Power abroad has been as important as power within: great power status has long served to legitimize the authority of the privileged and the deprivation of the disprivileged. To be sure, regimes since Peter the Great have also invoked ‘common weal’ (obshchee blago), be it prosperity in the Imperial period or egalitarianism in the Soviet era. But power abroad has been a significant theme, first in ensuring security in the medieval period and safety on an open plain visited by threatening powers, whether the Mongols from the East or crusaders and Catholics from the West. International status became far more important in the modern era, especially after Peter and Catherine raised Russia to the status of a great power in the eighteenth century; the triumph over Napoleon in 1812 then elevated Russia from a great power to the great power, and for the next four decades no European state seemed to wield its resources, could field an army of its size, and could remain immune to the bacillus of revolution. The defeat in the Crimean War inaugurated nearly a century of diminished status, not to be reversed until the Second World War made the USSR one of the two superpowers. For another half-century, at great cost and with diminishing return, Moscow clung to that superpower status, but it all came to an inglorious end in 1991. The Yeltsin years saw a marginalized Russia, barely able to contain insurrection from within, let alone play a major role on the world stage. It was only with the Putin era, when economic growth allowed the rebuilding of the military and reassertion of geostrategic power, that Russia was able to return to the rank of a great power. Whatever fate holds for Russia, I hope that this volume will enable readers to look upon Russia with greater understanding, to dispense with the Cold War (and pre-Cold War) stereotypes that have so distorted our vision and marred our relations with Russia.
GREGORY L. FREEZE
Brandeis University
2009
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
John T. Alexander is professor of history at the University of Kansas. His major publications include Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis (1969), Emperor of the Cossacks (1973), Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia (1980), and Catherine the Great (1989). He is currently preparing a comparative biography of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and a study of the four Russian empresses of the eighteenth century.
Gregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History at Brandeis University. His major publications include The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in Eighteenth-Century Russia (1977), The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (1983), and From Supplication to Revolution: A Documentary Social History of Russia (1988). He was director of the Russian Archival Project and edited the volume on the pre-revolutionary holdings of the State Archive of the Russian Revolution (Fondy Gosudarstvennogo Arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii po istorii Rossii XIX-nachala XX vv. [1994 ]). He is currently completing two works, one on ‘Religion and Society in Modern Russia, 1730–1917’, and the other on ‘Bolsheviks and Believers: Russian Orthodoxy in Soviet Russia, 1917–1941’.
William C. Fuller, Jr. is professor of strategy and power at the United States Naval War College. He is the author of Civil–Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (1985), Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (1992), and The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (2006).
William B. Husband is professor of history at Oregon State University. He is author of Revolution in the Factory: The Birth of the Soviet Textile Industry, 1917–1920 (1990) and ‘Godless Communists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (2000); he also edited The Human Tradition in Modern Russia (2000). He is currently working on a study, tentatively entitled ‘Nature in Modern Russia: A Social History’.
Nancy Shields Kollmann is professor of history at Stanford University. A specialist in Russian social and political history, she has written Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System (1987) and By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (1999).
Gary Marker is professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (1985) and Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (2007). He has co-edited Reinterpreting Russian History (1994) and edited two other volumes, Ideas, Ideologies, and Intellectuals in Russian History (1993) and Catherine the Great and the Search for a Usable Past (1994).
Janet Martin is professor of history at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. She is the author of Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (1986) and Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (1995).
Daniel T. Orlovsky is professor of history at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881 and edited Beyond Soviet Studies (1995). He is currently compiling a documentary history of the Provisional Government of 1917, Russia’s Democratic Revolution, for the Yale series ‘Annals of Communism’.
David L. Ransel is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History and director of the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University. He is the author of The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (1975), Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (1988), Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (2000), and A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov (2009). He co-edited a seminal collection of essays, Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (1998) as well as Polish Encounters, Russian Identity (2005).