Böcker av Richard Wortman

This new volume from the author of Scenarios of Power explores the effect of the symbolic representations of the Russian imperial government on law, administrative practice, and concepts of national and imperial identities throughout centuries of monarchical rule. Richard Wortman characterizes the monarchy as an active agent in Russia's political experience, one whose dominant role was resisting change until the inevitable collapse facing all absolute monarchies.

The Russian populists were intellectuals who saw the hope for transformation of Russian society in an alliance between peasantry and intelligentsia. They endowed the peasant with their own socialist ideas and in his institutions they saw the embryo of a just future life. Professor Wortman sees populism not as a defined ideology but as a group of shared attitudes and preconceptions.