UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AUTHOR · HISTORY · CIVILIZATION
Bernard Pares
Bernard Pares was born in England. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge University, where he developed a strong interest in Russian history. He first visited Russia in 1898 at about the same time as he was appointed a university extension lecturer in Cambridge. In 1902 he became a lecturer at Liverpool University. Five years later he founded the School of Russian Studies there. During this period he was a regular visitor to Russia, and his personal acquaintance with government officials as well as many of the foremost Russian liberals informed his subsequent book, Russia and Reform, (1907). In 1908 he was promoted to a chair at Liverpool, which he held until 1917. When the First World War began, he was appointed British Military Observer to the Russian Army. Following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, he moved to Siberia to support Kolchak's army. In 1919 he was knighted for his services to British relations with Russia, but he was banned by the new communist government from re-entering Russia. Also in 1919, he became Professor of Russian Language, Literature, and History and also Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at King's College London, University of London. He continued to write and research Russian history and literature, publishing most notably his History of Russia (1926 and subsequent editions). In 1939, he retired as Director to act as an adviser to the wartime government on Russian affairs. He moved to New York in 1942 where, shortly after completing his autobiography, he died.
This book's title might not seem like much to argue about, but its simplicity is deceptive.
— from A history of Russia
Most acclaimed
A history of Russia
A History of Russia covers the span of the country's history, from ancient times to the post-communist present. Keeping with the hallmark of the text, Riasanovsky and Steinberg examine all aspects of Russia's history--political, international, military, economic, social, and cultural--with a commitment to objectivity, fairness, and balance, and to reflecting recent research and new trends in scholarly interpretation. New chapters on politics, society, and culture since 1991 explore Russia's complex experience after communism and discuss its chances of becoming a more stable and prosperous country in the future.
Russia
The Soviet Union crumbles and Russia rises from the rubble, once again the great nation - a perfect scenario, but for one point: Russia was never a nation. And this, says the eminent historian Geoffrey Hosking, is at the heart of the Russians' dilemma today, as they grapple with the rudiments of nationhood. His book is about the Russia that never was, a three-hundred-year history of empire building at the expense of national identity. Russia begins in the sixteenth century, with the inception of one of the most extensive and diverse empires in history. Hosking shows how this undertaking, the effort of conquering, defending, and administering such a huge mixture of territories and peoples, exhausted the productive powers of the common people and enfeebled their civic institutions. Neither church nor state was able to project an image of "Russian-ness" that could unite elites and masses in a consciousness of belonging to the same nation. Hosking depicts two Russias, that of the gentry and of the peasantry, and reveals how the gap between them, widened by the Tsarist state's repudiation of the Orthodox messianic myth, continued to grow throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here we see how this myth, on which the empire was originally based, returned centuries later in the form of the revolutionary movement, which eventually swept away the Tsarist Empire but replaced it with an even more universalist one. Hosking concludes his story in 1917, but shows how the conflict he describes continues to affect Russia right up to the present day.