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Emergence of "Dual Russia" |
The
Petrine Reform is often seen as the main cause and the starting
point of the irrevocable split of Russian society into two
parts. His reforms transformed the upper levels of Russian
society while the masses remained largely unaffected by them.
Peter had forced the nobility to acquire the technical knowledge
of western Europe, to adopt European styles of dress and
manners.
An increasingly Europeanized education of the upper classes
brought with it a familiarity with the philosophies and theories
of the Enlightenment. |
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Soon many Russian nobles even preferred to speak the languages of
western Europe (particularly French and German) to Russian. By the
nineteenth century their world was European in dress, manners, food,
education, attitudes and language, and was completely alien to the way
of life of the Russian popular masses. |
Thus a
cultural and ideological wall was set up between a secular
westernized elite and the lower classes who remained bound by
tradition and religion. In the words of Tibor Szamuely: ‘A curious
process took place in Russia as a result of the Reform, a process
that in a way resembled a foreign conquest in reverse:
whereas, for instance, in England Norman baron and Saxon peasant
gradually grew closer, in time evolving a common nation, a common
language, a common culture, in Russia the nobility and the
peasantry, already separated by rigid social barriers, rapidly came
to inhabit what were to all intents and purposes, different worlds
alien and incomprehensible one to the other’.
This
cultural gulf proved to have tragic consequences for Russia. In the
nineteenth century many progressively minded members of the Russian
educated classes, who sincerely aspired to bridge the cultural
divide and atone for the suffering of the masses, joined the Russian
revolutionary movement. Their radical blueprints of improving the
lot of the common people often reflected their less than perfect
understanding of the life and mentality of the masses. Utopian and
unrealistic, these ideas not only failed to lead the Russian people
to the promised luminous future but, tragically, lured it to a
historical cul-de-sac.
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Tsarist Russia |
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