The Russian Empire 1450–1801

were free to move and land was available, this political economy made sense. Even when Russian and Ukrainian peasants began to m ...

mid-sixteenth century. Communalism was not an organic element of the Russian character, as some have idealistically argued, but ...

patriarch’s wife lorded over younger women in the household; on rare occasions, widows (with capable sons) joined the council of ...

The elders and officials of the commune had tremendous power. They appor- tioned obligations and tasks collectively; they assign ...

AGENCY AND RESISTANCE It was not in the self-interest of communes to resist the state or their landlords; peasants were tied to ...

angry at Russian seizure of their lands or newly imposed taxation or enserfment. None of these rebellions was successful in chan ...

Hetmanate support Russian troops and pay some taxes. As discussed in Chapters 3 – 5, these areas each organized their own govern ...

law, explaining to the Tunguz tribe,“if he had planned this with intent, then he would be killed without mercy. But in an uninte ...

On resistance: James C. Scott,Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) ...

11 Towns and Townsmen Townsmen in primarily Russian towns were not as different from the empire’sEast Slavic peasants as one wou ...

Time of Troubles, such that by the end of the seventeenth century another 110 towns had been created or acquired in territorial ...

with walls and widefirebreaks separating the town into neighborhoods:first the Kremlin, then the“Kitaigorod”trading neighborhood ...

Vladimir, Kolomna-Riazan’). Otherwise, streets were narrow and winding; homes were built inside a wooden fenced courtyard, not f ...

gentry, monasteries, bishops, and other hierarchs—and their“white”neighbor- hoods enjoyed freedom from taxation. Some urban resi ...

Some Russian towns in these centuries had even less of a“municipal”presence, with very fewposadskieand everyone in town engaged ...

ranged across European Russia and reached heights of success and depths of failure. Shorin was the son of agost’and became one h ...

Moscow riot (this time in protest of a new tax that he asgost’was in charge of levying), but his home was plundered. In the 1660 ...

Muscovy’s towns and townsmen from taxpayers togostirepresent in microcosm the diversity of an empire of“difference.”Towns were p ...

12 Varieties of Orthodoxy Empires project supranational ideologies to legitimize their power, often deriving their“imperial imag ...

On the one hand, eastern Orthodoxy is a quintessential religion of the book. It regards its task as preserving established dogma ...