The Great Reforms - 9780875801551

The Great ReformsAutocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia\nAuthor(s): W. Bruce Lincoln\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Northern Illinois University Press\nISBN-13: 9780875801551, 978-0875801551\nSynopsis\nThe Great Reforms of the 1860s marked the broadest attempt at social and economic renovation to occur in Russia between the death of Peter the Great in 1725 and the Revolution of 1905. In just more than a decade, imperial reform acts freed Russia's serfs, restructured her courts, established institutions of local self-government in parts of the empire, altered the constraints that censorship imposed on the press, and transformed Russia's vast serf armed forces into a citizen army in which men from all classes bore equal responsibility for military service. \n This invaluable study explains why the legislation assumed the shape that it did and estimates what the Great Reforms ultimately accomplished. The Gre.