ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses power relations and political process in Muscovite Russia and imperial Russia. It encompasses the rise and consolidation of the Muscovite and Romanov autocracies; the recurrent involvement of central rulers, various elite configurations, and nonprivileged groups in struggles to control power and resources; and systemwide processes of crisis, reform, and breakdown in the mid-nineteenth century. The significance of the Mongol invasions is debated in Russian historiography. In the landmark work The Mongols and Russia, George Vernadsky highlighted the close historical relationship between the "Tsardom of Muscovy and the Golden Horde" and showed how Mongol political practices and institutional arrangements permeated the emerging Muscovite state system. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the tumultuous sociopolitical ferment of the Russian masses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a process that culminated in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the revolutionary restructuring of power under Bolshevism.
