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Category: History Russia
Life in Russia Under Catherine the Great by Miriam Kochan
London: B. T. Batsford, 1969
Hardback with Dust Jacket over Green boards with Gilt titling to Spine
Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Black & White Plates; Black & White Drawings; Maps;
From the cover: Russia in the eighteenth century was still, despite the efforts of Peter the Great, an Asiatic empire covered with only the thinnest veneer of European culture. The strains and divisions which Peters policies had created were intensified during Catherines reign. Slavish imitation of French fashions and culture reached such heights that there was a reaction in favour of the ancient Muscovite traditions. St Petersburg achieved a splendour to rival that of Paris and Vienna, but the intelligentsia began to look to the old capital of Moscow. Catherines reign was the golden age of the nobility, but it also saw the first stirrings of the conscience-stricken gentry, uneasily aware that their privileges rested on the enslavement of the peasantry.
Miriam Kochan gives a vivid account of the whole range of Russian society from the fabulous affluence of the great nobles to the harsh poverty of the serfs, who worked on their lords estates, in the Empress factories and the ironworks of the Urals to support this new magnificence. Drawing on the lively memoirs of those tourists who visited Russia in increasing numbers and on many contemporary illustrations, the book vigorously describes life in Imperial Russia, both its squalor and its magnificence.
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