Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias PDF Download

Author: W. Bruce Lincoln
Publisher: Midland Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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**** The Indiana U. Press edition (1978) is cited in BCL3. A scholarly biography that provides a view of Russian autocracy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Cathy A. Frierson
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Rural fires were an even more persistent scourge than famine in late imperial Russia, as Cathy Frierson shows in this first comprehensive study. Destroying almost three billion rubles’ worth of property in European Russia between 1860 and 1904, accidental and arson fires acted as a brake on Russia’s economic development while subjecting peasants to perennial shocks to their physical and emotional condition. The fire question captured the attention of educated, progressive Russians, who came to perceived it as a key obstacle to Russia’s becoming a modern society in the European model. Using sources ranging from literary representations and newspaper articles to statistical tables and court records, Frierson demonstrates the many meanings fire held for both peasants and the educated elite. To peasants, it was an essential source of light and warmth as well as a destructive force that regularly ignited their cramped villages of wooden, thatch-roofed huts. Absent the rule of law, they often used arson to gain justice or revenge, or to exert social control over those who would violate village norms. Frierson shows that the vast majority of arson cases in European Russia were not peasant-against-gentry acts of protest but peasant-against-peasant acts of "self-help" law or plain spite. Both the state and individual progressives set out to resolve the fire question and to educate, cajole, or coerce the peasantry into the modern world. Fire insurance, building codes, "scientific" village layouts, and volunteer firefighting brigades reduced the average number of buildings consumed in each blaze, but none of these measures succeeded in curbing the number of fires each year. More than anything else, this history of fire and arson in rural European Russia is a history of their cultural meanings in the late imperial campaign for modernity. Frierson shows the special associations of women with fire in rural life and in elite understanding of fire in the Russian countryside. Her study of the fire question demonstrates both peasant agency in fighting fire and educated Russians' hardening conviction that peasants stood in the way of Russia's advent into the company of prosperous, rational, civilized nations.

Author: Vincent Cronin
Publisher: Harvill Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Catherine the Great was one of the most remarkable women in history. Born in 1729 into the family of one of the lesser princelings of Germany, she was married to the heir to the Russian throne at the age of 16. The marriage was an unhappy one and Catherine was banished from her husband's palace but, when Peter came to the throne and was then ousted from it in the space of a few months, it was Catherine who replaced him and became Empress. She ruled her vast domain for more than thirty years, until her death in 1796, and greatly expanded its territories. In her lifetime and since she has been infamous for her intrigues, her possible involvement in political murders, including that of her dethroned husband, and her numerous love affairs. Vincent Cronin's highly readable biography sifts the facts from the legends in Catherine's extraordinary life.

Author: W. Bruce Lincoln
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 888

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Author: Henry Norman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Caucasus
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Author: Dominic Lieven
Publisher: Random House (UK)
ISBN: 9780712660396
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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This portrait of the last Tsar tells the story of the family man, the father of the haemophiliac heir, the protector of Rasputin, and the victim of the infamous murder at Ekaterinburg in 1918. It also considers Nicholas as political leader and emperor. It presents a view of him very different from the one generally held in the West and portrays the old regime's collapse and the origins of Bolshevik Russia in a new light.

Author: Elaine Feinstein
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307424820
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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In this definitive biography of the legendary Russian poet, Elaine Feinstein draws on a wealth of newly available material–including memoirs, letters, journals, and interviews with surviving friends and family–to produce a revelatory portrait of both the artist and the woman.Anna Akhmatova rose to fame in the years before World War I, but she would pay a heavy price for the political and personal passions that informed her brilliant poetry. In Anna of All the Russias we see Akhmatova's work banned from 1925 until 1940 and again after World War II. We see her steadfast opposition to Stalin, even while her son was held in the Gulag. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich, and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression. And we see how, through everything, Akhmatova continued to write, her poetry giving voice to the Russian people by whom she was, and still is, deeply loved.

Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 159463453X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Author: Henry Norman
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9781330201268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Excerpt from All the Russias: Travels and Studies in Contemporary European Russia, Finland, Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia This volume is the outcome of fifteen years' interest in Russian affairs, culminating in four journeys - one of nearly 20,000 miles - in European and Asiatic Russia. In the course of these, besides a residence of some time in St. Petersburg and visits to the principal cities, I travelled in Finland, in Siberia as far as Lake Baikal (I had previously been to Vladivostok), in the Caucasus, and in Central Asia as far as the frontier of Kashgar. During all these journeys I was afforded opportunities of seeing and investigating every matter that interested me, and of making the acquaintance of the chief Russian administrators in every part. Indeed, official courtesy went so far as to convey me, by a special train and a special steamer, to places I could not otherwise have seen, and to provide for my safety on another occasion by an escort of Cossacks. In case the reader may wonder how, without a mastery of the Russian language, I held the conversations and made the inquiries here described, I may say that during my chief journeys I took with me as interpreter a young Russian gentleman, a student of law at the University of Moscow, whose knowledge and intelligent sympathy were of the greatest service to me. Without such help, or the ability to speak Russian fluently, a journey for any serious purpose in Russia outside the two capitals would be a waste of time. 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.

Author: Peter Baker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743281799
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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In the tradition of Hedrick Smith's The Russians, Robert G. Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power, and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb comes an eloquent and eye-opening chronicle of Vladimir Putin's Russia, from this generation's leading Moscow correspondents. With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, a childhood hooligan turned KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, resolved to bring an end to the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to reveal the culmination of Project Putin, the secret plot to reconsolidate power in the Kremlin. During their four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through the key moments of his tenure that re-centralized power into his hands, from his decision to take over Russia's only independent television network to the Moscow theater siege of 2002 to the "managed democracy" elections of 2003 and 2004 to the horrific slaughter of Beslan's schoolchildren in 2004, recounting a four-year period that has changed the direction of modern Russia. But the authors also go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encountered -- both those who have prospered and those barely surviving -- and show how the political flux has shaped individual lives. Opening a window to a country on the brink, where behind the gleaming new shopping malls all things Soviet are chic again and even high school students wonder if Lenin was right after all, Kremlin Rising features the personal stories of Russians at all levels of society, including frightened army deserters, an imprisoned oil billionaire, Chechen villagers, a trendy Moscow restaurant king, a reluctant underwear salesman, and anguished AIDS patients in Siberia. With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putin's insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling new revelations about Russia's leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land that he is building. As the first major book on Russia in years, it is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the country and promises to shape the debate about Russia, its uncertain future, and its relationship with the United States.