ABSTRACT
The support for reform on the part of nineteenth-century “progressives” is reflected in current historical accounts of that period. However, historians have made free use of the concepts of reform and counter-reform in describing historical development over a much longer period, and Russian historians are no exception: they have represented the history of Russia from Ivan the Terrible to Alexander II as a struggle between supporters and opponents of reforms. But was the modern concept of reform one with which the people of Ancien Régime Europe and Russia were familiar? In this study, I will consider how changes, improvements and corrections in eighteenth-century Russia were designated and described by their contemporaries – the changes and innovations that were in the later nineteenth century retrospectively called “reforms”, and so legitimating changes and innovations by inventing historical precedents. Almost all Russian texts from the 1700s to the 1780s shared a conservative concept of “restoring order”. The perception that contemporary morals were increasingly corrupt, and that the solution lay in the restoration of ancient justice and moral order, in part through the establishment of new institutions, became the leitmotif of “reformists” during this epoch.
