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National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Hans Rogger
Harvard University Press
This is the first intensive study of the developing national consciousness in 18th-century Russian life and letters. Historians have paradoxically argued a lack of national consciousness in this period both from Russia's backwardness and its imitativeness. As Hans Rogger points out, however, “neither the dearth nor the excess of Western influence, neither too little Enlightenment nor too much French frivolity are adequate formulations of the question for Russia”; and he demonstrates convincingly that the impact of European attitudes was already forcing Russians to articulate a national cultural identity well before the 19th century.
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The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout
An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia
Arcadius Kahan
University of Chicago Press, 1985
In this extraordinary rich and subtle work, Arcadius Kahan analyzes a massive collection of documents which revise traditional interpretations of eighteenth-century Russian economic history. Kahan stresses economic rationality in the context of social constraints, offering the fullest and most convincing explanation yet of the economic foundations of Russia's power. He shows that what have been taken as major failings in the Russian economy were in fact resourceful and even ingenious methods of circumventing deeply rooted structural obstacles to change. Kahan also escapes two extremes that have bedeviled Russian historians since the nineteenth century: he avoids depicting the state as an autonomous structure that acted with impunity upon a passive society, and he refutes the notion of the state as a mere instrument for advancing selfish class interests.
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