2.2.2 The Imperial Tsar Period of Russia

Arc: Kievan Rus' (Vladimir's Christianity, 988) → Mongol vassalage (1240–1480) → Muscovy'srise: Ivan III ("the Great," "autocrat," the Third Rome doctrine) → Ivan IV "the Terrible" (first crowned Tsar, 1547; the oprichnina terror) → the Time of Troubles → the Romanov dynasty(1613–1917):• Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725): the forced westernization — the navy and St. Petersburg (a new capital built on a swamp), the Table of Ranks (service nobility — merit by state service), beards taxed, church subordinated (the Holy Synod — caesaropapism perfected);• Catherine II (r. 1762–96): "enlightened" absolutism (charter to the nobility — and the serfs' chains tightened; the partitions of Poland; expansion to the Black Sea);• The system's essence:autocracy (no constitution, no estates with rights — "Russia's constitution is the autocrat's conscience"), serfdom (the majority population bound to land and lord until 1861's emancipation — Alexander II's great reform, followed by his assassination and reaction), the Orthodox Church as the state's altar, and the bureaucracy's growth without the law's rule (pravovoe gosudarstvo — the "lawful state" — arriving only as reformers' dream). To 1917 (the bridge): industrialisation's strain, the 1905 revolution's Duma (a parliament truncated by the Fundamental Laws), and the imperial system's collapse into the revolutions your Political Thoughts course (Marx) and Sociology course theorise. The law-student's point: tsarism is the standing example of modernisation withoutconstitutionalism…