Imperial Russia: Power and Society

Imperial Russia was the creation of Peter the Great (1672–1725). It was he who decided to impose on the backward country over which he ruled the modernizing reforms that would enable Russia to occupy a respected place among the European Great Powers. To provide himself with collaborators in realizing this vision of Russian greatness, he created a new cultural elite of landed noblemen educated on Western lines. It was this new elite, called into being by Peter and fostered by the empresses and tsars who succeeded him, whose offspring were responsible for 19th-century Russia’s stupendous achievements in the realms of literature, art, music, and science. Over the course of the two centuries between 1700 and 1900, Russia’s educated elite grew increasingly restive under the tutelage of the autocratic state, and some of its members eventually set about overthrowing the rule of the tsars by revolutionary means—a goal they achieved in 1917. The hypothesis to be considered in this course is that the tremendous flowering of cultural creativity for which 19th-century Russia is remembered was directly the product of the difficult relationship between the modernizing state and the Westernized elite that it had brought into being—between what Russians called “the power” (vlast) and “educated society” (obshchestvo). To explore this hypothesis, we will examine from a number of different angles the evolution of the Russian state, Russian society, and Russian culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. We will look at court politics, institutional and legal history, economic developments, and the system of serfdom that sustained the elite’s material position and social status until 1861. We will discuss government decrees, poems, novels, publicism, paintings, and operas. In the second half of the spring semester, we will trace the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and investigate how and why the Imperial regime abruptly collapsed in 1917. Open to first-year students with permission of the instructor.