threaten the unity of the empire; although population increased, families continued to operate in traditional ways; education reached a higher proportion of the empire's inhabitants, but still a relatively small minority; neither geographical nor social mobility was increasing very rapidly; 'communality' sometimes took new forms, but continued to prevail over intimations of individuality; belief systems, on the whole, remained backward-looking; and insofar as social change was nonetheless taking place in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia, countervailing official interventions of one kind or another tended to be equal to it. Why then did the Russian Empire collapse? Because it could not cope with the strain of warfare, and particularly with the social strains of World War One. In short, the research centres on the question whether the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917 had a long gestation. It proposes that social revolution was not always imminent in Russia. Although social harmony may not have been much in evidence either, social equilibrium - an equal contest between social change and social control - characterized the greater part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. War punctuated the equilibrium.