The Empire Of The Tsars And The Russians

Between the seventeenth century and the 1917 revolution, the Russian Tsars became absolute rulers of the largest and most diverse empire in the world. The splendor of their court and their capital city, St. Petersburg, was extraordinary, but this imperial edifice was supported by the toil of millions of serfs tied to the land and brutally repressed. The vast majority of the people were uneducated, yet Russia produced writers, artists, and composers of world importance. The Tsars created a mighty army, but it failed them in the Crimea and in World War I. This empire of contradictions was to have a profound influence on both Europe and Asia. Peter Waldron tells the stories of all the Russians, exploring how the vastness of the empire and its extremes of climate affected the lives of rulers and peasants alike. He recounts how Peter the Great and later Tsars built the empire, and describes some of the individuals who worked for and against social change in Russia. Box features on specific people, places, and events and many quotations from Russian sources bring this saga vividly to life. The ten facsimile documents include a 1710 map of St. Petersburg, a newspaper report on the Crimean War, and the announcement of Nicholas II’s abdication in 1917.

Covering more than one thousand years of tumultuous history, Russia as Empire shows how the medieval empire of Kyivan Rus’ metamorphosed into today’s Russian Federation. Kees Boterbloem vividly and lucidly describes Russia’s various incarnations and considers how the concept of empire evolved from tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union, and how and why it survives today. He discusses the ideological architects of these empires and the ideas of their political leaders—the tsars, Lenin, Stalin, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin. Russia as Empire considers the role of the various empires’ inhabitants, from nobility to clergy and communist party members, revealing how and why they adhered to, or believed in, their country’s imperial mission. What emerges is a highly original overview that illuminates the continuities and discontinuities in Russian history.

Russia occupies a unique position in the Muslim world. Unlike any other non-Islamic state, it has ruled Muslim populations for over five hundred years. Though Russia today is plagued by its unrelenting war in Chechnya, Russia’s approach toward Islam once yielded stability. In stark contrast to the popular “clash of civilizations” theory that sees Islam inevitably in conflict with the West, Robert D. Crews reveals the remarkable ways in which Russia constructed an empire with broad Muslim support. In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great inaugurated a policy of religious toleration that made Islam an essential pillar of Orthodox Russia. For ensuing generations, tsars and their police forces supported official Muslim authorities willing to submit to imperial directions in exchange for defense against brands of Islam they deemed heretical and destabilizing. As a result, Russian officials assumed the powerful but often awkward role of arbitrator in disputes between Muslims. And just as the state became a presence in the local mosque, Muslims became inextricably integrated into the empire and shaped tsarist will in Muslim communities stretching from the Volga River to Central Asia. For Prophet and Tsar draws on police and court records, and Muslim petitions, denunciations, and clerical writings—not accessible prior to 1991—to unearth the fascinating relationship between an empire and its subjects. As America and Western Europe debate how best to secure the allegiances of their Muslim populations, Crews offers a unique and critical historical vantage point.

Excerpt from The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, Vol. 1 However sparingly I made use of the latitude left me in the matter of annotation, this addition to the original work threatened to swell the English volume to a more than reasonable bulk. It became necessary, therefore, to have recourse to condensation. This delicate and responsible operation being necessarily left to my discretion, caused me more care and anxiety than all the rest of the work put together. Very rarely, very cautiously and lightly, with a fear on me as of committing sacrilege, I proceeded to abbreviate a paragraph here and there. Not so much by elimination - for it is but seldom that several lines or as much as half a page at once have been omitted - as by persistent compression, on the same principle as a pound of down, when compressed, is a pound still, though its volume is diminished. "What will the author say to this passage? - or this? - or this?" was the test question always present before my mind, and it was my standard that he should not be able to detect the abbreviations at the first reading unless he knew where they were made. After long and careful deliberation, it was thought advisable to depart from the ordinary custom of having but one index for a work of so great compass, and of placing this complete index at the end of the last volume. Every student knows how utterly unpractical and disconcerting such a system is, and will thankfully welcome an innovation which places all the references within easy reach and frees him from the necessity of cumbering himself with a big book otherwise unneeded, not to speak of the discomfort of doing without an index at all until the publication of the third volume, which naturally cannot take place for some considerable time after the first appears. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.