M. Curtiss, A Forgotten Empress (New York, 1974), the only book-length treatment on Anna in English.
L. Hughes, Peter the Great (New Haven, CT, 2002), engaging scholarly biography.
L. Hughes Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, CT, 1998), the standard general synthesis of the Petrine era.
A. Lentin (ed. and trans.), Peter the Great: His Law on the Imperial Succession in Russia (Oxford, 1995), translation of important defining political statement, ‘The Truth of the Monarch’s Will’.
E. J. Phillips, The Founding of Russia’s Navy (Westport, Conn., 1995), new interpretation on the origins of the Russian navy.
I. Pososhkov, The Book of Poverty and Wealth (Stanford, Calif., 1987), translation of important writing by a merchant in Petrine Russia.
N. V. Riasanovsky The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York, 1985), overview of rhetorical and historical representations of Peter.
E. A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca, NY, 2004), explores the discursive revolution in Petrine era.
5. THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1740–1801
J. T. Alexander, Catherine the Great (New York, 1989), modern scholarly biography.
E. V. Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1995), important study of key period of state-building.
G. L. Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977), on transformation of the married parish clergy into a social and cultural caste.
R. E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, NJ, 1973), examines the politics of terminating obligatory state service for the nobility.
———Provincial Development in Russia (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984), case study of provincial life and administration in Catherinean Russia.
W. G. Jones, Nikolay Novikov (Cambridge, 1984), standard work on leading publisher and intellectual figure.
J. D. Klier, Russia Gathers her Jews (De Kalb, Ill., 1986), on the formation of the Pale of Settlement.
J. P. LeDonne, Ruling Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1984), controversial attempt to provide ‘class’ interpretation of state and policies.
I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, CT, 1981), comprehensive portrait of Russian state and society in the second half of the eighteenth century.
G. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1985), on the role of state and public in the development of print culture.
M. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1966), imaginative attempt to explain how Petrine servitors became the disaffected intelligentsia.
———The Well-Ordered Police State (New Haven, CT, 1983), comparative study of cameralism and its transplantation to Imperial Russia.
D. L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinean Russia (New Haven, CT, 1975), highly original analysis of clan and politics.
C. Whittaker, Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb, Ill., 2003), on the emerging discourse about monarchy and its legitimacy.
6. PRE-REFORM RUSSIA, 1801–1855
W. L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800–1860 (Princeton, NJ, 1968), on obstacles and achievements of economic growth in pre-reform era.
R. Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804–1863 (New York, 2005), considers how university studies shaped the sexual and political identity of Russian males.
J. M. Hartley, Alexander I (London, 1994), informed, readable survey.
A. von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia (Chicago, IL, 1972), highly influential German analysis of Russian society in the 1840s.
S. L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia (Chicago, IL, 1986), case study of a serf estate in Tambov province.
W. B. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform (De Kalb, Ill., 1982), on the Nicholaevan pre-reforms and the officials who laid the groundwork for the Great Reforms.
———Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias (De Kalb, Ill., 1989), positive, revisionist assessment of the emperor, with clear summary of state policy.
M. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (New York, 1971), brilliant intellectual history of both the age and the progenitor of Russian agrarian socialist thought.
A. M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, Ill., 1997), on political thought in the wake of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era.
D. Moon, Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of Reform (Houndmills, 1992), on the serf question and stability in the pre-reform era.
M. Raeff, Michael Speransky (The Hague, 1957), political biography within the context of Russia’s institutional development in the early nineteenth century.
J. Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, NY, 2007), microhistory of the Bakunin family suggesting a linkage between the personal and ideological.
M. Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews (Philadelphia, PA, 1983), informative study of Jewish policy based on published sources.
E. K. Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier (Princeton, NJ, 1990), on the social conditions of lower ranks in pre-reform era.
7. REFORM AND COUNTER-REFORM, 1855–1890
N. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY, 2005), on the role of Russian sectarians in colonizing the south Caucasus between the 1830s and 1890s.
D. R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), excellent synthesis of urban history in post-reform era.
B. Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools (Berkeley, CA, 1986), on the peasant role in shaping the content of elementary education.
———and J. Bushnell (eds.), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), important collection of essays on individual great reforms.
C. Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002), stimulating study of the role of nineteenth-century Russian painting and literature in making landscape an integral part of national identity.
T. E. Emmons and W. Vucinich (eds.), Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge, 1982), on the composition and role of the zemstvo in the post-reform era.
D. Field, The End of Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), classic monograph on noble and state interaction in shaping the terms of emancipation.
———Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston, MA, 1989), penetrating analysis of two major peasant disorders in 1860s and 1870s.