The Russian Empire 1450–1801

across the century. Nevertheless from the 1730s Russia began to limit the register of Sloboda Cossacks, push lesser Cossacks int ...

and artsflourished here, particularly Polish-influenced baroque architecture in cathedrals, town halls, and noble estates. Its U ...

Hetmanate and stands as a sharp contrast to the Russian empire’s inability to codify its own laws despite efforts by Peter I and ...

remained the norm, under the influence of Polish property laws, and communities relied on communal institutions to regulate acce ...

intellectuals, some of whom served in St. Petersburg. Left Bank Ukraine produced many fine writers, dramatists, and historians, ...

elites, émigré Russian noblemen, and religious institutions, continued in the baroque manner popular in Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s tim ...

into the regular army. With the outbreak of war with the Ottoman empire in 1787 and Sweden in 1788, conscription of all taxpayer ...

political power and institutions) those of the Polish nobility, local boards ennobled upwards of 25,000 Cossacks and Ruthenian g ...

overseas colonies with European emigrants. Catherine II was as aggressively popu- lationist as her European counterparts. Starti ...

often cited as the last major Crimean Tatar raid into the southern borderlands of Russia, Crimean slave emporia continued to be ...

led by a governor from a leading family and a board ofmirzyand overseen by the Russian-appointed military governor forfiscal and ...

Under the minimal oversight of a Swedish governor, the two provinces of Estland and Livland essentially maintained their histori ...

policy of maintaining diversity: it affirmed the rights and institutions of the German nobility and reversed a Swedish campaign ...

thinking about the“folk”and the collective spirit of ethnicity and culture. In Riga Herder collected and later published Estonia ...

law, deeming their local laws and privileges sufficient and superior, Catherine II strove to integrate Livland and Estland’sfisc ...

The Duchy of Courland, centered in the peninsula that forms the southern rim of the Gulf of Riga, on the other hand, was an auto ...

disputes, subordinate to a governor-general. At the gubernia level, Russian language and appeals and criminal courts were impose ...

autonomies. The Commonwealth’s Jews governed themselves with a hierarchy of communal institutions paralleling the county and nat ...

Russian authorities and subjects, and their contributions to local economies were not appreciated. Official Russian policy to Je ...

Domestically, the empire had begun to implement a rational, homogenized administrative structure in Catherine II’s reforms of th ...