ABSTRACT
By the early 1800s, the Russian Empire was a huge but economically underdeveloped country, profoundly conservative yet with the first stirrings of revolutionary ferment, powerful militarily but inherently weaker than its Western rivals, and socially repressive despite spreading education and bursting cultural creativity. This chapter explores these paradoxes, focusing in turn on the empire's serf economy, political stagnation punctuated by reform efforts under Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I, the flowering of literature and the arts, the development of revolutionary ideas, and the empire's dominant role in Europe and Asia. Trade and a money economy grew, and the Russian Empire became an exporter of grain and other raw materials to Western Europe. It sketches the picture of what was in many respects a faltering giant: a great empire with endemic structural weaknesses, a socially divided citizenry, and uncertain and conflicting values. The government's slogan of "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality" summed up the ideology of Nicholas's conservative regime.
