ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century imperial Russia was still dominated by tsarist autocracy. Successive tsars believed that they inherited the divine right to rule Russia without challenge or opposition. It was a country in which opportunities for social reform by constitutional means appeared small and in which hopes of change were repeatedly disappointed. The Napoleonic Wars, however, had allowed a large number of educated Russians, mainly army officers, to gain first-hand knowledge of western Europe for the first time. This brought home to them the comparative backwardness of imperial Russia and the need for reforms.
