ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with the reign of Catherine II, focuses on the empress's ideas for improving the effectiveness of her government, and the people's reactions and relationship to the Petrine administration. Archives and libraries in Soviet Russia were inaccessible in the late 1940s and early 1950s; research thus had to be based almost exclusively on published and available documentation. There may be some dilettantism in ranging over many aspects—and most periods—of imperial Russian history. The moderate intelligentsia constituted the core of Russian political liberalism in the last decades before the 1917 revolution, so that its views pointed to the direction reforms had to take if a violent breakup were to be avoided. The book illustrates the application of the pattern, that Russia followed in becoming a multinational empire, in the reign of Catherine II.
