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Civil executions in Imperial Russia were punitive ceremonies that were staged before crowds and presaged a sentence of penal labour and lifelong exile in Siberia. Intended to underline the absolute supremacy of the autocracy, they choreographed the public humiliation of the criminal and collective condemnation from the crowds who gathered to witness the stripping away of the rights and entitlements that gave civil life in the autocracy its meaning. Many took place without incident, and followed the ritual of debasement and expulsion endorsed by the state. Yet when at the civil executions of revolutionaries during the reign of Alexander II both convicts and spectators departed from the state's script of public humiliation and orderly opprobrium, the performance of monarchical power and autocratic justice proved liable to subversion. Russian radicals sometimes succeeded in hijacking the ceremony to denounce despotism and proclaim an alternative vision of activism, solidarity, and revolution. In so doing, they contested the autocrat's position as the source of status, rights and, ultimately, of sovereignty. Building on studies of law, punishment, performance, and the revolutionary movement, this article demonstrates how radicals and their supporters recast "scenarios of power" as "scenarios of rebellion". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-nineteenth century pan-Slavic ideology was evident at two levels: at the personal level in N.P. Ignatiev's diplomacy, and at the institutional level in the Slavic Benevolent Committee's activities. Both served to spread Russian influence among the Slavic Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Sultan. The Russian Archives contain a wealth of material related to the Slavic Benevolent Committee and Ambassador N.P. Ignatiev's activities concerning Russia's Balkan policy. The memoirs of the Russian and Ottoman bureaucratic elites also offer great detail on the subject. Relying upon these archival sources and memoirs, this article aims to discuss the transformation of pan-Slavic ideology from a cultural organization into a Russian political asset, with special attention to N.P. Ignatiev and the Slavic Benevolent Committee. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the measures taken by the institutions of state government, the nobility, communities and charitable committees to relieve suffering in Estland during the hunger crisis of 1867–9, examining the share of relief borne by local resources and central administration. Through comparisons with Russian and Finnish famine experiences, it demonstrates that the functioning and efficiency of famine relief were strongly influenced by patterns of landownership as well as political and social factors. Estonian peasants received their share from the imperial funds but these were clearly inadequate to meet their needs. The government not only spared the purse but was also determined to follow the laissez-faire policy of non-interference in markets. The communities were unwilling to provide for the landless and the Baltic German landlords kept aid to the minimum for both farmer peasants and the landless. Institutional responses were shaped by the belief that all able-bodied persons had to provide for themselves, which was hardly possible due to the extreme lack of jobs and the legal restrictions on out-migration from the province. The severity of famine in Estland was a result not of inadequate resources but of inadequate responses, which were shaped by the dynamics of class relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by University of Delaware professor of history Peter Kolchin, delivered on November 14, 2014, at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Atlanta, Georgia, in which he discussed the emancipation of slaves in U.S. southern states during the 19th century as compared to the emancipation of slaves throughout the world, particularly to the emancipation of Russian serfs. He discussed the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, and Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Civil War.

The article offers information on the reforms imposed by government on the judiciary system of Russia. It presents an overview of the challenges encountered in the social relations development and the implementation of legal regulation. Moreover, the other changes done on the judicial sector are also stated.

The article discusses the use of Russian Siberia as an exile penal colony in the 19th century and its connection to Russian colonization of the country's Far Eastern provinces through an examination of the punishment and pardon of seaman and exile Andrei Ivanovich Tsybulenko. Tsybulenko had been exiled to Russia's Eniseisk province but managed to return to the Russian West on board the ship "Dawn" in 1877, and was subsequently pardoned. The author argues that Tsybulenko's case demonstrates the evolving Russian political culture under Tsar Alexander II as well as changes to Russian civil society's perceptions of Siberia from a place for exiles to one that could benefit from colonization. Focus is given to industrialist Mikhail Konstantinovich Sidorov's petition for Tsybulenko's pardon.

This article considers the origins of the Russian obsession with culture. Focusing on the last third of the nineteenth century, when in the aftermath of the Great Reforms of the 1860s Russia experienced a conspicuous expansion of public sphere, I examine public debates in the contemporary press that tackled the question of national culture, deliberating on what it was and whether Russia needed it. Contemporary periodicals demonstrate that the Russian tradition of locating positive identity in culture was originally highly contested territory. Russian culture thrived on debate. What is more, even such prominent makers of the national tradition as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy assumed an explicit stance against culture. The article nevertheless contends that it was precisely this negative take that contributed to the glorious mythology that surrounds Russian tradition today. In the course of the many heated debates of the day, culture became a household word and a familiar marker of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the popular and critical reception of operetta in Russia during its European heyday, which broadly coincided with the transformative reign of Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881). It argues that the genre consistently drew audiences from most social strata and should not be considered, as some historians have suggested, a uniquely ‘bourgeois’ form of entertainment closely associated with the rise of the middle classes. It also argues that operetta crystallized a range of wider concerns about Russian culture and politics during the era of the Great Reforms. Many critics attacked operetta’s frivolity and eroticism (held to be inconsistent with the aims of art), while radicals and conservatives regarded it as symptomatic of a new climate of political uncertainty (the former with hope, the latter with trepidation). The critical responses to operetta thus testified to its popularity and to the rapidity of change in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna made a decisive contribution to the Emancipation of the Serfs through the political battles she waged from 1855 to 1861. Using her position as a Grand Duchess, her salon and her relationship with her nephew Alexander II, Elena was able to provide support and guidance for Alexander's desire for emancipation and for those who wished for real as a opposed to a nominal emancipation of the serfs. Elena's contribution has gone largely unnoticed because the gendered conception of politics in imperial Russia had no place for a woman. That ideology, however, did not reflect the complete reality of politics in imperial Russia which revolved around the person of the emperor both in his capacity as an autocrat and as a man in the centre of a network of personal relationships of which royal women were an important, but unacknowledged, part. Elena's position close to the throne, her exception skills and abilities, and her desire to help the process of emancipation allowed her to take an active part in that fight. She provided an organizing centre for all those on the Editing Commission who shared her view, was able to arrange access for them to the emperor in a context in which he willingly engaged with them on the emancipation, and finally she used her own growing influence over Alexander to ensure his continued support for the Commission and its work. This article in reconstructing Elena's role in the political sphere gives due recognition to her unjustly neglected contribution to the emancipation and broadens our understanding of politics in imperial Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sinister figure of the Russian revolutionary was well established in the British mind by the early 1870s, whilst the terrorist campaign pursued by the People’s Will during the period 1878—1881 entrenched the stereotype still further. At the same time, however, the long-standing Russophobic motifs in British political culture helped to foster a degree of sympathy for the Russian terrorists as fighters against tsarist oppression. The first part of this article examines the reports carried in British newspapers during these years, arguing that although they generally condemned ‘terrorism’ in Russia, there was also a widespread sense that the upsurge in violence was at least in part a consequence of the Russian government’s refusal to embrace reform. Whilst the periodic eruption of ‘Fenian’ bombs created something of a moral panic about terrorism, most commentators believed that the use of violence to bring about change in an autocratic political system was qualitatively different from resorting to terror in a constitutional system where other avenues for non-violent change were available. The second part of the article examines the reception of the books and articles of Sergei Kravchinskii (Stepniak), a former member of People’s Will, who arrived in Britain in 1884. Stepniak made a concerted attempt to persuade his readership of the iniquities of the tsarist regime. He also argued that the use of terror was a natural response to the existence of despotic rule. Stepniak was generally successful at presenting himself as a representative of a national liberation movement, committed to promoting the cause of freedom, establishing in the process a good deal of support for his views amongst a section of British public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Vera Figner was a leading member of the Russian terrorist group Narodnaia Volia [People's Will] in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In her biography one can trace what Eric Voegelin and Emilio Gentile called 'political religion'. They argue that such a political religion is a basic component of mass mobilisation and also plays an important role in the exerting of political violence in totalitarian states in the twentieth century. Vera Figner and her comrades shared a deep belief in the 'Russian people' as a sacralised secular entity. Because of their ascetic conduct of life within the group, they considered themselves as 'moral elite' (virtuosi), able to lead the 'people' to a better future. Within the 'political sect' of Narodnaia Volia the unconditional submission to the authority of the Executive Committee and the resultant political violence against the regime became means to the revolutionary end. Vera Figner continued uncompromisingly in her struggle against the tsarist regime, even after it became clear that there was obviously no chance of success. In her view she had either to prevail or perish for her 'faith'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georgii Plekhanov is often credited with being the 'father of Russian Marxism'. He was not, however, the first Russian Marxist. That distinction belongs to Nikolai Ivanovich Sieber (Ziber), whose dissertation on Marx's economics appeared in 1871, the year before the Russian translation of Das Kapital, and introduced Plekhanov's generation of Russian revolutionaries to Marxist ideas. Sieber's work was then given a prominent endorsement in the second edition of Das Kapital, wherein Marx praised the depth of understanding Sieber had displayed of his economic theory. In view of this, one might consider that Sieber should be regarded as a dominant figure in the history of Marxism in Russia but, in fact, he is seldom mentioned by historians - and, when he is, it is generally cursorily and dismissively. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to examine the interrelationship of Sieber and Marx and to place Sieber's writings in the context of the emergence of the Russian conception of Marxism at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the Russian social policy actions which led to the large-scale demographic shifts of the Caucasus-Black Sea region in the 1860s. An overview of previous mainstream theories regarding Russian cultural repression is given and criticized. An alternative theory is presented, asserting that the Russian social policy in fact a failed two-step system to integrate Muslims into Russian culture through social acculturation and "refinement" followed by the fostering of ethnically pluralistic communities in the region.

The first subject of Russian ethnography was popular religious sects. For the Russian radical movement the experience with sects in the mid-1870s was of equal significance. Many leaders of the radical movement started their revolutionary careers by reading 'ethnographic' literature about the sectarians, went on to agitate amongst the sectarians, became bitterly disillusioned, and later became involved in terrorism. Revolutionary violence was a kind of political and psychological reaction to the mass rejection of the illusions to which ethnographic work had given birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]