The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 PDF Download

Author: Boris Nikolaevich Mironov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415608546
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
This is the first full-scale anthropometric history of Imperial Russia (1700-1917). It mobilizes an immense volume of archival material to chart the growth, weight, and other anthropometric indicators of the male and female populations in order to chart how the standard of living in Russia changed over slightly more than two centuries. It draws on a wide range of data--statistics on agricultural production, taxation, prices and wages, nutrition, and demography--to draw conclusions on the dynamics in the standard of living over this long period of time. The economic, social, and political interpretation of these findings make it possible to reconsider the prevailing views in the historiography and to offer a new perspective on Imperial Russia.

Author: Boris Mironov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136315195
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
This is the first full-scale anthropometric history of Imperial Russia (1700-1917). It mobilizes an immense volume of archival material to chart the growth, weight, and other anthropometric indicators of the male and female populations in order to chart how the standard of living in Russia changed over slightly more than two centuries. It draws on a wide range of data—statistics on agricultural production, taxation, prices and wages, nutrition, and demography—to draw conclusions on the dynamics in the standard of living over this long period of time. The economic, social, and political interpretation of these findings make it possible to reconsider the prevailing views in the historiography and to offer a new perspective on Imperial Russia.

Author: Bogdan Góralski
Publisher: Bogdan Góralski
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description
Cyclical climate crises shape the biological life on Earth, including the development and decline of subsequent human civilizations. Favorable climatic conditions cause a population increase within every civilization. Then comes the deterioration of climatic conditions and the internal crisis of civilization that sets the leader. Then comes the conquest of external countries and the development of the empire until its fall, which shape a new empire. The development and fall of subsequent civilizations follow the rhythm of the movements of the earth's coating, what I described in my works. Chinggis Khan's empire was born during the climate crisis in Asia. At that time, favorable climatic conditions prevailed in Europe, and it was in the direction of Europe that the Mongol expansion was directed. In the meantime, between the Mughal empire and Napoleon's empire, a powerful Ottoman Empire emerged, whose development indicates the shift of favorable climate zones from East Asia to the west towards Turkey. The empire developed and fell before the summit of the Little Ice Age that was destroying Europe. Russian Empire developed in almost the same time as the Ottoman Empire, and it collapsed in the internal crisis of the Russian revolution during the east European climatic crisis-see in my work below entitled "Russian revolution and the climate." The Little Ice Age caused an internal crisis in Europe, the expansion of Europeans to other continents, and the rise of Napoleon's empire. At that time, favorable climatic conditions prevailed in Asia. Another climate crisis in Asia is approaching, and I am sure that only the global opening of borders and the free migration of peoples can save the world from the Third World War. The analysis of past revolutions leads to the conclusion that two factors are needed for the revolution to take place: the dissatisfied people and the frustrated intelligentsia driving the revolution. 2 The dissatisfaction of the people comes from not fulfilling basic life needs, and the frustration of intelligence is a consequence of the lack of life prospects in the old social order. The environmental factors (natural and social ) determine the emergence of the revolutionary situation. Natural factors would include, above all, climatic factors - atmospheric precipitation and air temperature, which in the case of Russia, are very variable. They determine the basic social parameters - the size and sexual composition of the population developing in favorable climatic conditions for a given territory. For the revolution to take place, a decades-long period of good climatic conditions conducive to population growth and its masculinization would be needed, followed by a deterioration of this climatic situation and the social situation that was linked to it. In the decades before the Russian Revolution, there were better conditions in Russia (rising atmospheric precipitation) and social conditions (reform of education for Alexander I, release from serfdom and other reforms). The later deterioration of the social situation due to overpopulation and hunger of the land was followed by erroneous actions by the authorities that do not take into account the impact of the climatic factor and destroying the rural communities - сообщество. In the run-up to the revolution, climatic conditions gradually improved, and the apogee of the climate crisis took place just before the revolution. The crisis in Europe and the position of European powers pushing for world war caused deterioration of the internal situation in Russia and consequently accelerated the revolution. To the deterioration contributed the coolings of the climate of 1901-1905 and 1914-1918. (See fig. 24). The European elites, mostly landowners, were bankrupted by the constantly going down prices of grain (from 1830 supplied by steamers from the USA (about 15% of Europe's grain needs)) and only war left to escape from it. Probably it was one of the main causes of the First World War, apart from the masculinization of the European population. The social factor decisive for the revolution is the size of the population able to survive in a given territory. When the population rises to the border value for a given territory, it becomes sensitive to any deterioration of living conditions because the environmental resources available to individual units decrease, and also, due to the population density, social distances are reduced, which increases the level of aggression. Such a deterioration in the life situation of the Russian people uprooted Russian nobility, intelligentsia, and the Jewish community occurred in the period preceding the revolution, ie, from 1861 to 1917. The climate crisis and the lack of knowledge about the real problems of Russian society determined the outbreak of the revolution. Another reason was to stop by the state terror of progressive and positive evolution of the patriotically minded Russian intelligentsia. The victory of the Bolshevik Revolution was also decided by anti-Semitism, controlled by tsarism (?). In the further course of my work, I will try to show that the above factors determined the existence of a specific social situation and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.

Author: Stephen Anthony Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198734824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.

Author: Mustafa Tuna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131638103X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Imperial Russia's Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.

Author: Stephen F. Williams
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594039542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Besides absolutists of the right (the tsar and his adherents) and left (Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks), the Russian political landscape in 1917 featured moderates seeking liberal reform and a rapid evolution towards a constitutional monarchy. Vasily Maklakov, a lawyer, legislator and public intellectual, was among the most prominent of these, and the most articulate and sophisticated advocate of the rule of law, the linchpin of liberalism. This book tells the story of his efforts and his analysis of the reasons for their ultimate failure. It is thus, in part, an example for movements seeking to liberalize authoritarian countries today—both as a warning and a guide. Although never a cabinet member or the head of his political party—the Constitutional Democrats or “Kadets”—Maklakov was deeply involved in most of the political events of the period. He was defense counsel for individuals resisting the regime (or charged simply for being of the wrong ethnicity, such as Menahem Beilis, sometimes considered the Russian Dreyfus). He was continuously a member of the Kadets’ central committee and their most compelling orator. As a somewhat maverick (and moderate) Kadet, he stood not only between the country’s absolute extremes (the reactionary monarchists and the revolutionaries), but also between the two more or less liberal centrist parties, the Kadets on the center left, and the Octobrists on the center right. As a member of the Second, Third and Fourth Dumas (1907-1917), he advocated a wide range of reforms, especially in the realms of religious freedom, national minorities, judicial independence, citizens’ judicial remedies, and peasant rights.

Author: Nancy Shields Kollmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199280517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Modern Russian identity and historical experience has been largely shaped by Russia's imperial past: an empire that was founded in the early modern era and endures in large part today. The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys how the areas that made up the empire were conquered and how they were governed. It considers the Russian empire a 'Eurasian empire', characterized by a 'politics of difference': the rulers and their elites at the center defined the state's needs minimally - with control over defense, criminal law, taxation, and mobilization of resources - and otherwise tolerated local religions, languages, cultures, elites, and institutions. The center related to communities and religions vertically, according each a modicum of rights and autonomies, but didn't allow horizontal connections across nobilities, townsmen, or other groups potentially with common interests to coalesce. Thus, the Russian empire was multi-ethnic and multi-religious; Nancy Kollmann gives detailed attention to the major ethnic and religious groups, and surveys the government's strategies of governance - centralized bureaucracy, military reform, and a changed judicial system. The volume pays particular attention to the dissemination of a supranational ideology of political legitimacy in a variety of media - written sources and primarily public ritual, painting, and particularly architecture. Beginning with foundational features, such as geography, climate, demography, and geopolitical situation, The Russian Empire 1450-1801 explores the empire's primarily agrarian economy, serfdom, towns and trade, as well as the many religious groups - primarily Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism. It tracks the emergence of an 'Imperial nobility' and a national self-consciousness that was, by the end of the eighteenth century, distinctly imperial, embracing the diversity of the empire's many peoples and cultures.

Author: Carol Scott Leonard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113502166X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Few economic events have caused such controversy as the privatization process in Russia. Some see it as the foundation of political and economic freedom. For others it was economics gone wrong, and ended in "Russians stealing money from their own country". As Russia reasserts itself, and its new brand of capitalism, it is ever more important that policy makers and scholars understand the roots of the economic structure and governance of that country; what was decided, who made the decisions and why, what actually transpired, and what implications this has for the future of Russia. This work, written by two senior advisors to the Russian government, has unique access to documentation, tracking the decision making process in the Russian Mass Privatization process. By close reference to events, and supplemented by interviews with many of the key participants, it shows that the policies adopted were often influenced and shaped by different forces than those cited by current popular accounts. The book challenges the interpretation of Russian privatization by some of the West’s most eminent economists. It underlines that economists of all schools, who bring assumptions from the West to the analysis of Russia, may reach false or misleading conclusions. It is an essential guide for anyone interested in Russian economic reform, and anyone who seeks to understand this enigmatic country, and its actions today.

Author: Sylvia Sztern
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030892859
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
This book explores the impact of railroads on 19thcentury Russian peasant collectivism. The mutual-insurance mechanism in a precarious agricultural environment, provided bya structured communal-village system predicated on the reputation and authorityof community norms,is exposed to rationalist exchange—occasioning an institutional adaptation process:the individualization of property rights in land. Spatial-mobility technology animated market integration, specialization, literacy,and human-capital acquisition among peasant wage workers who commuted from their villages.Temporarily rising transaction costs forced the Tsar to concede household property rights in land in the so-called Stolypin reform of 1906.This challenge to the imperial patrimony, powered by the railroads, steered late imperial Russia toward constitutional governance.The spatial-mobility technology gave peasants access to centers of agglomeration of knowledge, changedcognitive perceptions of distance, and reduced the uncertainty and opportunity costs of travel. The empirical findings in this monograph corroborate the conclusion that the railroads occasioned a cultural revolution in late imperial Russia and made Stalin unnecessary for the modernization of the Euro-asian giant. This book highlights the profound effect that the development of the railroads had on Russian economic and political institutions and practices. It will be of indispensable valueto students and researchers interested in transitional economics and economic history.

Author: William G. Rosenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197610153
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 601

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Book Description
Amidst the vast literature on the parties and politics of revolutionary Russia and its near constant appropriation for presentist purposes over the years, States of Anxiety assesses the effects of the great scarcities and enormous losses that Russia experienced between 1914 and 1921, a period of dramatic civil conflicts and Russia's "long World War." Scarcities meant not only the deficits of necessary goods like food, but also their accompanying anxieties and fears. Using archival documents and materials of the period almost exclusively, this study explores how the tsarist, democratic liberal, democratic socialist, and Bolshevik regimes all addressed the forms and effects of scarcity and loss in ways they hoped would assure the revolutionary outcomes of their own historical imaginations. Looking closely at their efforts, it suggests how and why each failed to do so. Approaching the Russian revolutionary period in these terms involves exploring a broad range of connected issues. Material scarcities involved problems with market exchange, prices, and inflation, as well as procurement, production, and distribution. They involved fiscal policies, monetary emissions, and the effects of escalating debt. But they also directly engaged cultural understandings of fairness, sacrifice, and social difference, and were accompanied by what today would be called today the anxieties of "food insecurity," the dangerous risks of unemployment, and a range of fears about family and community welfare. Officials and members of various state and public committees of various political orientations faced both the threats and actualities of market collapse, rampant speculation, black markets, increasingly visible social inequalities, and an array of emotional fields whose implications need to be understood. The statistical and other objective dimensions of scarcity and loss are generally described in ways that omit their complex emotional dimension, as the language of "food insecurity" obscures the actual effects of hunger. While taking into account important recent contributions to a large historiography, new efforts to decipher historical feelings and emotions, and attention to the languages through which events and feelings both were represented and given coherence, this book contributes to a broader understanding of the social and cultural foundations of uprisings and revolutionary upheavals.