The Russian Empire 1450–1801

Making a statement of imperial power in architecture as Russia moved westward in the late seventeenth century was more difficult ...

charismatic and untouchable. In Muscovy there were no written or legally binding traditions of participation by the people or el ...

internecine struggles and territorial splintering. Moscow, however, benefited from biological accident: from 1328 to 1425 a sole ...

Neutralizing collateral dynastic kin did not eliminate struggles around succession within the court elite, but there were relati ...

and mounted a public procession to beseech him to take the position. Only then did Boris, legitimized by mass consensus, take th ...

the Kremlin, Michael Romanov instituted the ritual, thereafter standard, of bring- ing the empire’s entire populace to swear an ...

Figure 6.8 An illustrated book of 1673 depicts the 1613 election and coronation of the new Romanov dynasty; here the thousands c ...

to produce a male heir, reignited tensions and by autumn boyar clans had read the handwriting on the wall. Avoiding violence, th ...

Giorgio Agamben. They have theorized that“sacred violence”is the exclusive right of sovereigns (or sovereign states) to wield vi ...

ruler (no assassination attempts in Russian history until Peter I), since the elite rightly feared competition among themselves, ...

empire-wide institutions. From the power of an abstract imaginary we turn to the power of the knout, the army, and the bureaucra ...

On the interior decoration of Byzantine cathedrals, see Otto Demus,Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byz ...

nach St. Petersburg: Das russische Reich im 17. Jahrhundert,inForschungen zur osteuro- païschen Geschichte56 (2000): 167–85 and ...

Ukrainian Studies28 (2006): 521–42, and his“The Privy Domain of Ivan Vasil’evich,” in Dunning, Martin, and Rowland, eds.,Rude &a ...

7 The State Wields its Power Early modern Eurasian empires were capable offlexing their power across the realm. But in doing so, ...

necessary to pursue their goals. Despite the challenges of size and dearth of personnel, early modern empires deployed their pow ...

Volga and Bashkiria; when organized rebellion broke out, as in the Stepan Razin (1670–1) and Emelian Pugachev (1773–5) uprisings ...

Manning fortress lines and settling new frontier areas often required forcible population movement of servitors and of peasants ...

at the point of a gun; in the center, where peasants and townsmen had been paying taxes for centuries, the actual collection was ...

Ustiuzhna-Zheleznopol’skaia, Astrakhan, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan, and Kaluga. A river voyage from Moscow to Astrakhan could be do ...