ABSTRACT
The amazing thing about nineteenth-century Russia is that the country changed so much while remaining fundamentally the same, with old problems left unresolved. During the course of the century Russian culture would flourish, serfdom would be abolished, and major reforms would overhaul the legal system and rural government. Economic development would make the empire the world’s fifth-largest industrial power. Yet Russia’s population remained overwhelmingly rural. The peasantry found its new freedom limited by an atavistic web of legal limitations and by wretched poverty. The traditional chasm between the ignorant masses and the educated elite widened rather than shrank, Westernization having created in Russia two separate cultures and societies. Meanwhile, although in 1762 Tsar Peter III freed the nobility from its obligation to serve the state, the autocracy retained a monopoly on power that it exercised through an ever-expanding bureaucracy. Tsarism was housed in an elegant capital city with an opulent court, but Russia remained poor and exhausted from her struggle to match the power of more advanced and prosperous European competitors.
