1 - Introduction

Summary

This first volume of the three-volume Cambridge History of Russia deals with the period before the reign of Peter the Great. The concept of the ‘pre-Petrine’ period has a profound resonance in Russian intellectual and cultural history. Although Russia had not been entirely immune from Western influences before Peter’s reign, the speed and scale of Europeanisation increased greatly from the beginning of the eighteenth century. This process was deeply divisive, and its significance and effects were debated in the nineteenth century by ‘Westerniser’ intellectuals, who favoured modernisation, and their ‘Slavophile’ opponents, who idealised the Muscovite past. In the post-Soviet period, as Russians attempt to reconstruct their national identity after the experience of seven decades of state socialism, aspects of this debate have been revived. The pre-Petrine period has come to be seen in some neo-Slavophile circles as the repository of indigenous Russian values, uncontaminated by the Western influences which were to lead eventually to the disastrous Communist experiment. For many contemporary Westernisers, by contrast, the origins of the Stalinist dictatorship lay not so much in the dogmas of Marxism as in old Muscovite traditions of autocracy and despotism. Such views, which have found an echo in much Western journalistic commentary and in some popular English-language histories of Russia, tend to be based on outdated and ill-informed studies. The present volume, which brings together the most recent interpretations of serious scholars in order to provide an authoritative and reliable new account of pre-Petrine Russia, is designed to advance the knowledge and understanding of the period in the anglophone world.