Russian Empire

by Hourly History Book 5 in the History of Russia series.

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4.2(417)

The Russian Empire presents the expansion and government of a vast Eurasian state from the age of Peter the Great to the fall of Nicholas II. It follows military conquest, administrative centralisation and the incorporation of peoples across the Baltic, Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia.

The book examines serfdom, reform, industrialisation, nationalism and the relationship between autocracy and the Orthodox Church. It concludes with war, revolution and the inability of imperial institutions to manage rapid social and political change.

Imperial expansion created a state whose rulers governed Orthodox Russians alongside many peoples with different languages, religions and political traditions. Reform could therefore strengthen administration while also stimulating new demands for autonomy or representation. The book connects those tensions with the crises of 1905 and 1917, when war exposed the difficulty of preserving autocracy across a rapidly changing empire.