GEOFFREY HOSKING
RUSSIA
PEOPLE AND EMPIRE
1552–1917
Contents
PART ONE The Russian Empire: How and Why?
2 The Secular State of Peter the Great
3 Assimilating Peter’s Heritage
4 The Apogee of the Secular State
PART THREE Social classes, religion and culture in Imperial Russia
5 Towns and the Missing Bourgeoisie
6 The Birth of the Intelligentsia
7 Literature as ‘Nation-Builder’
PART FOUR Imperial Russia under pressure
Afterthoughts on the Soviet Experience
Rus’ was the victim of Rossiia Georgii Gachev
If this book were in Russian, the title would contain two distinct epithets: russkii for the people and rossiiskii for the empire. The first derives from Ras’, the word customarily employed to denote the Kievan state and the Muscovite one in its early years. The second comes from Rossiia, a Latinized version probably first used in Poland, which penetrated to Muscovy in the sixteenth century and became common currency in the seventeenth – precisely during the time when the empire was being founded and extended.1
In that way the Russian language reflects the fact that there are two kinds of Russianness, one connected with the people, the language and the pre-imperial principalities, the other with the territory, the multi-national empire, the European great power. Usage is not absolutely consistent, but any Russian will acknowledge that there is a considerable difference in tonality and association between the two words. Rus’ is humble, homely, sacred and definitely feminine (the poet Alexander Blok called her ‘my wife’); Rossiia grandiose, cosmopolitan, secular and, pace grammarians, masculine. The culturologist Georgii Gachev has dramatized the distinction: ‘Rossiia is the fate of Rus’. Rossiia is attraction, ideal and service – but also abyss and perdition. Rossiia uprooted the Russian people, enticed them away from Rus’, transformed the peasant into a soldier, an organiser, a boss, but no longer a husbandman.’2