ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the country's political and social structure to understand the rich cultural and intellectual life that flowered in nineteenth-century Russia and the forms taken by the political opposition to which that life gave rise. The institution of autocracy in Russia had developed over a long period following the throwing-off of the Tatar yoke under which Russia laboured from 1240 to 1480 and the emergence of the grand princes of Moscow as the claimants to power in the post-Tatar state. It is reasonable to argue that the harshness of the institution of autocracy in Russia was to a considerable extent the product of that long domination by the infidel nomads and the difficulty of conditions in which the Muscovite state developed. Autocracy depended on the support of the nobility. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the nobleman wielded on his own estate an absolute power comparable to that exercised by the tsar in Russia as a whole.
