Imperial Russia, 1700-1861

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The course begins in the early 1700s with the reforms of Peter the Great, which made Russia into a highly centralized, powerful, oppressive society whose nobles grew wealthy and Europeanized while its peasants were reduced to poverty and serfdom. Successive tsars made Russia the greatest power of continental Europe while failing to reform its increasingly archaic sociopolitical order. As a result, the regime ultimately faced a restive peasantry, a radicalized intelligentsia, and deepening economic and military backwardness. The course concludes with the final, vain attempt by the monarchy in the 1860s-70s to stave off revolution by dismantling the system that Peter had created.