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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI 10.1163/187633109X12582063121001 Russian History 37 (2010) 5–31 brill.nl/ruhi 1. Trouble in prison Th e Russian empire in the second half of the nineteenth century was a country of contradictions: so much so that she impressed one contemporary French visitor as “unfi nished.” 1 Its contradictions had various aspects. Th ere was the discrepancy between the dynamism of Russia’s cultural and economic life and the immobility of her political system. Incompatible was the monarchy’s insistence that it control all branches of the administration and its willingness, in 1864, to give the country an independent judiciary. Th ere was a marked divergence between Russia’s “high” culture, fully abreast of Western Europe’s, and the culture of the peasantry, four-fi fths of her population, who lived in a world of their own, resentful of everything derived from and associated with the non-Orthodox west. Th ese contradictions produced in Russia a perma- nent state of tension in which mingled fear and hope and no one could feel confi dent where the country was heading. To begin with the political regime. Russia was the last European country to deny its citizens any voice in government: suggestions of change,
Russian History – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2010
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