The Great Reforms of the 1860s marked the broadest attempt at social and economic renovation to occur in Russia between the death of Peter the Great in 1725 and the Revolution of 1905. In just more than a decade, imperial reform acts freed Russia's serfs, restructured her courts, established institutions of local self-government in parts of the empire, altered the constraints that censorship imposed on the press, and transformed Russia's vast serf armed forces into a citizen army in which men from all classes bore equal responsibility for military service. This invaluable study explains why the legislation assumed the shape that it did and estimates what the Great Reforms ultimately accomplished. The Great Reforms offered readers a vital starting point from which to evaluate the prospects for glasnost', perestroika, and reform in the Gorbachev era.

An examination of property rights reforms in Russia before the revolution reveals the advantages and pitfalls of liberal democracy in action--from a government that could be described as neither liberal nor democratic. The author analyzes whether truly liberal reform can be effectively established from above versus from the bottom up--or whether it is simply a product of exceptional historical circumstances.

Accessible to students, tourists and general readers alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the political history of Russia, but also developments in its literature, art and science. Bushkovitch describes well-known cultural figures, such as Chekhov, Tolstoy and Mendeleev, in their institutional and historical contexts. Though the 1917 revolution, the resulting Soviet system and the Cold War were a crucial part of Russian and world history, Bushkovitch presents earlier developments as more than just a prelude to Bolshevik power.

This book examines the history of reforms and major state interventions affecting Russian agriculture: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the Stolypin reforms, the NEP, the Collectivization, Khrushchev reforms, and finally farm enterprise privatization in the early 1990s. It shows a pattern emerging from a political imperative in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, and it describes how these reforms were justified in the name of the national interest during severe crises - rapid inflation, military defeat, mass strikes, rural unrest, and/or political turmoil. It looks at the consequences of adversity in the economic environment for rural behavior after reform and at long-run trends. It has chapters on property rights, rural organization, and technological change. It provides a new database for measuring agricultural productivity from 1861 to 1913 and updates these estimates to the present. This book is a study of the policies aimed at reorganizing rural production and their effectiveness in transforming institutions.

The Great Reforms undertaken during the reign of Alexander II represented a unique attempt by the tsarist government to restructure virtually every aspect of Russian life, beginning with the emancipation of the serfs and continuing through reforms of local government, the judiciary, the military, education, the financial system, censorship, and other domains. This volume, the work of an international group of scholars that includes historians from Russia, maps out the major landmarks in the conceptualization and implementation of the Great Reforms during the reign of Alexander II and proposes a variety of perspectives from which to view them. -- From publisher's description.

One of the striking results of this new research is how closely reaction and reform were connected. This ambiguity was already inherent in the Polish attempt at reform during the second half of the eighteenth century, and it never entirely disappeared during the times of dark reaction under Alexander II. Therefore, when the Russian government initiated a programme of modernization at the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Jewish stereotypes quickly hardened into anti-Semitism. In the conflict that ensued between reform-minded and reactionary forces, this anti-Semitism became an ideological weapon in which the Jews appeared as the embodiment of change, modernization and uprooted life. Lowe has taken the opportunity of the English translation to incorporate the results of his most recent research, extending the coverage of the book from the earlier version's beginning in 1890 backwards into the eighteenth century to give the whole background to Tsarist Jewish policy and Russian anti-Semitism.

This psychologically penetrating revisionist account of the life and rule of Rusia's 18th-century Tsar-reformer develops an important theme - that is, what happens when the drive for "progress" is linked to an autocratic, expansionist impulse rather than to a larger goal of human emancipation? And, what has been the price of power - both for Peter and for Russia?