A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917: v. 1

A Social History of Imperial Russia is the first general synthesis of Russian social history from Peter the Great to the October Revolution of 1917. Boris Mironov begins with background information on pre-Petrine Russia and then focuses on the crucial events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He demonstrates how social events in this period--including the creation of a modernized autocratic state, the abolition of serfdom, increasing urbanization, and the first stirrings of capitalism--played out in the Revolution, and beyond.