A Social History of the Russian Empire 1796-1917

这项研究是关于坚持而不是改变。这部作品的目的是把后来的俄罗斯帝国的历史作为一个结尾而不是序曲来呈现。尽管说19世纪和20世纪初的俄罗斯帝国没有发生任何社会变革显然是错误的，但社会变革的程度和影响都比我们根据1917年革命所设想的要小得多。支持这项研究的假设包括：俄罗斯帝国的就业模式多样化缓慢；地区性的离心主义不足以威胁帝国的统一；虽然人口增加了，但家庭继续以传统方式经营；帝国居民中受教育的比例较高，但仍然是相对较小的少数；地域和社会流动性都没有迅速增长；“共同性”有时以新的形式出现，但继续压倒个性的暗示；总的来说，信仰体系仍然是向后看的；在19世纪和20世纪初的俄罗斯，社会变革仍在发生，对这样或那样的官方干预的抵消往往与之相当。那么为什么俄罗斯帝国会崩溃呢？因为它无法应对战争的压力，尤其是一战带来的社会压力。简而言之，研究的中心问题是，1917年俄罗斯帝国的崩溃是否有一个漫长的酝酿过程。它提出俄国的社会革命并不总是迫在眉睫。虽然社会和谐可能也不太明显，但社会平衡——社会变革和社会控制之间的平等竞争——是19世纪和20世纪早期大部分时间的特征。战争打破了这种平衡。

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.