Top Highlights

• Until the mid thirteenth century, the economic, social, and political institutions of Rus, as the country was then known, bore certain similarities to those in Central and Western Europe. But the Mongol invasions of 1237, which marked the beginning of two centuries of foreign domination, deepened the isolation of Rus from Western Europe that had be...
• Russia also differed from most European countries in several other respects. The Industrial Revolution, which beginning in the mid eighteenth century produced vast economic and social changes in the West, did not take hold in Russia until late in the nineteenth century.
• Moreover, serfdom, an institution that had largely disappeared in Central and Western Europe by the sixteenth century, became firmly entrenched in Russia in 1649 when a new Code of Law reaffirmed the subservient condition of peasants. Serfdom was not abolished until 1861. Furthermore, the principle of autocracy, long challenged in the West and seri...
• 1832 as the first article of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire (the first volume of the Digest that listed all laws still in effect): ‘The Emperor of all the Russias is a sovereign with autocratic and unlimited powers. To obey the commands not merely from fear but according to the dictates of one’s conscience is ordained by God himself.’ I...
• The steady expansion of Russia to the east, south, and west, which began in the sixteenth century and lasted until late in the nineteenth century, transformed the country into a multinational empire in which some fifty-five percent of the population was not ethnically Slavic.