This chapter provides a brief historical survey of Russian conservative ideology over the past two centuries. It does not purport to reconstruct Russian conservatism as a narrative of conceptual evolution. To be sure, each new generation of conservatives recycled ideological building blocks from the past in order to provide convincing responses to the historical challenges of the moment. However, this chapter emphasizes the importance of the contextual interpretation of conservatism, and therefore depicts conservatism as an ideology concerned primarily with the problem of change, tradition, and cultural authenticity.
While some work has recently been done on native women in Russian America, very little has been written about Russian women and even less about the European non-Russian women who went to Russia’s North American colonies in Alaska—the easternmost outpost of the Russian empire in Alaska—from the western periphery of the empire. This paper is about three such women, Elisabeth von Wrangell, Margaretha Etholén and Anna Furuhjelm, and their experiences as governors’ wives in Russian America between 1829 and 1864. As the wives of governors, these women had a semi-official role as representatives of the Russian empire, which meant that they were expected to contribute to its civilizing mission in the colonies.
The paper aims to understand the experiences of these women as governors’ wives in the light of prescriptive notions of true womanhood and of the role of women in the civilizing mission. What was it like to be a young woman in the most remote part of the Russian empire and how can these experiences be related to the cult of domesticity and the new ideal of womanhood that took form in the nineteenth century? What was expected of them as representatives of the Russian empire and how did they themselves perceive this role?
This article investigates the link between nationalism and liberalism in Russia by looking at the way the leading spokesman of early Russian liberalism, Boris Chicherin, combined liberal ideas with notions of nation-building and the idea of the nation as a modernising phenomenon. The article argues that the young Chicherin, at least in the formative years of the 1850s, had an instrumental approach to liberalism. Liberalism served a specific purpose to integrate the people and shape a community of active citizens so that Russia could modernise. Chicherin was concerned with the formation of a modern nation-state rather than the establishment of popular rule or political rights. In this sense, his thinking fits well into what, in the context of the Ottoman Empire, has been called modernist nationalism.
The Russian Empire had a problem. While they had established successful colonies in their territory of Alaska, life in the settlements was anything but civilized. The settlers of the Russian-America Company were drunk, disorderly, and corrupt. Worst of all, they were terrible role models for the Natives, whom the empire saw as in desperate need of moral enlightenment. The empire’s solution? Send in women. In 1829, the Company decreed that any governor appointed after that date had to have a wife, in the hopes that these more pious women would serve as glowing examples of domesticity and bring charm to a brutish territory. Elisabeth von Wrangell, Margaretha Etholén, and Anna Furuhjelm were three of eight governors’ wives who took up this domestic mantle. Married to the Empire, tells their stories using their own words and extraordinary research by Susanna Rabow-Edling. All three were young and newly wed when they left Russia for the furthest outpost of the empire, and all three went through personal and cultural struggles as they worked to adjust to life in the colony. Their trials offer a little-heard female history of Russian Alaska, while illuminating the issues that arose while trying to reconcile expectations of womanhood with the realities of frontier life.
This paper studies the impact of the Spanish constitution of 1812 on Russian liberals in general and on the Decembrist movement specifically. It concludes that the constitution mainly exerted influence on the Decembrists by confirming their belief that liberty and constitutions were expressions of "the spirit of the time." It proved to them that liberal reforms were possible in Russia as well.
This article challenges the common distinction between a Western and an Eastern type of nationalism with regard to Russian nationalism. Analysing the civic nationalism of the Decembrists and the cultural nationalism of the Slavophiles, it argues that the type of nationalism that appears in a specific country has more to do with timing than with place or social conditions. The article also suggests that intellectual thought should be studied in an international rather than a national context and that the world of ideas has to be granted a considerable degree of autonomy from socioeconomic conditions.